Former telecom minister Arun Shourie on Sunday stirred a controversy by claiming in a TV interview that he was replaced by senior party leader Venkaiah Naidu in Parliament as the BJP's lead speaker in a debate on the 2009 Budget so that the party could take a more accommodating line on proposals that could favour industrialist Mukesh Ambani. Referring to tapes of a purported conversation between lobbyist Niira Radia and JD(U)...
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Mismatch between Nitish wave and vote share by Vidya Subrahmaniam
Put it to the vagaries of the first-past-the post system but the Nitish Kumar-led Janata Dal(U)-Bharatiya Janata Party combine, which pulled off an incredible, winner-take-all four-fifths majority in the recent Bihar election, secured a vote share of only 39 per cent — just a three percentage point improvement over what it polled in October 2005. The ruling alliance won 206 seats, leaving the combined Opposition clutching at all of 37 seats...
More »Media-lobbyist nexus may go to House panel
The government on Friday hinted at the possibility of the media-lobbyist nexus being examined by either the ethics or privileges committee of Parliament. Senior sources dropped broad hints that either of the two committees could go into the whole gamut of corporate lobbyist Niira Radia's telephonic conversations with media personalities. This was the first government response to the Opposition's demand that the media's role in corporate lobbying come under the JPC scrutiny....
More »Bihar surprise: Biggest landslide with smallest share of votes
The Nitish Kumar-led JD(U)-BJP alliance has won more than four-fifths of the Bihar assembly seats, but there is one unusual aspect to this landslide. The alliance got a little less than two-fifths of the votes cast. Why should this be unusual? Check out the accompanying chart and you will find that other wins of similar magnitude in terms of seats have invariably been the result of substantially larger vote shares. The comparisons...
More »Bihar polls: 59% of new MLAs have a criminal background
A cold reality check for the exultant voices from Bihar is hard statistics that show that criminals and money power continue to dominate electoral politics. A total of 141 out of 241 or 59% newly-elected MLAs have criminal backgrounds according to data analysed by National Election Watch (NEW) and Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR). This is a marked increase from 117 or 35% MLAs with pending criminal cases against them in...
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