Viswanathan K's Thoughts

I was glad that Rahul Gandhi’s conviction on defamation (commenting that every thief has the surname Modi) was overturned by the Supreme Court. Not because I like Rahul; but because it felt ridiculous to imprison someone for a comment like that. Almost everyone makes such statements about some group or the other. While not in good taste, a prison sentence of any duration is going way too far.   In politics though, everything can swing both ways. It could be due to cynical rivals, or campaign managers’ masterstrokes and blunders, or the unpredictable perception of the common man.   Asim Ali raised some interesting points about Rahul’s “return”: “The martyrdom parade might have been stopped…” While it is also true that: “The judgment also lends credibility to Congress’ claim of unjust punishment.”   It also brings back a fundamental contradiction to the fore: “(Congress’) 2024 strategy is composed of two mutually contradictory goals: the achievement of a...

There are many like Gopalkrishna Gandhi who cry foul that the BJP managed to win an absolute majority of seats with just 31% of the vote. In the age of data and the Internet, you will surely find someone who crunches the numbers differently. Like R. Jagannathan . He reminds us that the BJP fought as part of an alliance, which means that it didn’t contest all 545 seats. In fact, it only contested 428 seats on its own. Raju Limbachiya says that the vote share of the BJP in those 428 seats it contested is 40%. Or if you see the vote share of the NDA, it comes to 38.2%. Jagannathan provides context for these numbers: “In multi-party systems in the west no party usually crosses a 40 percent vote share; as for the gold standard of mandates – a 50-percent-plus vote – it happens only in two-party races.” In any case, as Jay Mazoomdaar says : “It is one thing to oppose the politics of Modi-led BJP; quite another to question its decisive mandate…(as is being done by the) many o...

In the end, the exit polls were wrong: It wasn't the NDA that scraped past the half way mark, it was the BJP that single handedly got the majority! The absolute majority has robbed the media of the usual next stage of an election: who will align with whom? What will they demand in return? What impact will it have on a cohesive agenda to govern? All moot points now. We don't need to suffer your blackmail tactics, amma and didi . To those who bemoan the rise of the “communal” leader, Harsh Pant has the answer : “(Narendar) Modi is a product of contemporary India, where the secular versus communal binary, while important, is no longer the be all and end all of politics.” Besides, let's face it: we have had a communal party in power for most of the period since 1984 anyway: the Congress killed 3000 Sikhs in 1984. While Bal Thackeray made the remote control model of governance (in)famous at a state level, madam and baba took it to the next level, the national leve...