Hindustan Times
Can Rahul rescue the Congress?
The message from the Congress’s Jaipur convention wasn’t as much about Rahul Gandhi’s elevation – which was a long-due formality – as about the party’s bid to reach out to the increasingly restive urban middle class.
Congressmen competed with each other to shower sycophantic praises on Rahul and his ability to steer the party in the 2014 elections. But they must realize that charisma is just one element in the rather complex process of winning back alienated constituencies. No General can win a war without a cogent plan and committed foot-soldiers.
Governments can formulate policy. But its propagation and effective implementation isn’t possible without robust organizational machinery. And this is one area where the Congress lacks in key states so crucial for returning to power at the Centre. Rahul failed in Bihar and UP because he entered the battle field without a well-oiled army of party workers.
So rather than scratching each other’s backs and celebrating Rahul’s anointment as Sonia Gandhi’s number two, they better get down to doing serious work on the ground. The process is time-consuming and the gap between now and the Lok Sabha polls too short. The challenge is in taking the Jaipur declaration from the drawing board to the ground.
Can the Congress do it? I will refrain here from pre-judging Rahul. Young leaders need to be given the benefit of doubt, no matter to which party they belong. But the Congress, as the country’s oldest political party, enjoys no such concession. It must rise in full force, not as much in search of power as to recover the credibility it has lost with its constituents.
Austerity, humility, honesty and accessibility are the attributes people don’t find in the political class these days. Congressmen are doubly alienated for they have been in power for over eight years and cannot escape the blame for rising popular frustration and anger.
Rahul started well by seeking to neutralise a possible ‘young versus old divide’ by assuring adequate respect, opportunity and accommodation for the old guard while ushering in the new order. His young team will need guidance from their seniors at every other tier of the organization in as much the same way he himself requires the canopy of Sonia’s experience.
Elections due in nine states before the big fight in 2014 will the test of their ability and commitment. They have to give – as has been promised by Rahul – their all to the party and the people of India.
(16 votes, average: 1.75 out of 5)
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pankaj#1 Reply:
January 21st, 2013 at 9:01 pm
Vinoo;
My anger is forcing me not to drive on roads. I may meet an accident.
You people are professionals. All professionals and nationalists, including, muslim nationalists, nay, even impartial civil society of Pakistan and Bangala desh should unite and finish this fountain head of communalism, that is Congress. Sounding very harsh?? Yes, Shinde has crossed all the limits. Every educated, liberal person in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, should take a vow, to finish this cancer, and by extension, congress. My anger know, no limit. Parliamentarians should not allow, parliament to function. lawyers should initiate PIL in supreme court. Police and Military should not salute this deshdrohi. Doctors should not treat him.Teachers should not teach his family members.Shokeepers should refuse to sell him goods. Administrative staff, should refuse to carry out his orders and maintenance staff, including Safai karamchari, should not clean his house and surroundings. he should suffer like Ashwthama, neither living nor dead.
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Anonymous Reply:
January 22nd, 2013 at 1:16 am
Pankaj
All of India has to unite against sycophants who sell the country for getting a position.
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ramnaam Reply:
January 22nd, 2013 at 5:57 am
Hope your anger gives birth to an able National leader in BJP ! Else, your anger only consume you, nobody else.
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pankaj#1 Reply:
January 22nd, 2013 at 11:14 am
Correctly said.
agnivesh Reply:
January 22nd, 2013 at 6:26 am
ndia’s Narendra Modi and the Tale of Two Rapes
By Shikha Dalmia Jan 17, 2013 7:42 AM PT
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
One of the most obscene moments after the death of the gang-rape victim in
New Delhi was a tweet by Narendra Modi, the chief minister of the Indian state
of Gujarat, offering regret and condolences to the dead woman’s family.
Modi,
who has quelled restive minorities by allowing attackers to
subject
women to unspeakable horrors, has done more than any man to numb
his
prudish country to sexual violence. Yet he was elected to a third
term
last month and is the presumptive front-runner of the Bharatiya Janata
Party, the main Hindu opposition party, for prime minister in next year’s
national elections.
So
long as Indians keep rewarding politicos such as Modi, the
country’s
collective outrage after the New Delhi case won’t change the
culture that makes such atrocities common in India.
The attack on the 23-year-old physiotherapy student was depraved.
Five men
and a teenager in a private bus are accused of kidnapping,
beating, raping
and violating her with an iron rod — and then dumping
her and her
semi-conscious boyfriend on a highway, where they also
allegedly tried to run
her over. But as monstrous as this crime was,
consider what happened in
Gujarat in February 2002, a few months after
Modi assumed office.
Organized
bands of well-armed Hindus — some from groups tied to Modi’s
party –
fanned across the state seeking revenge against Muslims for
allegedly
burning a train full of Hindu pilgrims a few weeks earlier. The
Hindu
rioters systematically sought out and destroyed Muslim homes and
businesses, killing more than 1,000 people.
Extreme Violence
Muslim women were singled out. According to many Indian and foreign sources,
including a Human Rights Watch account and a report by
an international
research team called “Threatened Existence: A Feminist
Analysis of the
Genocide in Gujarat,” women were stripped, gang-raped,
often publicly, and in
almost all cases then burned or hacked to death.
The
reason the violence reached such extremes was that the state
police
stood back and didn’t intervene to stop the Hindu attacks and even
told
victims that it couldn’t protect them. As if the bloodletting
wasn’t
horrific enough, Modi subsequently dismantled the shelters constructed
by private organizations for dispossessed Muslims, calling them “child-breeding
centers.”
Compared
with the New Delhi rape, which has triggered a protest movement
in
India calling for the castration and execution of the suspects,
the
Gujarat rapes and pogrom elicited barely a whimper. Many Hindus
either
deny that the horror even occurred or, if they accept it, claim
it
wasn’t as grisly as news accounts suggest. And if they believe
the
accounts, they say Muslims had it coming. Fewer than 100 out of
the
thousands accused — among them only one state minister and one Bharatiya
Janata Party leader — were convicted,
and that was a decade later. Modi
himself was exonerated.
Whatever
public disgust there was against him has dissipated, given the
stellar
economic growth that Gujarat has seen on his watch. Business leaders
and
corporations, from India and overseas, turn a blind eye to Modi’s
role
in allowing the bloodshed, and praise his economic stewardship.
His
business backers have already managed to
get the U.K. government to
reverse its long-standing ban on him and to
give him a visa. Now they are
trying to persuade the U.S. government to
follow suit.
What accounts for the wide gulf in the Indian public response to the single
crime in New Delhi and the mass crimes in Gujarat?
On a positive side, attitudes toward women have evolved considerably
since
the Gujarat atrocity 11 years ago. Indian women’s aspirations
and
opportunities have increased, especially in big cities, and they
are
demanding that the governing classes keep pace and create an
environment
in which they are free to move around safely.
Changed Attitudes
After
the New Delhi attack, any politician or even religious guru —
no
matter how revered — who suggested that women need to
circumscribe
their lives and choices for their own protection was condemned
and
lampooned, something scarcely imaginable when I was growing up in
New
Delhi (in a Hindu household) in the 1970s.
But
the darker reality is that the young woman’s rape and murder
outraged
the country’s Hindu urban middle class because it was a random
and
senseless act that could have just as easily victimized their
daughters.
Not so with attacks on the Muslim women in Gujarat. The
premeditated
and programmatic violence against them meant that the broader
Hindu
majority was insulated from it. If the New Delhi woman’s fate made
every
Indian feel more
vulnerable, the attack on the Muslim women made
Hindus feel more secure.
There
are other reasons for India’s apathy toward Modi’s misdeeds. India
is a
democracy and has its share of human-rights activists and
watchdog
groups keeping an eye on government brutality. Yet the public at
large
has little appreciation of the dangers associated with overly
muscular
government. Indians complain constantly about government dysfunction
and
corruption. Yet they have little compunction about giving
draconian
powers to their rulers in the name of security. The upshot,
tragically,
is that Indians care less about state-fueled rape than when
perpetrated
by individuals.
The
scale of the sexual violence in Gujarat was unprecedented in India.
But
smaller episodes are a matter of routine. The Indian army has been
accused of using rape as
a weapon to crush secessionist movements in Kashmir
and Manipur. After
one particularly heinous case eight years ago, Manipuri
women stripped
naked and stormed the army headquarters with placards
plaintively
protesting: “Indian Army Rapes Us.”
Tolerating
sexual violence for any purpose erodes the overall stigma
against it,
opening a moral space where hoodlums can run amok. The lack of
national
outrage against the mass rapes perpetrated under Modi reduces their
true
cruelty, breaking down the psychological walls that would at
least
prevent nonsociopaths from going on a rampage. Hindus who turn a
blind
eye to the rape of Muslim women can’t ultimately protect their own.
How
India can restore moral boundaries is a difficult issue, but
it
certainly won’t be solved by electing Modi to higher office — even
if
he were Adam Smith himself. Protesters shouldn’t just seek justice against
the six accused in New Delhi. Modi, too, has much to atone.
(Shikha
Dalmia is a contributor to Bloomberg View and a Detroit-based
senior
analyst at Reason Foundation. The opinions expressed are her own.)
To contact the writer of this article: Shikha Dalmia in Detroit at shikhadalmia62@gmail.com.
–
Teesta Setalvad
‘Nirant’, Juhu Tara Road,
Juhu, Mumbai – 400
049
http://teestasetalvad.blogspot...
http://www.gujarat-riots.com/
http://www.sabrang.com/
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engrich Reply:
January 22nd, 2013 at 7:13 am
teesta why u and ur friend file a pil in sureme court against modi for inciting rascism and rascist killing.this is weakness of our justice system that he is still out.this is also an encouragement to law breakers.
indians wants justice more than secularism.
pankaj#1 Reply:
January 22nd, 2013 at 11:11 am
Agnivesh;
no ordinary person, can inflict such barbarity on any human being. If this has happened and in riots this might have happened, indian civil society should have courage to apprehend such people. I am totally against violence perpetrated on weaks. Rape is violent most crime, in my view. It should never go unpunished.
My one advise to you. If you get a chance to see a movie :THE END OF WATCH- see it. In the begining it self, a voice says.. I am police… and what a beutiful statement it was. that is why we, in minority- feel so secure even amongst, majority whites. Looking for a day, when Asian countries can have police of such caliber.
Javed Reply:
January 28th, 2013 at 11:38 am
mental masturabation. heard of it?
dont worry if you havent. you just had a rather long session of it
Javed Reply:
January 28th, 2013 at 11:38 am
*masturbation
before spelling police childishly jump in
engrich Reply:
January 22nd, 2013 at 7:21 am
what indian need is justice not secularism.
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