Kejriwal’s battle for Varanasi is to oppose Modi, defeat Congress

By Jai Mrug

As the media followed the ink attack on Kejriwal in Varanasi, it again looked like a fight between David and Goliath. Even by the most optimistic estimates David might not win this battle. So why the contest ? Why should Kerjriwal spend his time in a contest in Varanasi when he has so much to be gained by campaigning across the country and the AAP seems challenged in its home base of Delhi. Often you have to lose a battle to win the war, and that is exactly what Kejriwal is doing. So the battle is for Varanasi , the war is not.

Flashback to November 2013 - the battle between Sheila Dikshit and Arving Kejriwal. By positioning himself as an opponent "itching for a combat" with Sheila Dikshit, he eventually positioned himself as the other pillar of Delhi politics, giving the BJP a run for its money. So what does Kejriwal seek to obtain out of the battle in Varanasi ? Does he hope to displace the BJP completely now? Not quite. The actual competition is to occupy the space that the Congress is soon vacating. In 2014 the Congress is expected to sink to a historically low tally. The shrinking footprint of the Congress may soon incapacitate it from emerging even as a strong regional alternative to the BJP. So for an opponent of the Congress the key lies in how he accelerates this decline or positions himself to make the most of a historic meltdown. It can be done by taking away some of the most committed voters of the party, that can push the party in a state of terminal decline. In this case the most committed voters of the Congress have been minorities, and Kejriwal needs to signal to them. The battle is not therefore to give Modi a fight but to ensure that the most entrenched Congress voter knows he is the next best suitor for them.

And so does that mean, Kejriwal has nothing to gain in this election from this contest? Quite the opposite. The anti- Modi qualifier has quite the possibility of pushing many minorities into the arms of the AAP, and a sizeable movement on the ground already seems to have started. In UP, the AAP has worked hard to wean away minority voters. To cite a couple of examples it has fielded a MPLB (Muslim Personal Law board) member, Maulana Kalbe Rushaid, from Amroha, a veteran leader, Mahmood Husain Rehmani, an eye surgeon from Kanpur, and a veteran contestant (Dabre Alam) from Padrauna. Not to mention of Shazia Ilmi from Ghaziabad. A groundswell of minority support across these and other seats could produce a windfall for the AAP and that is what Kejriwal seeks. Arvind Kejriwal is not fighting a battle to win Varanasi, but to ensure this windfall , not just in Uttar Pradesh but outside too. Apart from this election, such gains will help accelerate the movement of other social blocs towards the AAP post election.

Arvind Kejriwal during his visit to Varansi. PTI

Reports from the ground now suggest a movement of minorities towards the AAP in cities like Mumbai and smaller towns like Jaipur, a movement through which the AAP can ensure long term and sustainable damage to the Congress. In Mumbai North-East, Medha Patkar has quite made the fight triangular by weaning away minorities from the Congress support base. Mumbai South, from where Meera Sanyal is testing the waters, has two assembly segments that are minority dominant. Minorities in this seat could be a game changer as much as they could be in Mumbai North-West where Mayank Gandhi of AAP is trying his luck.

The AAP ideologically can seek to displace only the Congress and occupy the space that is being vacated by the Left and Left of Centre forces. Its techniques of fasting and non-violence are the very same techniques that were deployed by Mahatma Gandhi to harness the anti- establishment sentiment. However coincidental it may sound, Kejriwal is a practitioner of Vippasana, that has its roots in Buddhism. The Theosophical Society, the ideological predecessor of the Congress, was seen as a quasi Buddhist movement in the 19th Century, preaching tenets of universal brotherhood like Buddhism. It is therefore in some way not a surprise that the two seek to occupy the same constituency. As the Congress vacates the Left of Centre space , the AAP seeks to quickly occupy the same.

What is unique about the Aam Admi Party is that it is seeking to dismember the Congress base by poaching on one of its most fundamental constituents – the minorities, something no other party with a national foot print has worked on in a way as systematic as the Aam Admi Party. Close to a quarter of the AAP candidates in UP are Muslims.

The Battle for Varanasi is thus not the fight against Modi. The subtext is the AAP readying its long term strategy to ultimately replace the Congress as the other pole in Indian politics. Strange as it may sound, it does not need to take pot shots at the Congress for the same.

If elected, BJP may adopt the Gujarat farm model

New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would, if elected, roll out a programme to boost farm efficiency that its prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi, has championed in his home state of Gujarat.

India's main opposition party, which opinion polls show winning the most seats in a general election, is pushing a range of market reforms to differentiate it from the Congress-led government's focus on subsidies.

Narendra Modi. AFP.

"A market-centric policy would make the promotion of self-reliance a top priority," said one senior source in the BJP, which hopes to win the five-week election starting on 7 April after a decade in opposition.

A national roll out of a policy based on Gujarat's Soil Health Card scheme could be a centerpiece of policies aimed at improving farming practices and boosting productivity in a sector that accounts for 14 percent of economic output.

While no decisions have been taken, a BJP-led government may also review the possibility of allowing genetically modified crops into the food chain. Under Modi, Gujarat has promoted the cultivation of Bt cotton, a genetically modified strain developed by Monsanto that produces its own insecticide.

India has achieved self-sufficiency in grain production, with the introduction of high-yielding Mexican wheat varieties helping to bring about the Green Revolution of the late 1960s.

But low productivity continues to be a major barrier to growth for farming in India, a leading producer of rice, wheat, sugar, soybeans and cotton.

The source also said the party would not aggressively seek foreign investment, but rather promote so-called public-private partnerships in areas such as irrigation and the construction of storage facilities.

India's monsoon-dependent economy lacks irrigation on more than half of its arable land, while warehousing shortages have resulted in huge wastage of wheat surpluses produced in recent bumper harvests.

Gujarat Model

The BJP has trumpeted Modi's record as chief minister in Gujarat, where farm output has grown on average at an annual rate of 6 percent over the past three years - about a percentage point higher than the national average.

"The new regime may replicate the successful Soil Health Card scheme of the Gujarat government on the national canvas," said Vinay Sahasrabuddhe, the head of the BJP's Good Governance Cell, a policy unit.

As the chief minister of Gujarat, Modi led a drive to issue soil health cards in order to ensure that farmers use proper methods.

The cards are issued after the soil is tested for properties such as productivity, mineral mix, water capacity and salinity.

They also contain information on what types of pesticides, fertilisers and seeds, and how much water should be used to improve productivity, said Sudhir Panwar, president of Kishan Jagriti Manch, a farmers' lobby group.

Panwar said these cards better guide a tiller to adopt new practices on the basis of soil conditions.

"The soil card will promote opportunities for integrated input manufacturers to sell fertilisers, pesticides and insecticides to growers," said YK Alagh, former chairman of the Institute of Rural Management.

Reuters

How caste equations could undo Rajnath Singh in Lucknow

While prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi picked Varanasi as his constituency, party president Rajnath Singh picked the equally symbolic seat of Lucknow for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. However he could face a somewhat uphill battle if a caste alliance backing him wavers.

Singh, from the Thakur community, is someone the Brahmin community in Uttar Pradesh reportedly isn't taking too kindly to, especially given the fear that he may be the compromise prime ministerial candidate in the event that Modi is deemed unacceptable to potential alliance partners.

While the Thakur community dismisses this as conjecture, a Business Standard report quoted unnamed political observers as saying that distrust from the Brahmin community could make Lucknow a closer contest than Singh would like.

Rajnath Singh with Lalji Tandon in Lucknow. PTI

Singh has traditionally never enjoyed the backing of the Brahmin community in the state ever since he was chief minister of Uttar Pradesh and at the time faced attempts by community leaders to unseat him.

BJP officials have also claimed in the past that Singh has been increasing the number of Thakur community members in the party, particularly former bureaucrats and leaders, in order to increase his influence. Among them include former Army chief VK Singh, ex-home secretary RK Singh and former Congress leader Jadambika Pal.

The Brahmin community is widely expected to stand behind the BJP and constitutes around 15 percent of the population in Uttar Pradesh. But the fact that the Muslim community constitutes around 30 percent in the seat, and he isn't certain of their vote, means Singh would need to ensure the Brahmin community stands firmly behind him during the poll.

It doesn't help that all his major opponents, from the Congress and BSP, are from the Brahmin community and the Samajwadi Party also strengthened its candidate from the seat to make his path to the Lok Sabha tougher. The Samajwadi Party changed its candidate to Akhilesh Mishra, an aide of Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav, in order to present Singh a stronger challenge.

The law of averages isn't in favour of the BJP president either. A Times of India report points out that a non-Brahmin candidate has won only during three elections in all the elections since 1951.

Singh brought up the legacy of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a  five time MP from the city, multiple times while announcing his candidature from Lucknow but the BJP stalwart was also from the Brahmin community.

The man he displaced to contest from the constituency, Lalji Tandon, is one of just three non-Brahmin candidates to win from the seat and was seen as being closer to Vajpayee than Singh is.

Expectedly, despite having a relatively secure seat, Singh isn't backing on the traditional vote bank to take him to victory. As a Firstpost report pointed out, Singh is also reaching out backward castes and the Muslim community to secure his victory not only for him but other seats in the state as well.

"It is not only in Lucknow but in at least a dozen seats that this combination can affect the result," a former Lucknow president of the BJP had told Firstpost. 

If it all falls in place, Rajnath Singh may not only ensure a better tally for the BJP but could also cement his position as the second in line after the party's prime ministerial candidate.

Foul language on Modi started with Sonia’s Maut Ka Saudagar: Jaitley

New Delhi: BJP leader Arun Jaitley Friday accused the Congress of using inappropriate language, saying that it started with Sonia Gandhi's "Maut Ka Saudagar" comment on prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi.

Jaitley said this in his blog after Imran Masood, the Congress candidate from Uttar Pradesh's Saharanpur Lok Sabha seat, said Modi will be chopped into pieces.

Arun Jaitley. PTI

"This is not an isolated case of an unacceptable attack on Narendra Modi. Sonia Gandhi, Lalu Prasad, Digvijaya Singh, Mani Shankar Aiyar have all led attacks on Modi in improper language. It started with Sonia Gandhi's words 'Maut Ka Saudagar'," Jaitley said.

"The mindset behind these attacks being made in unacceptable language is that an abuse on Modi is an expression of aggressive secularism.

"Abuse on Modi has now graduated to intimidation. Those who indulged in these tactics were rejected in Gujarat. The Congress has got desperate at the centre in anticipation of defeat. Such tactics are not likely to work," he said.

Masood was seen saying in a video, "I will chop Modi into small pieces", which has gone viral online.

IANS

LS polls: Won’t minimise importance of AAP, says Deve Gowda

Bangalore: Former Prime Minister and JDS supremo HD Deve Gowda today said he will not minimise the importance of Aam Aadmi Party in the upcoming Lok Sabha polls.

"I'm not going to minimise the importance of Aam Aadmi Party, whether they are going to win ten seats, five seats, twenty seats...," Gowda told reporters here in response to a question on CP1-M leader Sitaram Yechury's comment regarding AAP joining the third front.

HD Deve Gowda. AFP

He said "Aam Aadmi Party has come up with young leaders who want to fight against corruption in the Parliament, their voice will be there..."

Stating that no government can suppress the voice of those fighting against corruption, he said, "corruption is a major issue, if you even take a unanimous decision to throw them out of the house- the people outside, specially youngsters will come together to fight it out."

Yechury had on Wednesday said it was up to AAP to decide whether it would join the Left and other secular forces, but it could be decided only after the elections.

Speaking about BJP and Congress Gowda said, "...as far as Karnataka is concerned, BJP leaders have come to the conclusion that only Narendra Modi's charm will bring them about 23 seats; on the other side, Chief Minister is also claiming that he will not allow even a single seat for JDS."

" ...people of this country including the state of Karnataka are watching all these, they have political maturity, and they will give their verdict. Please wait till May 16 until counting is over to see what will happen," he added.

PTI

Amarinder Singh has foot in mouth problem: Arun Jaitley

New Delhi: After Capt Amarinder Singh's "160-member club" jibe at him, BJP leader Arun Jaitley hit back, saying Congress may be reduced to a club of 75 after the elections and the former Punjab Chief Minister "certainly" will not be a part of it.

The Leader of the Opposition in Rajya Sabha and Singh are facing each other in Amritsar Lok Sabha constituency and have been involved in a verbal duel since Congress decided to field the former Punjab Chief Minister against Jaitley.

Arun Jaitley. AFP

"The Captain has a foot in mouth problem. The Captain is a disgruntled member of the Congress... Concern yourself at your own depleting fortunes. The Congress may be reduced to a club of 75 in the next Lok Sabha. You certainly will not be a part of that Club-75," Jaitley wrote on his blog.

Singh had accused Jaitley of secretly nursing the ambition of becoming the Prime Minister, claiming that he was working to keep BJP within the tally of 160 seats to queer the pitch for prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi.

Taking a jibe, Jaitley said Singh is concerned about people in BJP being anti-Narendra Modi. "Thank you, Captain sahib for your concern for Modi," he said, asking him to keep his concerns for his party.

PTI

The NYT’s Modiphobia: bias masquerading as fact

By Sandeep Balakrishna

As several commentators have observed, the campaign for the 2014 general elections began almost immediately after Narendra Modi's 2012 third consecutive electoral victory in Gujarat. With it, the media coverage on Modi only intensified. And that includes international media as well.

For the most part since India attained independence, it has not been really an object of high interest in the western media – and especially the American media. And when there was some interest, the coverage was mostly perfunctory, if not slightly biased. One cannot discount the possibility that Nehru's conscious rebuffing of at least two US presidents had a role to play in strengthening this disinterest/bias. And then Indira Gandhi took this rebuffing to a new level, which led to a near-closure of access to western journalists reporting on India. Besides, interest in India waned significantly after the country consciously chose socialism and made all the wrong economic choices.

Associated Press

By the mid-1980s, as Koenraad Elst mentions in his seminal Decolonizing the Hindu Mind, an India stint was not really high on the list of any western media major's journalists. At one time, an India stint was the equivalent of a "punishment posting". Western journalists posted here would typically spend most of their time in Delhi and undertake little field work even on crucial, burning issues. They would content themselves with inputs from their Indian counterparts who themselves belonged to a power elite and had their own blind-spots.

There's really no other way of putting this. Most of our Delhi-based journalists have had a track record of fawning over these "punishment posting" western journalists. Perhaps the elevation of William Dalrymple to some sort of a cult status in Indian journalistic and writing circles best exemplifies this phenomenon, as explained so powerfully by Hartosh Singh Bal. Foreign reporters stationed here churned out reportage and analyses based precisely on such biased inputs with predictable consequences: a distorted coverage of India in the West, which in turn influences the perception of India in their respective countries. Of course, this phenomenon has been on the decline in recent years with greater penetration of the Internet, both in India and abroad, but it still persists.

Today, in a vastly changed geopolitical situation, Western – more, specifically, America's - interest in India has noticeably increased. Yet a few things have remained the same. The same biased reportage still exists among Indian media houses, with our English TV channels leading the charge. And the same fawning-over-western-journalists syndrome continues to persist. And here's where we get to notice that there's another side to western reportage of India.

Enter the New York Times.

Of all the adjectives one could apply to the NYT, "venerable" is certainly not one of them. "Veteran" maybe. "Liberal," definitely, as NYT public editor Margaret Sullivan confessed last year, qualifying that her paper's liberalism was "nuanced." So it is worth examining exactly how well it has adhered to its self-confessed nuanced liberalism. But, more fundamentally, how well has it adhered to what we can consider reasonable standards by which one can judge the NYT - or any media house: factuality, fairness, and objectivity?

A survey of 11 pieces covering mostly political themes - both reportage and opeds - reveals the fact that they are characterised by an undisguised undertone of what in India has become infamous as the 'pseudo-secularist discourse.

A 2011 piece by Manu Joseph doesn't even make any pretense at objectivity: it is a straight out personal attack on Sri Sri Ravishankar and even Rabindranath Tagore, for good measure. It is nobody's case that anybody should be above scrutiny but that scrutiny must be based purely on facts, not personal likes or dislikes.

An even older report by Somini Sengupta claims that Hindu outfits' opposition to missionary conversions was what led to Swami Lakshmananda Saraswati's murder in Kandhamal. However, she omits mentioning the social and cultural havoc that conversions in the tribal areas of Odisha have caused. More crucially, she fails to mention the evangelism-caused horrors set out in vast detail in the Niyogi Commission Report on conversions, a government document. Also, Arun Shourie's 1999 investigative essay provides the complete picture of the kind of consequences that unbridled conversions have wreaked in that tribal state.

This then is a mere sample of NYT's India reportage. But it gets interesting when we examine its record of covering the BJP's PM candidate Narendra Modi. Here, the NYT seems to have adopted a template: nothing that Modi says or does should be shown for what it is except in a negative light. And so this templated approach to Modi coverage is hinged on one or several or all of these:

-          Accused of presiding over the 2002 communal riots which left more than 1,000 killed, majority of them Muslims

-          The Supreme Court appointed SIT has cleared him of all charges but...

-          His popularity has risen over the years but he remains a polarising and deeply divisive figure

-          Muslims don't trust him

-          He is authoritarian, is described as a fascist, and thrives on hate

-          His model of Gujarat's economic development is flawed

-          He encourages only big industrialists and has largely ignored the SME sector

Of the 11 stories surveyed, pick any of the seven pieces (linked above) dedicated to covering Modi: these are the common threads around which the coverage is woven. Of course, a leader who is eyeing the Prime Minister's chair needs to be deeply, ruthlessly and critically scrutinised. His/her flaws along with the good points need to be examined and exposed, and Modi should be no exception to this. But, has the NYT done this?

Worse, the author of most of these pieces, Gardiner Harris, has gone on to make what can only call wild accusations. In at least two pieces, he claims that Modi has been "linked with a secret police assassination squad" that "mostly" targets Muslims. This is not journalism by any standard - to put it bluntly, it is the journalistic equivalent of a hit job.

And if that was not enough, the NYT has fudged facts not once but thrice. A 2013 editorial had claimed that Muslims were poorer in Gujarat compared to elsewhere in India, a lie that several people in social media quickly called out, forcing the NYT to publish a corrigendum.

The self-same Gardiner Harris had also claimed that the Muzaffarnagar riots were triggered after Modi was announced as the PM candidate whereas the riots had begun much earlier than 13 September 2013. In yet another piece by Gardiner Harris again, the NYT issued yet another corrigendum for overstating "what is known about a 2002 train fire in Gujarat state."

Once is a mistake. Twice raises doubts about competence. Thrice raises suspicions about integrity. It is impossible to believe that a global media giant like the NYT can consistently get facts available in the public domain wrong three times. And this, apart from that secret police assassination squad bit.

And our own journalists too must partake in the sin of journalism of this sort because these pieces acknowledge the contributed reporting from their Indian counterparts. These counterparts, who could have pointed out what I have done, once they'd seen the final copy.

Among others, it was the New York Times which had once led a campaign against what it termed was yellow journalism practised by Hearst's New York Journal. An apocryphal instruction that Hearst gave his artist, Remington goes "you furnish the pictures, and I'll furnish the war." The NYT of today seems to have followed the textual equivalent of this instruction in the case of Narendra Modi.

In the end, this is much less about Narendra Modi than about the New York Times, which seems to be on a single-minded mission to demonise him even if that means throwing some simple journalistic ethics to the wind. The NYT is certainly entitled to be biased against Narendra Modi but it needs to at least keep up the pretence of fairness in exercising its bias.

And so, one is forced to conclude that at the root of it, it's really not bias at work here but an irrational fear of Narendra Modi. Modiphobia, in short.