News, Opinions & Updates

February 24, 2017

Recently, according to this Asian Age update, Laloo Yadav’s wife who also stumbled her way into the position of chief ministership of Bihar while cooking dinner for the family one day, said that there has been demand that Tejaswi Yadav, her son, be made Bihar Chief Minister. Right now, as you may already know, the chap who is still learning how to wipe his nose, is the “deputy” Chief Minister.

And why not? The entire state of Bihar is basically the fiefdom of Laloo Yadav. Due to political compulsions, they are just biding their time. The coming together of Nitish Kumar and the Laloo Yadav clan was any way a very uncomfortable political adjustment both for Nitish Kumar and Laloo Yadav – in the past they have been archrivals and everybody had thought that his RJD was a nightmare of the past. But the suicidal public perhaps hadn’t had enough of his good old criminal gangs and had started feeling bored of the fact that they could move around in the evening after 4 PM without carrying a “tamancha”. They gave his party enough votes to put him in a position to inject his family members and close associates into the veins of the current government led by Nitish Kumar.

All these regional parties are basically localised replicas of the Congress party – some families running their dynasties. You have Laloo Yadav in Bihar, Mulayam Yadav in Uttar Pradesh, Badals in Punjab, and Karunanidhi in Tamil Nadu and so on, and of course, at the centre we have had the misfortune of the Nehru-Gandhi family.

The tragedy in our country is that even people don’t mind it. In the name of ideology, they are fine with various shady families running a reign of loot in the country. In the cities and urban areas, the so-called intellectuals and liberals are fine with supporting the Nehru-Gandhi family as long as “communal forces” are kept away. In urban and semiurban areas, it’s all about caste and religion. Somehow, the patriarchs and the matriarchs of these parties have figured out how to control emotional strings of people and reap political benefits from that. Narendra Modi is trying to dismantle these dynasties but it’s a long due process and the entire system is working against him.

I’m not sure whether this is a PR piece on Jayalalitha or a genuine attempt at throwing light at some of her schemes that made her “Amma”.

Why I’m cynical is that our politicians have perfected the art of being highly corrupt but still emerging as massihas of the poor. They scam away thousands of millions of rupees and then throw a few crumbs at the poor – and there is no dearth of the poor in the country – and then keep on getting elected, if not continuously, then in cycles.

But there are some people on Facebook and Twitter whom I ideologically agree with and they are admirers of Jayalalitha. She actually did some good work for the state of Tamil Nadu, they say.

The above-linked article lists many schemes started by Jayalalitha. For example, she started canteens where food was extremely cheap. She also distributed laptops to youngsters, although, the article says, many laptops ended up in the grey market.

I’m not very against freebies especially when they are given to the poor. The freebies act as a prop, or the push, provided these freebies are actually used for the good of people rather than using them as crumbs thrown to the birds just to attract them for the sake of entertainment (in this case, for getting votes). Food, anyway, should be highly affordable because if people are healthy, they can be more productive, although it is a double-edged concept.

The Jan-dhan scheme of the current NDA government under Narendra Modi is much better because instead of giving the doles to people, it empowers them by directly sending money to their bank accounts. This way, the middlemen are completely eliminated.

This OpIndia report tells what actually happened at the Ramjas College. As usual, our mainstream media tried to paint the ABVP students as vicious villains and commie students from the JNU innocent victims whereas, it was the opposite. The truth was revealed on social media.

As you will see in the photographs, the perpetrator was turned into a victim and the victim was turned into a perpetrator.