'Today in 2 hours if 5 crore people can vote then in 5 years time how many people can vote in 2 hours' Parakala Prabhakar

 

Indian Elections 2024 - A Personal Note

Girish Menon

As the incumbent Prime Minister Modi heads off to Kanyakumari for some much-needed R&R (or maybe just to escape the election madness), I thought I'd share my two rupees on the 2024 Indian election extravaganza. But before you get too excited, let me warn you – these observations are based on the ramblings of biased commentators who probably couldn't tell the truth from a hole in the ground. So, take it all with a pinch of salt (or maybe a whole shaker).

The Election Commission's Impartiality? What's That?

The Election Commission of India (ECI) was supposed to be the impartial referee in this political boxing match, ensuring a fair fight. But let's be real, when has any referee ever been truly impartial? It's like expecting the umpire at an India-Pakistan cricket match to be completely unbiased. The ruling party was pulling all sorts of shenanigans, and the ECI just turned a blind eye. At least in the IPL, every team gets an equal chance to buy the best players in a glitzy auction. But in this election, it felt like one team was playing with a committed umpire.

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The Olympic Games of Democracy? 

Elections in India are touted as the "Olympic games of democracy," a grand 44 day spectacle where all parties compete on an even playing field, much like the athletes gathering for Paris '24. However, the reality is far from this idealized notion. It's more akin to a rigged game where the ruling party shows up with a souped-up, nitro-boosted sports car, while the opposition parties are stuck with rusty old clunkers, and the track is greased with ill-gotten gains, making it nearly impossible for them to gain traction. The opposition faces disadvantages similar to a woman athlete from Afghanistan competing against a well-trained, well-funded athlete from a developed nation. As Donald Trump aptly put it, the entire exercise is a "rigged game," where the dice were loaded long before the race even began, and I haven't even mentioned the EVMs (Electronic Voting Machines) and the conspiracy theories surrounding it. If the opposition wins then it will be nothing short of an Act of God.

The Mandate Debate: A Never-Ending Soap Opera

Ah, the age-old "mandate" debate. It's like a never-ending soap opera, with the winning party claiming they have a mandate to do whatever they want, and the opposition crying foul. It's a classic case of "he said, she said," and in the end, the only ones benefiting are the lawyers raking in the big bucks.

Expert Predictions: A Game of Darts in the Dark

Then we have the "expert" predictions. Sanjay Dikshit, Prashant Kishore, Yogendra Yadav, and Parakala Prabhakar have thrown out numbers ranging from 180 to 400 seats for the BJP in the 542-member Lok Sabha. That's a wider range than my waistline after a weekend of binge-drinking and snacking. Are these experts consulting some mystical crystal ball, or are they just playing a game of darts in the dark, hoping to hit the bullseye by sheer luck? Who knows, maybe they're just trying to keep their political overlords happy by telling them what they want to hear.

My Two Rupees? The BJP as the Loyal Opposition

Personally, I'd love to see the BJP end up as the single largest party with around 200-210 seats, taking on the role of the loyal opposition. They actually represent only a minority of the Indian population (38% in 2019). They've proven themselves to be quite the watchdogs in the past, barking at every perceived injustice (whether real or imagined). But at the same time, I can't help but worry about the plight of the common folk who've had to bear the brunt of their policies implemented over the last decade.  So there you have it, folks – my completely unbiased (wink, wink) take on the 2024 Indian election circus. Just remember, when it comes to politics, it's always better to laugh than to cry (or maybe do both, just to be safe).

Finding Common Ground with Canadian Truckers

 

The many instances of ‘resort politics’ in India

Sruthi Radhakrishnan in The Hindu

From a fractured electoral verdict, the natural progression is towards political impasse. And in the case of Assembly elections in India, it is then a question of whom the Governor sides with. When the numbers are touch-and-go, political parties often get into horse trading and poaching of MLAs. In such instances it becomes the responsibility of party leaders to ensure that their MLAs are not baited by others

Enter ‘resort politics.’ Over the last few decades, party leaders have taken to squirreling away their MLAs to vacation spots or other hideaways to stave off poachers.


Here are some of the instances when parties ‘resorted’ to this practice:

Haryana

Haryana in 1982 saw the rise of the Indian National Lok Dal, a regional challenger to the Congress.After the elections, despite not having enough seats, Governor G.D. Tapase invited the Congress to form the government, ignoring the INLD-BJP combine. Reportedly, the then-INLD chief Devi Lal grabbed the Governor by his neck for his decision, and promptly took his 48 MLAs, both from the INLD and the BJP, and holed up with them in a hotel in New Delhi. This didn’t stop a dissenting MLA from escaping, Shawshank Redemption-style, by slithering down a water pipe. The Congress went on to form the government anyway.

Karnataka

Although herding MLAs to resorts has been done in many States, Karnataka seems to hold the top spot in the number of times this has been done. Beginning with Ramakrishna Hegde in 1983, who sought to save his government from being dissolved by then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, to B.S. Yeddyurappa in the period between 2009-11, and also in 2004, 2006, 2008 and 2012. During a crucial trust vote in the Assembly, around 80 BJP MLAs were taken away to a luxury resort on the outskirts of Bengaluru; and this happened multiple times in the 2009-11 period.

Andhra Pradesh

N.T. Rama Rao had to go to the U.S. for an open heart surgery in 1984, but in his absence, Governor Thakur Ramlal installed N. Bhaskar Rao as the Chief Minister. The actor-turned-politician took the TDP’s legislators to a resort in Bengaluru, and then to Delhi. The government in Andhra Pradesh collapsed, NTR took out the TDP equivalent of a rath yatra, and came back to power in two months, by which time, Indira Gandhi had installed Shankar Dayal Sharma as the State’s Governor.

N. Chandrababu Naidu took a page out of his father-in-law’s rule book in 1995 when he wanted to oust NTR from the party. MLAs loyal to Mr. Naidu were sequestered in a Hyderabad hotel until he could pull off a coup and take over the party.

Gujarat

In 1995, Shankersinh Vaghela rebelled against the BJP leadership with 47 MLAs on his side. Mr. Vaghela took them to a high-end hotel in Madhya Pradesh, where they were kept for seven days. Eventually a compromise was worked out and the then Chief Minister Keshubhai Patel was replaced with a Vaghela supporter, Suresh Mehta. Even this didn’t help as Vaghela, soon after losing his Lok Sabha seat, left the party with his loyalists in tow, bringing down the State government.

Uttar Pradesh

Governor Romesh Bhandari dismissed the Kalyan Singh-led BJP government in 1998 during the Lok Sabha elections, and Jagdambika Pal, who was then with the Congress, was appointed as Chief Minister for 48 hours. Pending a floor test, the BJP flew its members to a secluded place, after which Mr. Singh came back and won the confidence vote. Mr. Singh also challenged the Governor’s decision in the Allahabad High Court, and armed with the High Court’s ruling in his favour, he was re-appointed as Chief Minister.

Bihar

The Congress and the Rashtriya Janata Dal sent their MLAs to a hotel in Patna in 2000, afraid that JD(U)'s Nitish Kumar, who had been invited to form the government, would lure their legislators. Mr. Kumar was Chief Minister for seven days before he lost the trust vote. In 2005, Lok Janshakti Party MLAs stayed in a hotel in Jamshedpur to provide the JD(U) with the requisite numbers to form a government, with support from the BJP.

Maharashtra

To ensure that his MLAs were not won over by the Shiv Sena-BJP opposition in 2002, then Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh packed them off to a luxury resort in Bengaluru, and visited them to make sure they didn’t jump ship. When asked by The Hindu why the MLAs had been flown to Bangalore if he was so confident of their loyalty, Deshmukh said it had been done to prevent “street fights” in Mumbai.

Uttarakhand

In 2016, after the Congress government in Uttarakhand booted out rebel MLAs, the BJP flew its legislators to a hotel in Jaipur ahead of a confidence vote by former Chief Minister Harish Rawat. A protracted war of words ensued, with the Congress and the BJP accusing each other of horse-trading. The Centre decided to impose President’s Rule in the state, an order that was overturned by the High Court. The Congress then lost the Assembly elections in 2017.

Tamil Nadu

After O. Panneerselvam resigned his Chief Minister-ship in 2017 and accused the then AIADMK leader V.K. Sasikala of forcing him to do so, Sasikala took matters into her own hands and sent loyal MLAs to a resort near Chennai. The rebel faction under Mr. Panneerselvam and the Sasikala-led Edappadi K. Palaniswami faction eventually joined hands after she was convicted in a disproportionate assets case.

The six Brexit traps that will defeat Theresa May

Yanis Varoufakis


“It’s yours against mine.” That’s how Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister, put it to me during our first encounter in early 2015 – referring to our respective democratic mandates.

A little more than two years later, Theresa May is trying to arm herself with a clear democratic mandate ostensibly to bolster her negotiating position with European powerbrokers – including Schäuble – and to deliver the optimal Brexit deal.

Already, the Brussels-based commentariat are drawing parallels: “Brits fallen for Greek fallacy that domestic vote gives you stronger position in Brussels. Other countries have voters too,” tweeted Duncan Robinson, Brussels correspondent of the Financial Times. “Yep,” tweeted back Miguel Roig, the Brussels correspondent of Spanish financial daily Expansión. “Varoufakis’ big miscalculation was to think that he was the only one in the Eurogroup with a democratic mandate.”

In truth, Brussels is a democracy-free zone. From the EU’s inception in 1950, Brussels became the seat of a bureaucracy administering a heavy industry cartel, vested with unprecedented law-making capacities. Even though the EU has evolved a great deal since, and acquired many of the trappings of a confederacy, it remains in the nature of the beast to treat the will of electorates as a nuisance that must be, somehow, negated. The whole point of the EU’s inter-governmental organisation was to ensure that only by a rare historical accident would democratic mandates converge and, when they did, never restrain the exercise of power in Brussels.
In June 2016, Britain voted, for better or for worse, for Brexit. May suddenly metamorphosed from a soft remainer to a hard Brexiteer. In so doing she is about to fall prey to an EU that will frustrate and defeat her, pushing her into either a humiliating climb-down or a universally disadvantageous outcome. When the Brussels-based group-thinking commentariat accuse Britain’s prime minister, without a shred of evidence, of overestimating the importance of a strong mandate, we need to take notice, for it reveals the determination of the EU establishment to get its way, as it did when I arrived on its doorstep, equipped with my mandate.

When I first went to Brussels and Berlin, as Greece’s freshly elected finance minister, I brought with me a deep appreciation of the clash of mandates. I said as much in a joint press conference with Schäuble in 2015, pledging that my proposals for an agreement between Greece and the EU would be “aimed not at the interest of the average Greek but at the interest of the average European”. A few days later, in my maiden speech at the Eurogroup of eurozone finance ministers, I argued: “We must respect established treaties and processes without crushing the fragile flower of democracy with the sledgehammer that takes the form of statements such as ‘Elections do not change anything’.” May will, I presume, go to Brussels with a similar appreciation.

When Schäuble welcomed me with his “it is my mandate against yours” doctrine, he was honouring a long EU tradition of neglecting democratic mandates in the name of respecting them. Like all dangerous hypotheses, it is founded on an obvious truth: the voters of one country cannot give their representative a mandate to impose upon other governments conditions that the latter have no mandate, from their own electorate, to accept. But, while this is a truism, its incessant repetition by Brussels functionaries and political powerbrokers, such as Angela Merkel and Schäuble himself, is intended to convert it surreptitiously into a very different notion: no voters in any country can empower their government to oppose Brussels.


There is a long EU tradition of neglecting democratic mandates in the name of respecting them

For all their concerns with rules, treaties, processes, competitiveness, freedom of movement, terrorism etc, only one prospect truly terrifies the EU’s deep establishment: democracy. They speak in its name to exorcise it, and suppress it by six innovative tactics, as May is about to discover.

Time to listen in, Theresa. Photograph: Russell Cheyne/Reuters

The EU runaround 

Henry Kissinger famously quipped that when he wanted to consult Europe, he did not know whom to call. In my case it was worse. Any attempt to enter into a meaningful discussion with Schäuble was blocked by his insistence that I “go to Brussels” instead. Once in Brussels, I soon discovered that the commission was so divided as to make discussions futile. In private talks, Commissioner Moscovici would agree readily and with considerable enthusiasm with my proposals. But then his deputy in the so-called Eurogroup Working Group, Declan Costello, would reject all these ideas out of hand.

The uninitiated may be excused for thinking that this EU runaround is the result of incompetence. While there is an element of truth in this, it would be the wrong diagnosis. The runaround is a systemic means of control over uppity governments. A prime minister, or a finance minister, who wants to table proposals that the deep establishment of the EU dislike is simply denied the name of the person to speak to or the definitive telephone number to call. As for its apparatchiks, the EU runaround is essential to their personal status and power.

Picking opponents

From my first Eurogroup, its president, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch finance minister, began an intensive campaign to bypass me altogether. He would phone Alexis Tsipras, my prime minister, directly – even visiting him in his hotel room in Brussels. By hinting at a softer stance if Tsipras agreed to spare him from having to deal with me, Dijsselbloem succeeded in weakening my position in the Eurogroup – to the detriment, primarily, of Tsipras.

The Swedish national anthem routine

On the assumption that good ideas encourage fruitful dialogue and can be the solvents of impasse, my team and I worked hard to put forward proposals based on serious econometric work and sound economic analysis. Once these had been tested on some of the highest authorities in their fields, from Wall Street and the City to top-notch academics, I would take them to Greece’s creditors in Brussels, Berlin and Frankfurt. Then I would sit back and observe a symphony of blank stares. It was as if I had not spoken, as if there was no document in front of them. It would be evident from their body language that they denied the very existence of the pieces of paper I had placed before them. Their responses, when they came, would be perfectly independent of anything I had said. I might as well have been singing the Swedish national anthem. It would have made no difference.

The Penelope ruse

Delaying tactics are always used by the side that considers the ticking clock its ally. In Homer, Odysseus’ faithful wife, Penelope, fends off aggressive suitors in her husband’s absence by telling them that she will announce whom among them she will marry only after she has completed weaving a burial shroud for Laertes, Odysseus’ father. During the day she would weave incessantly but at night she would undo her work by pulling on a loose string.

In my negotiations in Brussels, the EU’s Penelope ruse consisted, primarily, of endless requests for data, for fact-finding missions to Athens, for information about every bank account held by every public organisation or company. And when they got the data, like the good Penelope, they would spend all night undoing the spreadsheets that they had put together during the day.

Truth reversal

While practising the Swedish national anthem and Penelope ruse tactics, the Brussels establishment utilised tweets, leaks and a campaign of disinformation involving key nodes in the Brussels media network to spread the word that I was the one wasting time, arriving at meetings empty-handed; either with no proposals at all or with proposals that lacked quantification, consisting only of empty ideological rhetoric.

Sequencing

The prerequisite for Greece’s recovery was, and remains, meaningful debt relief. No debt relief meant no future for us. My mandate was to negotiate, therefore, a sensible debt restructure. If the EU was prepared to do this, so as to get as much of their money back as possible, I was also prepared for major compromises. But this would require a comprehensive deal. But, no, Brussels and Berlin insisted that, first, I commit to the compromises they wanted and then, much later, we could begin negotiations on debt relief. The point-blank refusal to negotiate on both at once is, I am sure, a colossal frustration awaiting May when she seeks to compromise on the terms of the divorce in exchange for longer-term free trade arrangements.

So what can Theresa May do?

The only way May could secure a good deal for the UK would be by diffusing the EU’s spoiling tactics, while still respecting the Burkean Brexiteers’ strongest argument, the imperative of restoring sovereignty to the House of Commons. And the only way of doing this would be to avoid all negotiations by requesting from Brussels a Norway-style, off-the-shelf arrangement for a period of, say, seven years.

The benefits from such a request would be twofold: first, Eurocrats and Europhiles would have no basis for denying Britain such an arrangement. (Moreover, Schäuble, Merkel and sundry would be relieved that the ball is thrown into their successors’ court seven years down the track.) Second, it would make the House of Commons sovereign again by empowering it to debate and decide upon in the fullness of time, and without the stress of a ticking clock, Britain’s long-tem relationship with Europe.

The fact that May has opted for a Brexit negotiation that will immediately activate the EU’s worst instincts and tactics, for petty party-political reasons that ultimately have everything to do with her own power and nothing to do with Britain’s optimal agreement with the EU, means only one thing: she does not deserve the mandate that Brussels is keen to neutralise.

Theresa May is dragging the UK under. This time Scotland must cut the rope

George Monbiot in The Guardian

Here is the question the people of Scotland will face in the next independence referendum: when England falls out of the boat like a block of concrete, do you want your foot tied to it?

It would be foolish to deny that there are risks in leaving the United Kingdom. Scotland’s economy is weak, not least because it has failed to wean itself off North Sea oil. There are major questions, not yet resolved, about the currency it would use; its trading relationship with the rump of the UK; and its association with the European Union, which it’s likely to try to rejoin.

But the risks of staying are as great or greater. Ministers are already trying to reconcile us to the possibility of falling out of the EU without a deal. If this happens, Britain would be the only one of the G20 nations without special access to EU trade – “a very destructive outcome leading to mutually assured damage for the EU and the UK”, according to the Commons foreign affairs committee. As the government has a weak hand, an obsession with past glories and an apparent yearning for a heroic gesture of self-destruction, this is not an unlikely result.

On the eve of the first independence referendum, in September 2014, David Cameron exhorted the people of Scotland to ask themselves: “Will my family and I truly be better off by going it alone? Will we really be more safe and secure?” Thanks to his machinations, the probable answer is now: yes.

In admonishing Scotland for seeking to protect itself from this chaos, the government applies a simple rule: whatever you say about Britain’s relationship with Europe, say the opposite about Scotland’s relationship with Britain.

In her speech to the Scottish Conservatives’ spring conference, Theresa May observed that “one of the driving forces behind the union’s creation was the remorseless logic that greater economic strength and security come from being united”. She was talking about the UK, but the same remorseless logic applies to the EU. In this case, however, she believes that our strength and security will be enhanced by leaving. “Politics is not a game, and government is not a platform from which to pursue constitutional obsessions,” she stormed – to which you can only assent.

A Conservative member of the Scottish parliament, Jamie Greene, complains that a new referendum “would force people to vote blind on the biggest political decision a country could face. That is utterly irresponsible.” This reminds me of something, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.

Before the last Scottish referendum, when the polls suggested that Scotland might choose independence, Boris Johnson, then London mayor, warned that “we are on the verge of an utter catastrophe for this country … No one has thought any of this through.” Now, as foreign secretary, he assures us that “we would be perfectly OK” if Britain leaves the EU without a deal.

  Independence supporters gather in Glasgow’s George Square after Nicola Sturgeon’s call for a second referendum.

The frantic attempts by government and press to delegitimise the decision by the Scottish first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, to call for a second independence vote fall flat. Her party’s manifesto for the last Scottish election gives her an evident mandate: it would hold another referendum “if there is a significant and material change in the circumstances that prevailed in 2014, such as Scotland being taken out of the EU against our will”.

Contrast this with May’s position. She has no mandate, from either the general election or the referendum, for leaving the single market and the European customs union. Her intransigence over these issues bends the Conservative manifesto’s pledge to “strengthen and improve devolution for each part of our United Kingdom”.

Her failure to consult the governments of Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland before unilaterally deciding that the UK would leave the single market, and her refusal to respond to the paper the Scottish government produced exploring possible options for a continued engagement with the EU after Brexit testify to a relationship characterised by paternalism and contempt.

You can see the same attitude in the London-based newspapers. As the last referendum approached, they treated Scotland like an ungrateful servant. “What spoilt, selfish, childlike fools those Scots are … They simply don’t have a clue how lucky they are,” Melanie Reid sniffed in the Times. Now the charge is scheming opportunism. “We hope the Scottish people call Sturgeon out for her cynical, self-interested game-playing,” rages the Sun’s English edition. If you want to know what cynical, self-interested game-playing looks like, read the Sun’s Scottish edition. It says the opposite, contrasting the risks of independence with “the stick-on certainty of decades of Tory rule with nothing to soften it”, if Scotland remains within the UK.

Whenever I visit Scotland, I’m reminded that Britain is politically dead from the neck down. South of the border, we tolerate repeated assaults on the commonweal. As the self-hating state destroys its own power to distribute wealth, support public services and protect the NHS from ruin; as it rips up the rules protecting workers, the living world, our food, water and the very air we breathe; as disabled people are pushed off a cliff and poor people are evicted from their homes, we stand and stare. As the trade minister colludes with the dark money network on both sides of the Atlantic, threatening much that remains, we shake our heads then turn away.

Sure, there are some protests. There is plenty of dissent on social media; but our response is pathetic in comparison with the scale of what we face. The Labour opposition is divided, directionless and currently completely useless. But north of the border politics is everywhere, charged with hope, anger and a fierce desire for change. Again and again, this change is thwarted by the dead weight of Westminster. Who would remain tethered to this block, especially as the boat begins to list?

Scotland could wait to find out what happens after Brexit, though it is hard to see any likely outcome other than more of this and worse. Or it could cut the rope, pull itself back into the boat, and sail towards a hopeful if uncertain future. I know which option I would take.