RESEARCH

It has all the right messages for the nation. The polity will be well advised not to slot him into a caste for identity politics or cherry-pick from his statements to imprison governance in dogma. A Bengali in Bihar, I spoke simple Bengali, shorn of Sanskrit-origin words that I thought were meant only for editorials in Anandabazar Patrika until I migrated to Kolkata after school. My Hindi was horrible, with the written form as devoid of gender sensitivity as Bihari Hindi is (and I used to wonder how Biharis couldn’t get it right while speaking but could pull off written compositions perfectly). No elder ever congratulated me for my exam scorecard; for, amid all the scores in 90s, and a few 100s, that in Hindi hovered in the 50-60 range, creating an eyesore and attracting the attention of everybody who had the authority to scold me. But even this hopeless student of Hindi got goosebumps all over when the teacher recited Ramdhari Singh ‘Dinkar’ (who was a Bihar...

But it has such educated advisers that it seems unlikely that its silence on critical issues is a result of ignorance; it must be part of its strategy, the right wing ideologue says Govindacharya addressing the press conference Seizing the opportunity to assess the NDA government’s performance over the past one year before other political observers do, founder of Rashtriya Swabhiman Andolan (RSA) and former RSS ideologue KN Govindacharya covered a host of issues of governance, addressing a press conference today. Govindacharya began by saying that the government at the Centre was Modi government. “It would be improper to call it a BJP or NDA government; the party and the alliance are just playing assisting roles,” he said. The Lok Sabha campaign of the BJP headed by Narendra Modi had raised a lot of hope among the people at large, but no change is visible at the ground level. “I still see poor children loitering around at railway platforms and people sleeping beneath flyo...

Other men are found wanting in protest, too. Support for emancipation of Muslim women from unfair marital laws of the Shari’ah comes mostly from victims of the patriarchal regime and women of other faiths. “H umera was sick of this life. It was as if she was continuously tightrope walking, balancing herself like a skilled acrobat so that she would not fall down. Every time she did something that displeased her husband, he pronounced ‘talaq’ once. The next month would pass with her praying that the second pronouncement would not come. The month would pass and if he did not repeat it, she would heave a sigh of relief and begin praying that he would not utter it again. Thrice, he was so angry that he kept count of the days and right on dot repeated the ‘talaq’. How she had prayed that the third pronouncement would not come and the talaq would not materialise.” Binding : Paperback Publisher : Vitasta Publishing Author : Zaheer, Noor Released : 2015 Pages : 160 Pr...

This state of affairs of the I&B Ministry explains why the government has been failing on the propaganda front   I f you have been wondering why Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s flagship programmes Jan Dhan Yojana, Make in India, Land Acquisition Bill/Ordinance, etc are not being hard-sold by state-owned media houses Doordarshan and Press Information Bureau, wonder no more. Directors in Doordarshan known to be close to different ministers of the Congress-led UPA dispensation and the most visible of the 2009 batch of anchor-correspondents still decide the content of the national broadcaster, sources in the I&B Ministry and the government-run news channel have revealed to me. The sources said that Raj Kumar, Director–New Media (“New Media” is the department that handles DD News’ Twitter handle and Facebook page) and Special Programme, was once close to NCP chief Sharad Pawar; Mamta Verma, Director–Assignment, was a favourite of Kapil Sibal and Director–Ad...

They did everything to subvert internal democracy in the Aam Aadmi Party until the tables turned against them. In all likelihood, the party chief tolerated them for his own intellectual shortcoming and the fear that the duo would be dangerous as dissenters. Their story of subterfuge is long. While one of them was initially admired within the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) for disarming other panellists on television talk shows with a modulated intonation of voice, the other was hailed for his public interest litigations (PILs) against perceived corrupt people. But neither Yogendra Yadav nor Prashant Bhushan is popular in the party, not at least in the national council — the third line of command of which this writer was a part till 21 November 2013, when I resigned due to a manifesto of freebies and doles. In the ultimate analysis, such a manifesto that has persisted till 2015 would not have been possible if there was internal democracy in the AAP right from the time of its ince...