'BJP alone can do justice to BCs'

The BJP today attacked the Congress for allegedly indulging in corrupt practices after a court here found former Jharkhand Chief Minister Madhu Koda guilty in a coal block allocation case and Delhi Police arrested its MLA in a money laundering case.Addressing the media in Delhi Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader and Union Railway Minister Piyush Goyal said the Koda government was backed by the Congress when the scam occurred which put the party and the previous UPA government in the dock. The special Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) court today pronounced Koda and three others guilty of criminal conspiracy in the coal scam case in which they allegedly illegally ensured allocation of a Jharkhand coal block to a Kolkata-based firm.Mr Goyal also said that three-time former Congress MLA from Delhi Rajesh Jain was arrested last month allegedly for converting black money through shell companies and hawala after demonetisation. Madhu Koda was propped up by Ahmed Patel. The party made Independent legislator Koda the Chief Minister. And at that time the Jharkhand government was being run by Congress leaders from Delhi. The UPA government had then allocated coal blocks in the 36th screening committee (meeting) Mr Goyal said. All this put then Jharkhand government and the Congress-led UPA government in the dock. The allegations have been proved now... Congress compromised with the national interest and the losses incurred are estimated to be Rs 1.86 lakh crore as per then CAG (Comptroller and Auditor General). Responding to the Congress demand for a discussion on corruption under the present regime he said: BJP governments are not involved in corruption. So there is no such talk. However cases of corruption by Congress are coming out again and again. The Congress leadership must answer. Referring to Rajesh Jain s case Mr Goyal said it proved why the Congress was opposed to demonetisation. Congress must tell whether it will support the (BJP) government in making the country free of corruption and black money or oppose it. Reacting to Congress President-elect Rahul Gandhi s interview to a local news channel post the campaigning period Mr Goyal said Gandhi had violated the model code of conduct. As per law the Election Commission is supposed to take action in the case as we understand interview cannot be given within 48 hours before the polling. We are hopeful that the Election Commission will take cognizance of it and take proper action. He also took a dig at the Congress-led alliance in the state calling it unholy .The minister said the BJP was confident of bagging more than 150 seats in the Gujarat Assembly election and that the undercurrent was anti-Congress. It forced the President-elect to violate the model code of conduct and give an interview to channel (when the code was in force) he said. BJP was written off in Uttar Pradesh before the elections. However we got over 80 per cent of seats while Congress could get just seven. He also said the BJP believed that Hindu God Ram existed and no damage should be done to the Ram Setu.Holding the erratic monsoon responsible for the hike in vegetable prices he said the government would ensure fast distribution to cool off the prices.He said the government had finalised the framework for commercial mining and it was expected to be sent to the Cabinet shortly . A Bharatiya Janata Party MP was caught on camera threatening an official who was clearing encroachments in Uttar Pradesh s Barabanki town The Indian Express reported. I will make it very difficult for you to live in Barabanki BJP MP Priyanka Singh Rawat is heard saying. She represents the Barabanki constituency in the Lok Sabha.The official Ajay Dwivedi is a sub divisional magistrate NDTV reported. He was with his team in Chaila village where a government school and a pond were illegally taken over allegedly by local BJP leader.BJP MP Priyanka Singh Rawat threatens SDM who was leading an anti-encroachment drive in Barabanki says Barabanki mein jeena mushkil kar dungi agar shetra ke logon aur mere karyakartaon ko zara si bhi taklif hui toh pic.twitter.com/z3yb1GvoGC ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) December 13 2017 Soon Rawat reached the spot with some supporters. When a public representative is standing in front of you then you should remember the protocol she said. I will make your life very difficult in Barabanki if my workers face even an iota of difficulty. She then told the crowd gathered there: All you people let me make this clear. Their officials are everywhere. If they don t listen to you chase them away. That will drill some sense into them. Dwivedi later told NDTV that his team could not finish their work. There was a big crowd...We had to return. But we will continue with our work. The MP was earlier in the news for threatening a police officer. By Chaitanya Kalbag Those who make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire Absurdity was piled atop absurdity as seven weeks of vitriol ended in a splash on Tuesday with Prime Minister Narendra Modi taking a seaplane ride. When this prime minister arguably the most powerful mass leader we have had in a generation breaks security rules his loyal ministers fall over themselves to promise a review. He sets the rules. Our politicians have plumbed new depths in slander and abuse. This is a bottomless pit: with social media amplifying every word and gesture we have heard enough about everything from imported mushrooms to Allauddin Khilji s offspring. Although Modi has only seven million fewer followers than Donald Trump s 44 million on Twitter he has to work much harder making speech after stump speech. He cannot take anything for granted least of all the seven million Gujaratis between 18 and 25 who were eligible to vote in the 2017 election - which is why hopping from river to dam reservoir in a single-engined aircraft makes for such good visuals. Followers aside Trump and Modi have been brushed by an eerie confluence of events. Modi announced demonetisation on the day Trump was elected; Trump bowed to Jewish cultural nationalism by recognising Jerusalem as Israel s capital on December 6 the anniversary of the Babri masjid demolition. The Bharatiya Janata Party s general secretary Ram Madhav described the Ram Janmabhoomi movement as the ideological sheet-anchor of the nationalist movement and said the mantra of good governance and development propelled the BJP to power in 2014. The tragedy is that the principal Opposition party is still stuck in identity politics Madhav wrote unself-consciously in The Indian Express on the anniversary. But of course it is all about identity politics. When Modi inaugurated the Ambedkar International Centre in New Delhi the following day the prime minister dominated the occasion putting even two big statues of our first law minister in the shade. Rahul Gandhi has just been elected unopposed as Congress president. You cannot get more dynastic than to see a political post becoming a fifth-generation hereditary fiefdom. But was there a contest for the post of BJP president when Amit Shah was unanimously appointed to that post by the party s parliamentary board in 2014 and re-elected to a three-year term in 2016? The same day as the Babri anniversary and the Jerusalem news a video went viral of a migrant Muslim worker hacked to death and his body burnt by his attacker in Rajasthan. Such atrocities are becoming commonplace. Not a single senior BJP leader has spoken out against the savagery. When our political discourse is suffused with anger and prejudice (and this applies to all our parties) you can be excused for being cynical if you peer through jaundiced eyes at the combatants trooping into Parliament on Friday for a winter session that has been slashed to only 14 working days because well law-making is less exciting than law-breaking. We have to take a cleaver to the overgrowth of rhetoric to be able to see more clearly. Gujarat was a good opportunity to talk about development and about how good economics can subsume caste and religious animosities - it was the test-tube in which Modi created the formula for national domination - but the opportunity has been lost. By evening of the day this column appears you will be inundated by exit polls on who is likely to emerge victorious - Modi or the newly-crowned Rahul Gandhi. Gujarat is the BJP s to lose. From 2002 when Modi fought his first election as Gujarat chief minister the BJP s vote share has remained in the 47-49 percent range while Congress has been stuck around 38 percent and won less than one-third of the assembly seats. There has to be a huge swing to reverse this even if you take into account the reported discontent among the KHAM (Kshatriya Harijan Adivasi and Muslim) voters and the Hardik Patel-led Patidar revolt. Modi was easily the colossus bestriding the Gujarat stage. Yet he resorted to devices like alleging that Pakistan was trying to topple the BJP in Gujarat (and by extension himself). Being at the apogee of popularity does not seem to confer security. In early March 1976 when she was seemingly at the height of her power with the Emergency in force and her opponents in prison Indira Gandhi complained that a foreign hand was trying to destabilise her when she was taking strong steps to unite the nation. One year later she was tasting the ashes of defeat. Modi on the other hand is likely to be a shoo-in in 2019 if he sticks to his economic knitting. Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad set out the extent of Modi s power in a recent speech when he ticked off the senior judiciary for not letting the executive play a bigger role in the appointment of judges. The prime minister is the principal player in the appointment of the president of India; in the vice-president of India; in the speaker of the Lok Sabha; in the three armed forces chiefs...the chief election commissioner...a whole range of other constitutional bodies Prasad said. The prime minister possesses the nuclear button; that is how much the people of the country trust him. Such power needs delegation. Back in May 2014 a few days after he took power Modi listed his Ten Commandments. No.1 said Build confidence in bureaucracy. No.2 read Welcome innovative ideas and give freedom to bureaucrats to work. The prime minister has held regular meetings with top bureaucrats. But recent conversations with senior civil servants reveal that there is a fair bit of angst and demoralisation. The reasons seem to be a combination of the empanelment that lists senior bureaucrats for Secretary-level appointments (and punishes those not in favour) an opaque 360-degree appraisal system and frequent changes at the top levels of key ministries. Here is a sampling of Secretary-level personnel changes in important departments since May 2014: - Five Secretaries in Chemicals & Petrochemicals - Five Secretaries in Department of Fertilisers - Four Secretaries in the Ministry of Coal - Three Secretaries in the Department of Commerce - Five Secretaries in the Department of Posts - Three Secretaries in Telecommunications - Five Secretaries in Ministry of Development of North-Eastern Region - Six Secretaries in Electronics and Information Technology - Four Secretaries in the Department of Economic Affairs - Four Secretaries in the Department of Higher Education - Five Secretaries in School Education & Literacy - Four Secretaries in Micro Small and Medium Enterprises - Five Secretaries in Minority Affairs - Five Secretaries in New & Renewable Energy - Five Secretaries in Rural Development - Four Secretaries in the Ministry of Textiles - Five Secretaries in Urban Development Getting our administrative machinery into top gear is just one urgent priority. Several forecasts now see India s gross domestic product growing at a middling 6.7 percent in 2017-18. Core inflation is at a 15-month high and industrial production is limping. Hopefully the Modi government will move past Gujarat GST and demonetisation to focus on making sure our economy vaults over the New India bar. ALSO READ TMC MLA removed as in-charge of Basirhat following violence BJP to intensify social media campaign in Kerala Tripura PM Modi no stranger to online trolling had once talked about real power of social media Odisha CM buying fake Twitter followers: BJP BJP says AAP responsible for its legal battles span.p-content div id =div-gpt line-height: 0px; font-size: 0px; A Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader on Wednesday apologised for brandishing AK-47 rifle in a photograph.Ashish Sareen who is vice president of the BJP state unit was in news after his photograph went viral in which he was brandishing an AK-47 rifle. Talking to ANI Sareen apologised for the photograph and said there was not any bad intention behind it. Many national leaders have photos with guns; I am still a local leader. It was not with any wrong intention but I still apologise for it Sareen said.He said the photograph was uploaded on social media by his brother.This is not the first incident wherein a political leader is seen with AK-47 which otherwise is the favourite weapon of the terrorists.In 2014 a photo of People s Democratic Party (PDP) MLA Javed Mir with an AK-47 rifle had gone viral.(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) With barely two months to go for the Assembly election Tripura is witnessing hectic political activity. While the Bharatiya Janata Party has firmly established its position as the primary challenger to the ruling Left Front over the last few years the Congress may be staging a late comeback.On a comeback trail?Last week saw around 1 000 Congress renegades led by the influential leader Mujibar Islam make their way back to the party. Most of them had joined the Trinamool Congress last year to protest against the Congress s alliance with the Left Front for the West Bengal Assembly election. Tapan Dutta who had joined the BJP in August from the Trinamool Congress also rejoined the Congress on Friday.Tapas Dey vice president of the Congress in Tripura claimed several other leaders had rejoined the party in smaller batches through the week and many political heavyweights including former lawmakers were likely to join over the next few weeks. We are in talks with many important leaders he said. And I can say with certainty some big shots will be back with us very soon. There has been talk of the Congress gaining ground since the party won the bye-election to the North Dhanicherra village committee of the Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council in late November. It took 197 votes against the Communist Party of India (Marxist) s 181. The BJP managed only 24 votes and lost its deposit.In the 2013 Assembly election the Congress with nine seats had emerged as the primary opposition to the CPI(M) which had won all the other 51 seats. In 2016 six of the Congress legislators defected to the Trinamool which they later left for the BJP. In effect as the Congress s strength waned the BJP s increased sharply.So are their fortunes reversing now?Too little too late?Analysts contend the Congress s latest surge may be too little too late. Dismissing the party s claim of a comeback the veteran Agartala-based journalist Manas Paul said the Congress has become a non-existent entity in the state. It is very much a two-horse race currently he said. For the first time voters in the state have an alternative to the Left and it is the BJP. As of now the two parties are almost neck and neck. Asked about the Congress predicting more last-minute defections from the saffron party BJP spokesperson Mrinal Kanti Deb said A few insignificant leaders may have gone but no state-level leader will leave the party. Some BJP officials though said ticket distribution could spark disaffection in the coming weeks. It is obvious that not all former MLAs who have joined the party recently can be given tickets said a state BJP leader who asked not to be named. That happens in every election but we will deal with that when the time comes. So far there is no decision on who will get tickets and who won t. Prime Minister Narendra Modi s election campaign in Gujarat over the last fortnight saw him playing the victim a man facing a conspiracy to engineer his downfall. Of course playing the victim has always been Modi s political style. It foregrounded his Gujarat Assembly election campaigns of 2002 and 2007 but was pushed into the background in 2012 as he sought to invent a new persona of Mr Development. It was mainly in this avatar that he led the 2014 Lok Sabha election campaign.It is hard to tell whether Modi subconsciously regressed into playing the role of victim over the past few weeks because of the acute pressure of winning Gujarat. Perhaps he reverted to his old persona because that he thought it was his best bet to trump his rivals. In either case Modi the victim was placed at the centre of the electoral battle and the issue of development became secondary at least in media headlines.To understand why Modi plays the victim occasionally we must turn to our psychology text books. They say that all of us have amour propre a sense of self-worth otherwise known as narcissism a term that is erroneously used as a pejorative. Narcissism is a dominant even defining trait among powerful leaders point out Manfred FR Kets de Vries and Danny Miller in a paper titled Narcissism and Leadership: An Object Relations Perspective. Kets de Vries is a Dutch psychologist of repute and Miller is a professor of management studies and consultant to Fortune 500 companies. Narcissism is often the driving force behind the desire to obtain a leadership position they say. Perhaps individuals with strong narcissistic personality features are more willing to undertake the arduous process of attaining a position of power. No need for loyalty loveModi has indeed gone through an arduous process to become prime minister overcoming the hurdle of his lower middle-class background a feat only a handful of people manage to achieve. This should have injected in him a sense of immense satisfaction. But perhaps it also inflated the narcissistic tendencies that characterise most successful people. As Kets de Vries and Miller write Narcissists feel they must rely on themselves rather than on others for gratification of life s needs. They live with the assumption that they cannot reliably depend on anyone s love or loyalty. It explains Modi s tendency to centralise power his penchant to take decisions in secrecy (of which demonetisation is an apt example) of projecting himself as the sole embodiment of the government. Few members of his cabinet can call themselves his friend. His own party sold Modi as the leader whom India can trust because he is single and will therefore not be corrupt because he has no children to whom he can bequeath his wealth. His lack of familial ties of love has been turned into a virtue.Since narcissists refuse to depend on loyalty and love Kets de Vries and Miller say they become preoccupied with establishing their adequacy power beauty status prestige and superiority . In a democracy therefore narcissistic leaders must repeatedly win elections to prove their adequacy superiority and power. Every election victory has a bearing on Modi s self-definition: it reinforces his supremacy establishes he is without equal. A defeat therefore becomes proof of his inadequacy. It diminishes his sense of the self. So even when he loses an election he seeks to establish his superiority either engineering the defection of his rival to his side or preventing him from functioning. That is what he has done to Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal. In the end of course defeat can only be effaced with his next triumph. No wonder then Modi invests so much energy and personal equity in every election he spearheads.Modi dreads defeat and therefore the tactic of spinning a yarn about a Pakistan-Congress conspiracy to unseat the BJP from power in Gujarat. The dramatic routeGiven that every election has the potential to threaten the integrity of his personality the question of waging electoral battles in an ethical manner is reduced in significance. For Modi to claim that the presence of former prime minister Manmohan Singh at a dinner hosted by Mani Shankar Aiyar for a visiting Pakistani dignitary suggested a Pakistan-Congress conspiracy to dislodge the Bharatiya Janata Party from power in Gujarat was therefore just another tactic in the long war.But if Modi is not the victor he must appear to the people as the victim a person who was tripped slyly by his opponent. It is important for him to keep alive the fiction that he wins all battles if they are fought fairly. Modi dreads defeat of which he perhaps saw fleeting signs in Gujarat and so spun an unethical yarn about a Pakistan-Congress conspiracy.Kets de Vries writes in another paper Are You a Victim of the Victim Syndrome?: The world is a dangerous place for people with a victim mentality. They have always to be prepared for the worst as it is full of people who are out to hurt them. Let alone the dinner Aiyar hosted even the neem-coated urea his own government has introduced is projected to have risky consequences. Don t you think that by taking this step of introducing neem-coated urea I have ended the business of black marketeers? Don t you think they will avenge it? I carry my maut death in mutthi fist In the same vein Aiyar was accused of going to Pakistan to fix contract to kill him.Kets de Vries writes People with a victim mentality know how to inflame others. It was to inflame people that Aiyar s description of Modi as a neech kisam ka aadmi (a low-life kind of person) was twisted to accuse the Congress of insulting members of the lower castes. The party was projected as being anti-Gujarat because Indira Gandhi in the had removed Morarji Desai as finance minister in 1969 and the Congress had allegedly sidelined Sardar Patel in the post-Indepence period.Modi accused Sardar Arshad Rafiq a relatively unknown former Pakistani Army officer of writing a Faceboo post supporting Congress leader Ahmed Patel s candidature as Gujarat s chief minister. Rafiq denied he had written such a post. Nevertheless Modi demanded to know Why is Pakistan s senior retired army officer exercising his brain in the Gujarat election? It was to stoke the anger of Gujaratis against Pakistan as was perhaps Modi s aim when he accused Salman Nizami a Congress activist in Kashmir of questioning his parentage.These examples only prove right another one of Kets de Vries observations: people prone to the victim syndrome are also masters of manipulation and have a penchant for high drama. Indeed whenever Modi is under stress he slips into playing the victim with a theatrical touch. After his policy of demonetising high-value bank notes seemed to have gone horribly wrong he said in Goa on November 13 2016 I will not stop doing these things even if you burn me alive They may ruin me because their loot of 70 years is in trouble My dear countrymen I gave up everything my home my family I gave up everything I had for this country. Kets de Vries explains the motivation behind such theatrics: Victims talent for high drama draws people to them like moths to a flame. Their permanent dire state brings out the altruistic motives in others. It is hard to ignore cries of help. In an election how can people assist a person who is the prime minister of the world s largest democracy? Obviously they can do so by voting for his party.The Hindutva angleModi playing the victim has another meaning in the context of Hindutva a cultural identity offered to those who have been bruised by modernity. Modernity homogenises cultures disrupts the old social system and dislocates individuals from the socio-cultural milieu in which they were once secure. There is thus bound to be a palpable grief for the values of a lost and retrospectively idealised world writes renowned psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar in The Colours of Violence a seminal study of the 1990 riots in Hyderabad. Cultural groups are not only a shelter for those mourning lost attachments but also vehicles for redressing narcissistic injuries for righting what is perceived as contemporary or historical wrongs. Hindutva aims to build a community that mourns not just through the bonds of brotherhood but one that seeks to recover its lost self-esteem by avenging itself against groups held responsible for inflicting narcissistic injuries on them. Hindutva blames quite a few groups for the plight of Hindus but none more than Muslims and the Congress.In the Hindutva laboratory of Gujarat socio-cultural experiments in vengeance have been conducted for long. Perhaps sensing that Gujaratis were quite so enamoured with him as they were in 2014 Modi presented himself as the victim of a Congress-Muslim-Pakistani conspiracy. He hoped that in his persecution fantasy Gujarati Hindus would perceive their own historical and contemporary victimisation and vote for the BJP.It is hard to tell what a BJP victory could mean to Gujaratis psychologically but it will certainly help Modi preserve his narcissistic self which he has conceived with utmost grandeur laced with the belief that India is lucky to have him. For such a leader just the fear of being rejected by the people of his own state can seem a menacing threat to his self. Shares of Gujarat government-owned companies are witnessing a sell-off ahead of the state election results amid heightened uncertainty about the Bharatiya Janata Party s prospects in the polls. Shares of Gujarat State Fertilizers & Chemicals (GSFC) Gujarat Mineral Development Corporation (GMDC) and Gujarat Narmada Valley Fertilizers & Chemicals (GNFC) have dropped 10-15 per cent since November 1 after rallying strongly for the previous three months. The mid-cap index gained 0.8 per cent and the small-cap index rose 1.6 per cent since November. Analysts said investors are worried that if BJP loses the Gujarat state elections the prospects of these companies would turn hazy. Investors fear that uncertainty post-election results could adversely impact the state owned companies which have shown tremendous growth under BJP government said G Chokkalingam CEO Equinomics Research & Advisory Services. Prior to November these stocks had run up on expectations that BJP would win the elections. Despite prepoll survey projecting a BJP victory market participants are nervous. GANDHINAGAR: OBC leader and Congress candidate Alpesh Thakore on Tuesday alleged that Prime Minister Narendra Modi disliked Gujarati food and was fond of Taiwanese mushrooms which cost Rs 80 000 a piece. Somebody told me that Mr Modi doesn t like what we eat. He eats imported mushrooms from Taiwan priced at around Rs 80 000 a piece he said. And he eats five such mushrooms every day. He was eating these mushrooms since he was the chief minister of Gujarat Thakore added. The prime minister who eats mushrooms worth Rs 4 lakh every day how can he like this roti and chawal he quipped. Thakore also alleged that Bharatiya Janata Party s Gujarat leaders siphoned off Rs 1 500 crore meant for Banaskantha flood victims. The Rs 1 500 crore which was meant for the Banaskantha flood victims has not reached the beneficiaries but has found their way to the pockets of the Gujarat BJP leaders and workers. Thakore formed a front from the OBC community Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe communities and called it the OSS Ekta Manch. Thereafter he joined hands with the Congress.