Former Andhra CM suddenly talks of farmer welfare

IIPM RANKED NO.1 in MAIL TODAY B-SCHOOL RANKINGS

Andhra pradesh politics: Naidu's changed tone

When Nara Chandrababu Naidu sat on an indefinite fast for the sake of forlorn farmers of the calamity-hit coastal Andhra, taking the public amnesia for granted, the farmers were happy to see a changed Naidu. The former CM's eight-day hunger strike is nonetheless a medical miracle as he is a severe diabetic.

“How could anyone believe that Naidu’s indefinite fast was meant for welfare of farmers,” housing minister Kanna Laxminarayana wondered while talking to The Sunday Indian, taking a dig on Naidu's allegedly anti-farmer policies. “Naidu’s much hyped Vision 2020 programme did not have any significant provision to rehabilitate the farmers,” says PCC Kisan cell chairman, Kodanda Reddy.

Naidu received flak from all quarters for neglecting farmers and labourers during his tenure. Farmers were asked not to produce more rice as the state had no place to stock it. They were encouraged to shift to commercial crops such as tobacco, cotton, chillies and castor seed. This forced shift led to more suicides as the ill-equipped small farmers were no match for the big players ruling the market. The commercial crops required huge investments which the small farmers could not make.

Naidu became more unpopular among the farmers and labourers when his government refused to sanction ex-gratia to the bereaved families arguing that it would induce farmers into a suicide spree. Owing to his lopsided views on agriculture, he paid heavy price during the 2004 general elections.

Now, Naidu, who paid little attention to agriculture and irrigation facilities and turned a deaf ear to the plight of farmers when they were struck by, is ironically projecting himself as a messiah of farmers. “I feel the criticism on our leader’s views about agriculture is biased and unilateral. Even if that criticism on his past actions was valid, will it take away his right to voice for the welfare of farmers now? Don’t you allow any revision and re-examining of thoughts and views?” Nannapaneni Raja Kumari, a Telugu Desam MLC told TSI when contacted.

According to the senior political analyst, B.C. Sekhar, Naidu is not a changed soul. “His consistent objective is to promote the commercial interests of the agribusiness companies, foreign financial institutes, international bankers and the IT hardware units. When there has been a drastic change in the world scenario and when agriculture has again come into the centre stage, Naidu has tuned himself accordingly,” says Sekhar. According to him, Naidu developed sudden affection for agriculture when World Development Report 2008 called for greater investment in agriculture in developing countries. Thus, Naidu consistently dances to obvious tunes, this time around it's in the name of farmers!

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.
IIPM ranks No 1 in International Exposure in the 'Third Mail Today B-School Survey'
Management Guru Arindam Chaudhuri Dean Business School IIPM
IIPM Excom Prof Rajita Chaudhuri
Kapil Sibal’s voters want Jan Lokpal, not Government-proposed Lokpal Bill

IIPM: What is E-PAT?
"Thorns to Competition" amongst the top 10 best sellers of the week.
'Thorns to Competition' - You can order your copy online from here
IIPM Mumbai Campus

Insiders say the congress faces rebellions and defections because of the lack of communication between the high command and the party leaders

IIPM Mumbai Campus

Rebels with a pause

In political circles, the Congress party is often referred to as “the big house”. This is because politicians and workers who leave tend to return to its fold in due course after testing the waters outside. It is not that other parties don't have such examples. They do. But they are few and far between. People like Kalyan Singh, Uma Bharti, Madan Lal Khurana and Amar Singh have learned at their own expense that individuals are never bigger than an organisation. But as far as exceptions are concerned, there are a few in the Congress too. People like Chandrashekhar, Morarji Desai and Charan Singh in the past and Maninderjeet Singh Bitta in more recent times never returned to the party after deserting it.

There are some interesting names on this list. Ajit Jogi and K Karunakaran were expelled from the party, but were taken back to the fold. People like S Bangarappa has been in and out of the party so many times that he himself might have lost count.
So what is the reason behind this phenomenon? To start with, it appears that people lose their political standing when the defect from a big party. Congress, technically, means congregation of people, and that is what it has always proved to be. Now not everybody is like Sharad Pawar and Mamata Banerjee, who have the money power and the political base respectively to launch and sustain an independent party. In fact, without these two factors, it is impossible to run a regional outfit. To put it in perspective, in 2007 alone, as many as six such regional outfits merged with the Congress because of “lack of funds”. Being foregone conclusions, these mergers did not make news.

The Congress budget runs into crores of rupees. At election time individual candidates are allocated huge sums. Election Commission guidelines are often flouted in ingenious ways. In fact, many candidates save money from this poll fund for completely private use. But look at the condition of regional parties. Their musclemen and local middlemen ask for exorbitant sums to manage votes. Failing to secure what they want, they threaten to transfer the votes to the official Congress candidate in lieu of money. The exasperated rebel candidate realises that life is easier under the umbrella of a big party.

Talk to any politician about this and they will pour their hearts out. Subramaniam Swamy still holds the post of the president of the Janata Party, but the party itself is now in a mummified state. Swamy has lost his status as a political leader of import; he is at best an “anarchist” with some nuisance value. People like P Chidambaram and K Karunakaran were smart enough to return to the party fold before things got out of hand.

Another question that intrigues all is, why does the Congress face so many rebellions and defections? Insiders say the primary reason is the lack of communication between the high command and the leaders. People like Natwar Singh, Arjun Singh, Sheila Dikshit and Kedar Nath Singh had differences over the election of PV Narasimha Rao as party president. They supported the one-man one-post norm, which didn't go down well with the then PM. The Gandhi family was out of politics at that juncture and Rao was at the helm of affairs. Well-wishers wanted Sonia Gandhi to come into active politics and thus raised the one-man one-post issue. They wanted Sonia to be president of the party if Rao was to keep the post of the Prime Minister. The above-mentioned quartet rebelled during the Surajkund general meeting and just after that the 'Tiwari Congress' came into being.

Tiwari Congress was an interesting case. Sonia had started giving signals that she might join active politics after all. At the Tiwari Congress's office adjoining New Delhi's Le Meridien Hotel, Narain Dutt Tiwari used to discreetly keep tabs on Sonia's plans. Even veteran journalists covering the Congress were unaware of the real reason behind this outfit. They only got wind of it when they saw Janardhan Dwivedi, considered close to Sonia, coming out of Arjun Singh's house though the latter had left the party. This rebellion was clearly not against the Gandhi-Nehru family. Not surprisingly, this outfit merged with the mother party following Sonia's entry into active politics.

It was much later that Arjun Singh and Natwar Singh fell out with the party high command. Arjun Singh is an outspoken man. Insiders say he was too forthright a leader to remain subdued for too long. Natwar Singh, on the other hand, was let down by his son's involvement in the Volcker oil-for-food scandal.

Old timers will tell you that as far as rebellions in the Congress are concerned, it was never against the high command. Talking to TSI, Bhishm Narain Singh says, “From Debkanta Barooah to Siddhartha Shankar Ray, each one of them advised Indiraji to proclaim Emergency. Because of this wrong advice, a lot of people left the Congress. This weakened the party. Our biggest enemy is in-fighting and back-stabbing.”
Had conflict with the high command been the reason for desertion, many of the rebels would not have returned to the Congress. People like Ambika Soni, Pranab Mukherjee, AK Antony and Chidambaram would have severed all links with the party once they had turned their backs on it. The fact that Agatha Sangma is a junior minister in the Cabinet also confirms that the high command doesn't keep grudges. The party's problem is that the "coterie" gives dubious advice to the high command. For example, Natwar Singh was done in by Sonia's political adviser Ahmad Patel. The latter was reportedly unhappy with Natwar's direct access to Sonia.

Take the case of Jagan. A party bigwig from Andhra Pradesh who was promoting his aides convinced the party that Jagan's defection would not harm the party's prospects. Rahul Gandhi was not sure. So he sent a young general secretary to analyse the situation. That office-bearer was coerced by the big gun to give the same input. However, he gave the actual report saying that Jagan's departure would hurt the party in the next polls and that Jagan is of the same temperament as his father.
The list of people who left the Congress because of “neglect”, “insult”, “ego clashes” and otherwise is long. The first big name is that of K Kamraj, who was the original kingmaker. Kamraj was instrumental in getting Lal Bahadur Shastri the post of PM. It was only after his death that Indira Gandhi overcame the so-called Syndicate to become PM. Around the same time and after, Chandrashekhar, Morarji Desai and Charan Singh left the party never to return. They formed their own outfits and became political heavyweights in their own right.

Analysts might add here that since the aforementioned did not strictly adhere to the “Congress ideology”, they left the party. Similarly in February 1977, Babu Jagjivan Ram left the Congress and formed Congress for Democracy. Former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Hemwati Nandan Bahuguna and erstwhile Orissa CM Nandani Satpathy joined his ranks. The same year, Karnataka's Devraj Urs tried to split the Congress. He was initially backed by AK Antony, Sharad Pawar, Ambika Soni, Priyaranjan Dasmunshi, Oomen Chandi and PC Chako, but all of them returned to the Congress soon enough.
Antony, meanwhile, formed the Regional Congress (A), which was rechristened Indian Congress (S) with the inclusion of Sharad Pawar. However, the party merged with the Congress in 1981. In 1994, Tiwari Congress and Bangarappa's Karnataka Congress merged with the Congress. Bangarappa, to give him his due, revolted again and formed Karnataka Vikas Party but rejoined after much cajoling. But he again upped and quit and joined Samajwadi Party only to return when reality sunk in.

It was during the same year that GK Moopanar's Tamil Manila Congress, Madhavrao Scindhia's Madhya Pradesh Vikas Party and Gegong Apang's Regional Arunachal Congress also merged with the Congress.

Following an analysis of the defeats the party has faced in recent elections, a high-power committee of the Congress has recommended that it should actively try to woo back the sidelined old warhorses in a bid to reclaim its lost impetus. After all, as recent political history has repeatedly shown, Congress rebels are pretty prone to changing their anti-party stance with just a bit of coaxing.

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.
Management Guru Arindam Chaudhuri Dean Business School IIPM
IIPM Excom Prof Rajita Chaudhuri
Kapil Sibal's voters want Jan Lokpal, not Government-proposed Lokpal Bill
IIPM Prof. Arindam Chaudhuri on For Salman Khurshid, it is a big challenge ahead; and I personally look forward to a revolutionary couple of years ahead!

IIPM Adds Another Feather to Its Cap: This Time Gets the Best Business School of Asia Award
Item Numbers Are The New Mantras of Bollywood

Noida CEO rules out hike in land compensation
IIPM, GURGAON
Rajita Chaudhuri on ‘The Magic of Number 3 in Marketing’
Noida Extn dreams breaks as court scraps new acquisition
IIPM Marches Ahead in B-School Rankings...

Criminals in politics: Politics is in my backyard

Best Colleges for Vocational Courses in India

Decriminalising politics is imperative for a successful democracy

India’s democracy, despite being the largest in the world, is at stake. And criminals entering into politics is certainly adding to the woes of the already tainted national polity. Politicians with a criminal record is not a new phenomenon. But, there has been little progress in decriminalising the Indian polity especially looking at the recent Bihar Assembly election. 139 candidates participating in the 35 assembly constituencies have criminal records and 75 of them have serious criminal charges including murder or attempt to murder. Surprisingly, they got tickets from major parties. 65 per cent of RJD candidates have criminal cases against them followed by JD(U) (59 per cent) BJP (54 per cent), Congress (40 per cent) and BSP (40 per cent). Thisgives enough reasons to ponder over the issue.

The Bihar assembly election is not an isolated example. 206 members out of 403 who won the 2002 Uttar Pradesh assembly election had criminal backgrounds. More surprisingly, in its 2007 assembly election, 74 per cent of the candidates had criminal cases. Mafiosi like Arun Gawli, Hitendra Thakur and Pappu Kalani dominated the polity of Maharashtra for years. The situation at the national level is equally dreadful. As per Washington Times, in 2008, one-fourth of the 540 Indian Parliamentarians had criminal records. In 1996, there were 70 Parliamentarians and over 100 state assembly members with ‘criminal background.’ Shockingly, in the 2009 general elections, 43 MPs from BJP and 41 from Congress and 69 from other minor political parties are facing criminal cases against them. What is more shocking is that 19 BJP and 12 Congress newly elected MPs are having serious criminal charges against them.

Criminals entering into politics is a rare phenomenon in successful democracies. Why can't India stop criminals entering into politics? The Chances are rare unless strong measures are taken. India's strange laws do not allow undertrials to vote but allow even jailed politicians to contest in elections. A politician is barred from contesting elections only when guilt is established. There has also been lack of political will. However, Sonia Gandhi recently avowed, “We need to do more in contending with the influence of money and muscle power... We also need to build a consensus on how to prevent individuals with a criminal record from contesting elections." However, just a statement is certainly not enough. Such a strong decision needs greater commitments, political will and a strong leadership. Now the question is – can the current leadership deliver it? Obama has only termed India as 'the world's largest democracy'. Can we make it the most successful and transparent one?

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.
Arindam Chaudhuri on his third National Award and his unique business formula for films
IIPM Prof. Arindam Chaudhuri on Internet Hooliganism
GIDF Club of IIPM Lucknow Organizes Blood Donation Camp

Arindam Chaudhuri: We need Hazare's leadership
IIPM: Indian Institute of Planning and Management
The hunt for hostel and paying guest (PG) accommodation for students
INDIA'S BEST COLLEGES, INSTITUTES and UNIVERSITIES