Readers of this blog would recall that I predicted that the Congress (and Sonia Gandhi too) would show some prudence in electing any seasoned politician from its camp (and there are many) to be the next Prime Minister. Sonia could still be the party supremo to act as the “source of inspiration” for the party [...]

My father is a retired public sector undertaking employee. Having grown up in a township within a city scenario where this navratna organisation had created all kind of facilities for its employees, sector-wise schools, colleges, dispensaries, shopping complexes, recreational facilities, in short - everything the employee and their families would ever need; reason why I [...]

Few afterthoughts on the Elections 2004 that I must pen down.

Tough days ahead for Congress, reorganizing the cadres, dealing with inline power spots and above all running a coalition with a bloated ego. Though leaders like Paswan (who earlier backed NDA) want to be part of the government, many (like CPI(M)) will chose to stay [...]

What a turnaround! Couple of weeks ago I was contemplating on how LK Advani will overrule Vajpayee after an NDA win. But in my earlier post on the Chandrababu Naidu debacle I had talked about the choice of Chip and Chapati that a voter of today is presented today. I am happy that he [...]

They had a choice to go for a CEO or choose another able(?) Chief Minister and people of Andhra Pradesh settled for the latter. The recipe of advances in the IT, economic reforms hardly mattered for 80% of the people who were dealing with abject poverty and lack of development. IT has been a pure [...]

Indian politics and the electoral procedure are fun galore. From the tickling to outrightly funny, from bizarre to most innovative, we have it all. A candidate from Madhya Pradesh, for instance uses banners and thelas carrying boxes with posters to campaign, nothing unusual in this except that he urges the voters not to vote for [...]

Two interesting aspects were brought forward related to making the forthcoming polls completely electronic with sole usage of the EVMs (Electronic Voting Machines). The first is off course the public interest litigation which demands the Elections Commission to add a last option “None suitable” on the EVM panel, similar to the “None of the above” [...]

Zee News featured an interview of Atalji with veteran journalist Rahul Dev on 16 April. It was supposed to be a short routine interview, but instead came out saying a lot of unsaid things about the contender to the post of next PM. I had only read about Bahadur Shah Zafar's last days and perhaps [...]

The PM to be, L.K.Odd-vani is a great movie buff and like most stereotypical Hindi film characters is a hopeless blusterer. In last many posts I had talked about his and BJP's poll strategy of passing the Indo-Pak friendship lollypop to the minorities and the feel-good lollypop to the majority urban masses. This, he hopes, [...]

Praful Bidwai writes in his column about BJP's poll strategy:
Vajpayee must pave the way for the 2 per cent-rating man to take over. The BJP knows Advani is like Dick Cheney, equally devious, but more rabble-rousing and demagogic, who cannot match Bush's ratings. Therefore, gullible sections of the public and the BJP's upper middle-class supporters [...]