As the world’s largest democracy goes to the polls, it is with a sense of trepidation that the average Indian is looking at these elections. In a way this might be a watershed event in the history of India. If the BJP wins, Congress would disintegrate in a matter of time. If the Congress wins(a distant possibility) Modi and the BJP would be written off. AAP might make an impact but would not be in a position to win.
For me the Heart says congress, but the brain says BJP. Let us wait and watch.
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Both parties would survive, whatever be the result.
Elections are being held in Delhi :)
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I seriously doubt if the Congress would survive. People have lost faith in the Nehru Gandhi family and I think with Rahul coming out in the forefront it would be doomsday for him. Without the binding force of the Gandhi family congress might not survive.
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I think Nawaz Sharif is going to win this election in India. :)
Bad news for minorities. Good news for religious bigots.
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BJP is always better than Congress when in power but worse than Congress when in opposition. BJP plays the religious card when in opposition and causes all kinds of trouble for Muslim minority. i think we had lot less communal riots during BJP government in the centre.
remember, BJP demolished Babri Masjid when Congress was in power.
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Doesn't matter for Pakistan who ever wins the elections in India as the policy of all parties is the same viz a viz Pakistan.
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Whoever wins the election will solve the public hygiene problem. By making the toilet less people realize they can't always expect govt handouts.
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Doesn't matter for Pakistan who ever wins the elections in India as the policy of all parties is the same viz a viz Pakistan.
I think Modi as the PM might take a more stringent view of Pakistan. This is a perception that he is trying to build up.
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BJP in its entire tenure has always tried to be friendly to Pakistan. Solution to every issue is possible only when there is some millitary dictator in Pakistan as multiple power centres reduces chances of any solution
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I think Modi as the PM might take a more stringent view of Pakistan. This is a perception that he is trying to build up.
What else can he do did the Congress didnt?
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Dunya News: Must Watch Page : Modi refusing to wear Muslim skull cap
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interesting article
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/19/opinion/being-muslim-under-narendra-modi.html?_r=0
AHMEDABAD, India — Late last month I bought an Indian comic book online. I hadn’t bought one since the mid-80s, when I was a boy and would walk to the bookstore in my hometown in Kashmir to pick up copies of D.C. and Marvel Comics, or Amar Chitra Katha, a series based on the lives of major contemporary, historical and mythological figures in India. My latest purchase, “Bal Narendra” (“Boy Narendra”), was styled after Amar Chitra Katha.
I turned the pages with a mixture of anticipation and foreboding. The book purports to tell stories from the childhood of Narendra Modi, the longtime chief minister of Gujarat, one of the richest states in India, and the polarizing Hindu nationalist candidate for prime minister in the ongoing election. The tales are part of Mr. Modi’s high-octane campaign effort to present himself as a bearer of good governance, growth and efficiency.
Bal Narendra, the son of a tea-seller in a small town of Gujarat, embodies many virtues: courage, wit, diligence, fairness, compassion. He sells tea at a village fair to raise money for flood victims. In devotion to the religious tradition of his village, he swims across a lake full of crocodiles and hoists a flag on top of a temple on an island. When some bullies rough up a weaker child at school, he marks them by throwing ink from his fountain pen on their shirts and denounces them to the principal.
The publishers of the comic book — available exclusively from Infibeam, an Amazon-like online retailer run by a Gujarati entrepreneur close to Mr. Modi — would have you believe that now that he is all grown up, Bal Narendra is just as brave, clever and just. If anything, however, Mr. Modi’s public record paints the picture of a leader unapologetically divisive and sectarian.
It was on his watch as chief minister that more than 1,000 people, many of them Muslims, were killed throughout Gujarat in 2002, when rioting erupted after some 60 Hindus died in a burning train in Godhra. A Human Rights Watch report that year asserted that the state government and local police officials were complicit in the carnage.
Mr. Modi has not visited the camps of the Muslims displaced by the violence or apologized for his government’s failure to protect a minority. Instead, he has described the reprisal killings of Muslims that year as a simple “reaction” to an “action,” namely the deaths of the Hindu train passengers — and has said he felt as sad about them as would a passenger in a car that accidentally ran over a puppy. His only regret, he once told a reporter for this paper, was failing to manage the media fallout.
Even as candidate for prime minister, Mr. Modi has not given up his sectarian ways. Nor has his party, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. Of the 449 B.J.P. candidates now running for seats in the lower house of Parliament, all but eight are Hindu. The party’s latest election manifesto reintroduces a proposal to build a temple to the Hindu god Ram on the site of a medieval mosque in the northern town of Ayodhya, even though the destruction of that mosque by Hindu extremists and B.J.P. supporters in 1992 devolved into violence that killed several thousand people.
Amit Shah, a former Gujarat minister and Mr. Modi’s closest aide, is awaiting trial for the murder of three people the police suspect of plotting to assassinate Mr. Modi. (Mr. Shah calls the charges a political conspiracy.) He has made speeches inciting anti-Muslim sentiment among Hindu voters, including in Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state in India, despite an outbreak of sectarian violence there last September.
Ahmedabad ceases to swagger in Juhapura, a southwestern neighborhood and the city’s largest Muslim ghetto.
The problem isn’t just about rhetoric. Judging by the evidence in Gujarat, where Mr. Modi has been chief minister since 2001, a B.J.P. victory in the general election would increase marginalization and vulnerability among India’s 165 million Muslims.
Ahmedabad, Gujarat’s largest city, has become a wealthy metropolis of about six million people and three million private vehicles. Office complexes, high-rise apartments, busy markets and shopping malls have replaced the poor villages that once dotted the land. The city has a mass transit system called People’s Path, with corridors reserved for buses.
But Ahmedabad ceases to swagger in Juhapura, a southwestern neighborhood and the city’s largest Muslim ghetto, with about 400,000 people. I rode around there last week on the back of a friend’s scooter. On the dusty main street was a smattering of white and beige apartment blocks and shopping centers. A multistory building announced itself in neon signs as a community hall; a restaurant boasted of having air-conditioning. The deeper we went into the neighborhood, the narrower the streets, the shabbier the buildings, the thicker the crowds.
The edge of the ghetto came abruptly. Just behind us was a row of tiny, single-story houses with peeling paint. Up ahead, in an empty space the size of a soccer field, children chased one another, jumping over heaps of broken bricks. “This is The Border,” my friend said. Beyond the field was a massive concrete wall topped with barbed wire and oval surveillance cameras. On the other side, we could see a neat row of beige apartment blocks with air conditioners securely attached to the windows — housing for middle-class Hindu families.
Mr. Modi’s engines of growth seem to have stalled on The Border. His acclaimed bus network ends a few miles before Juhapura. The route of a planned metro rail line also stops short of the neighborhood. The same goes for the city’s gas pipelines, which are operated by a company belonging to a billionaire businessman close to Mr. Modi.
“The sun is allowed into Juhapura. The rain is allowed into Juhapura. The wind is allowed into Juhapura,” Asif Pathan, a 41-year-old resident, said with sarcasm. “I get a bill for water tax and pay it, but we don’t get piped water here.” The locals rely on bore wells, which cough up salty, insalubrious water.
Mr. Pathan has been living in Juhapura since 1988, when his father, a retired district judge, bought a house here from a Hindu man. “My father said, ‘When the storm comes, you don’t get more than 10 minutes to run,"’ Mr. Pathan explained, referring to the threat of sectarian violence. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Juhapura was a mixed Hindu-Muslim neighborhood, but with the string of sectarian clashes in Gujarat — in 1985, 1992 and 2002 — more Muslims began to move here, seeking relative safety among people like themselves. Prejudice begets riots, and riots only exacerbate prejudice, and so the population of Juhapura has almost doubled since 2002.
That evening, back in my hotel room, I read another story from the comic book “Bal Narendra.” The boy is at a camp of the National Cadet Corps — the Indian version of the Eagle Scouts — when he notices a pigeon in a tree entangled in the strings of a kite. Holding a razor blade between his teeth, he climbs up, cuts the lines and frees the injured bird. I remembered Juhapura’s putrid water and the carcasses on the brown mountain, and wondered how a Prime Minister Narendra would wield that blade.
Basharat Peer is the author of “Curfewed Night,” a memoir of the conflict in Kashmir.
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Modi critics told to go to Pakistan after polls - DAWN.COM
New Delhi: Narendra Modi used to call Gujarat’s Muslims Mian Musharraf. On Saturday, his electoral candidate from Bihar just went a step further when he warned Mr Modi’s critics they would be sent to Pakistan after the polls.
In remarks quoted by NDTV from Godda in Jharkhand, bordering Bihar, BJP candidate Giriraj Singh told a rally that those who oppose his party’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi will have “no place in India” after the result of the general election are announced.
“Those who want to stop Narendra Modi (from becoming prime minister) are looking towards Pakistan. In the coming days, they will have no place in India. They will only have place in Pakistan,” Mr Singh said while addressing a gathering in Godda district of Jharkhand.
Mr Singh made the remarks in the presence of senior party leader and former president Nitin Gadkari. He is the party’s candidate from Nawada in Bihar.
Opinion polls, not known for their veracity, suggest that the Narendra Modi-led BJP could to win the maximum seats in the national election. Voting, spread across nine phases, ends on May 12. Results will be declared on May 16.
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if modi becomes PM, the cow belt bjp politicians are guaranteed to drag their society back 50 years in six months with their ghundaism and rioting.
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^ cow belt?? UP??
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Don't know much abt Juhapura. Pathetic what is happening at the other side of the Ahmedabad Juhapura "border".
I have heard that if muslims come for tuition in Hindu neighborhood in Ahmedabad such teachers are discouraged from letting "Mohammadens" into their home. Scum of the earth.
Ashamed I have relatives who are Modi fans. Ashholes.
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UP, MP, bihar, rajasthan.. almost guaranteed that minorities will get bullied. no idea why allegedly sensible people like MJ Akbar are being BJPs spokesmen.
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UP, MP, bihar, rajasthan.. almost guaranteed that minorities will get bullied. no idea why allegedly sensible people like MJ Akbar are being BJPs spokesmen.
I think its better for BJP to come to power, will help people understand the party (better) for what it is.
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Don't know much abt Juhapura. Pathetic what is happening at the other side of the Ahmedabad Juhapura "border".
I have heard that if muslims come for tuition in Hindu neighborhood in Ahmedabad such teachers are discouraged from letting "Mohammadens" into their home. Scum of the earth.
Ashamed I have relatives who are Modi fans. Ashholes.
I thought the situation had changed there over the years, seems its more of the same.
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I thought the situation had changed there over the years, seems its more of the same.
This is anecdotal evidence from one source. Said source was gently warned not to teach muslim kids.
The FB threads on elections - I went to a pro modi one. Disgusting g posts abt muslims who were killed in Gujarat riots. Depressingly evil posts.
Don't know what situation is at ground level. Since I don't follow india politics closely. But those posts were revealing.