झारखंड में आखिर किसका क्रेज है? यह तो 23 नवंबर को ही साफ होगा, लेकिन वोटिंग में जबर्दस्त क्रेज दिखा. पहले चरण में 43 सीटों पर मतदान 2019 में हुए विधानसभा चुनाव के पार चला गया.

Welcoming the Supreme Court’s direction on bulldozer ‘justice’, the SP chief says from now onwards, the bulldozer will remain parked in garage forever

Mr. Patra claimed that the Congress wanted to give 4% reservation to the Muslim organisations and contractors in public tenders

Deputy Chief Minister points to BRS call to Maharashtra voters not to vote for Congress

“During the Lok Sabha election, it was said at the party headquarters and in press bytes that the AIADMK will not have alliance with the BJP in the [2026] Assembly election,” he said

Mayoral elections today; ruling party says L-G should have considered either incumbent Mayor or most senior councillor for role to ensure fairness; AAP in habit of casting aspersions, says BJP

The State told the court that a Division Bench had directed the authorities to ensure that no person or party was permitted to install statues in the State without getting proper permission

1. Evening brief: BJP asks Delhi govt to close schools amid rising AQI; IMA condemns attack on doctor in Chennai; and more  Hindustan Times
2. Smog Blanket Over North India, Air Quality Drops To "Severe" Level  NDTV
3. BJP targets govt on pollution, AAP says don’t play politics  The Times of India
4. Delhi overtakes Lahore to become world's most polluted city  The Economic Times
5. City In Greyscale: Season’s First Fog, ‘Severe’ Air Day  The Times of India

The Maharashtra Bharatiya Janata Party on Wednesday posted a video on X showing checking of Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis' bags, and said merely holding the Constitution for 'show' is not enough and one must also follow the constitutional system.

Online Games पर पाबंदी लगाने के लिए 16 नवंबर को पूर्व राज्यपाल, केंद्रीय मंत्री और पूर्व जस्टिस देंगे जंतर मंतर पर धरना. बीजेपी से जुड़े नेताओं ने कहा कि सरकार से मांग करेंगे कि आनलाइन गेम्स को बंद कराने के लिए जल्द से जल्द बिल लाए.

Police officers throw stones towards the demonstrators during a protest against a government demolition drive, in Haldwani in the northern state of Uttarakhand, India, February 8, 2024. — Reuters Pleas were filed after demolitions in BJP-ruled states. Rights groups,...

The BJP on Tuesday rejected the assertion that actor-turned-politician Mithun Chakraborty's purse was stolen during a rally in Jharkhand's Dhanbad, claiming that it was misplaced and later found.

BJP MP from South Delhi Ramvir Singh Bidhuri on Tuesday inaugurated a newly constructed stretch of a 12-lane national highway connecting Mithapur Chowk to the Mumbai-Baroda highway in the Badarpur area.

In a political twist almost no one saw coming, on the morning of November 23, 2019, Devendra Fadnavis took oath as the Maharashtra Chief Minister for a second term.

The BJP on Tuesday rejected the assertion that actor-turned-politician Mithun Chakraborty's purse was stolen during a rally in Jharkhand's Dhanbad, claiming that it was misplaced and later found.

A day after the political row over a routine check of Shiv Sena (BT) chief Uddhav Thackeray's luggage, the BJP today posted a video of airport security frisking Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis' bags and took a dig at Mr Thackeray

A day after the political row over a routine check of Shiv Sena (BT) chief Uddhav Thackeray's luggage, the BJP today posted a video of airport security frisking Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis' bags and took a dig at Mr Thackeray

India's benchmark indexes opened at fresh all-time highs on Monday, aided by strong domestic macroeconomic data and elevated bets of a US rate cut in March

The Congress and BJP fight against each other across the country, but have a "strange love story" in Telangana, former state minister and Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) leader KT Rama Rao told NDTV today

BJP MP from South Delhi Ramvir Singh Bidhuri on Tuesday inaugurated a newly constructed stretch of a 12-lane national highway connecting Mithapur Chowk to the Mumbai-Baroda highway in the Badarpur area.

This is the 18th installment of The Rationalist, my column for the Times of India.

The man who gave us our national anthem, Rabindranath Tagore, once wrote that nationalism was “a great menace.” He went on to say, “It is the particular thing which for years has been at the bottom of India’s troubles.”

Not just India’s, but the world’s: In his book The Open Society and its Enemies, published in 1945 as Adolf Hitler was defeated, Karl Popper ripped into nationalism, with all its “appeals to our tribal instincts, to passion and to prejudice, and to our nostalgic desire to be relieved from the strain of individual responsibility which it attempts to replace by a collective or group responsibility.”

Nationalism is resurgent today, stomping across the globe hand-in-hand with populism. In India, too, it is tearing us apart. But must nationalism always be a bad thing? A provocative new book by the Israeli thinker Yael Tamir argues otherwise.

In her book Why Nationalism, Tamir makes the following arguments. One, nation-states are here to stay. Two, the state needs the nation to be viable. Three, people need nationalism for the sense of community and belonging it gives them. Four, therefore, we need to build a better nationalism, which brings people together instead of driving them apart.

The first point needs no elaboration. We are a globalised world, but we are also trapped by geography and circumstance. “Only 3.3 percent of the world’s population,” Tamir points out, “lives outside their country of birth.” Nutopia, the borderless state dreamed up by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, is not happening anytime soon.

If the only thing that citizens of a state have in common is geographical circumstance, it is not enough. If the state is a necessary construct, a nation is its necessary justification. “Political institutions crave to form long-term political bonding,” writes Tamir, “and for that matter they must create a community that is neither momentary nor meaningless.” Nationalism, she says, “endows the state with intimate feelings linking the past, the present, and the future.”

More pertinently, Tamir argues, people need nationalism. I am a humanist with a belief in individual rights, but Tamir says that this is not enough. “The term ‘human’ is a far too thin mode of delineation,” she writes. “Individuals need to rely on ‘thick identities’ to make their lives meaningful.” This involves a shared past, a common culture and distinctive values.

Tamir also points out that there is a “strong correlation between social class and political preferences.” The privileged elites can afford to be globalists, but those less well off are inevitably drawn to other narratives that enrich their lives. “Rather than seeing nationalism as the last refuge of the scoundrel,” writes Tamir, “we should start thinking of nationalism as the last hope of the needy.”

Tamir’s book bases its arguments on the West, but the argument holds in India as well. In a country with so much poverty, is it any wonder that nationalism is on the rise? The cosmopolitan, globe-trotting elites don’t have daily realities to escape, but how are those less fortunate to find meaning in their lives?

I have one question, though. Why is our nationalism so exclusionary when our nation is so inclusive?

In the nationalism that our ruling party promotes, there are some communities who belong here, and others who don’t. (And even among those who ‘belong’, they exploit divisions.) In their us-vs-them vision of the world, some religions are foreign, some values are foreign, even some culinary traditions are foreign – and therefore frowned upon. But the India I know and love is just the opposite of that.

We embrace influences from all over. Our language, our food, our clothes, our music, our cinema have absorbed so many diverse influences that to pretend they come from a single legit source is absurd. (Even the elegant churidar-kurtas our prime minister wears have an Islamic origin.) As an example, take the recent film Gully Boy: its style of music, the clothes its protagonists wear, even the attitudes in the film would have seemed alien to us a few decades ago. And yet, could there be a truer portrait of young India?

This inclusiveness, this joyous khichdi that we are, is what makes our nation a model for the rest of the world. No nation embraces all other nations as ours does. My India celebrates differences, and I do as well. I wear my kurta with jeans, I listen to ghazals, I eat dhansak and kababs, and I dream in the Indian language called English. This is my nationalism.

Those who try to divide us, therefore, are the true anti-nationals. We must reclaim nationalism from them.

The India Uncut Blog © 2010 Amit Varma. All rights reserved.
Follow me on Twitter.

This is the 20th installment of The Rationalist, my column for the Times of India.

Amit Shah’s induction into the union cabinet is such an interesting moment. Even partisans who oppose the BJP, as I do, would admit that Shah is a political genius. Under his leadership, the BJP has become an electoral behemoth in the most complicated political landscape in the world. The big question that now arises is this: can Shah do for India what he did for the BJP?

This raises a perplexing question: in the last five years, as the BJP has flourished, India has languished. And yet, the leadership of both the party and the nation are more or less the same. Then why hasn’t the ability to manage the party translated to governing the country?

I would argue that there are two reasons for this. One, the skills required in those two tasks are different. Two, so are the incentives in play.

Let’s look at the skills first. Managing a party like the BJP is, in some ways, like managing a large multinational company. Shah is a master at top-down planning and micro-management. How he went about winning the 2014 elections, described in detail in Prashant Jha’s book How the BJP Wins, should be a Harvard Business School case study. The book describes how he fixed the BJP’s ground game in Uttar Pradesh, picking teams for 147,000 booths in Uttar Pradesh, monitoring them, and keeping them accountable.

Shah looked at the market segmentation in UP, and hit upon his now famous “60% formula”. He realised he could not deliver the votes of Muslims, Yadavs and Jatavs, who were 40% of the population. So he focussed on wooing the other 60%, including non-Yadav OBCs and non-Jatav Dalits. He carried out versions of these caste reconfigurations across states, and according to Jha, covered “over 5 lakh kilometres” between 2014 and 2017, consolidating market share in every state in this country. He nurtured “a pool of a thousand new OBC and Dalit leaders”, going well beyond the posturing of other parties.

That so many Dalits and OBCs voted for the BJP in 2019 is astonishing. Shah went past Mandal politics, managing to subsume previously antagonistic castes and sub-castes into a broad Hindutva identity. And as the BJP increased its depth, it expanded its breadth as well. What it has done in West Bengal, wiping out the Left and weakening Mamata Banerjee, is jaw-dropping. With hindsight, it may one day seem inevitable, but only a madman could have conceived it, and only a genius could have executed it.

Good man to be Home Minister then, eh? Not quite. A country is not like a large company or even a political party. It is much too complex to be managed from the top down, and a control freak is bound to flounder. The approach needed is very different.

Some tasks of governance, it is true, are tailor-made for efficient managers. Building infrastructure, taking care of roads and power, building toilets (even without an underlying drainage system) and PR campaigns can all be executed by good managers. But the deeper tasks of making an economy flourish require a different approach. They need a light touch, not a heavy hand.

The 20th century is full of cautionary tales that show that economies cannot be centrally planned from the top down. Examples of that ‘fatal conceit’, to use my hero Friedrich Hayek’s term, include the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and even the lady Modi most reminds me of, Indira Gandhi.

The task of the state, when it comes to the economy, is to administer a strong rule of law, and to make sure it is applied equally. No special favours to cronies or special interest groups. Just unleash the natural creativity of the people, and don’t try to micro-manage.

Sadly, the BJP’s impulse, like that of most governments of the past, is a statist one. India should have a small state that does a few things well. Instead, we have a large state that does many things badly, and acts as a parasite on its people.

As it happens, the few things that we should do well are all right up Shah’s managerial alley. For example, the rule of law is effectively absent in India today, especially for the poor. As Home Minister, Shah could fix this if he applied the same zeal to governing India as he did to growing the BJP. But will he?

And here we come to the question of incentives. What drives Amit Shah: maximising power, or serving the nation? What is good for the country will often coincide with what is good for the party – but not always. When they diverge, which path will Shah choose? So much rests on that.

The India Uncut Blog © 2010 Amit Varma. All rights reserved.
Follow me on Twitter.

While the BJP-led NDA won resoundingly in the 2019 Lok Sabha election, it has lost power in five major State assemblies since December 2018.

In FY21, national parties and regional parties received ₹427 crore and ₹264 crore worth of funds, respectively, from unknown sources

National parties’ unknown income rose from 66% to 71% in the three years before and after the scheme’s introduction

Elections in Karnataka have increasingly become bipolar, with 77% of the seats recording bipolar contests in 2018

The rape and murder of a junior doctor of state-run R.G. Kar Medical College & Hospital here in August, is dominating BJP's line of campaiging for the forthcoming bypolls for six Assembly constituencies in West Bengal.

Accusing Speaker of partisanship, BJP MLAs stage mock Assembly session after some of them were being marshaled out of J&K House

After holding a parallel assembly session, the BJP on Friday warned to form a parallel government in J&K to counter NC's dictatorial attitude.

The J&K Legislative Assembly's recent resolution seeking the restoration of special status has ignited a fierce debate between the BJP and Congress.

BJP national spokesperson Rohan Gupta on Monday said that the Hemant Soren-led JMM government in Jharkhand is on its way out and people are determined to elect BJP-led NDA government, for bringing holistic development to the state.

BJP top guns including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, Union Minister Nitin Gadkari, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, Haryana Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini among others will on Tuesday criss-cross Maharashtra to hold rallies for party nominees and MahaYuti candidates for the Assembly elections slated for November 20.

Telangana CM Revanth Reddy urges Congress to revise its electoral strategy, focusing on emotional connections rather than strict ideologies to win upcoming polls.

Delhi BJP calls for an inquiry into alleged collusion between AAP and power discoms, claiming undue financial benefits at citizens' expense.

Both the Congress and the CPI(M) are helping each other, says the BJP leader

As part of its preparations, the party is carefully assessing public sentiment while awaiting the Maha Vikas Aghadi to announce its seat-sharing formula before launching a full-scale campaign

Referring to 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, External Affairs Minister says, “Mumbai, the financial capital of India, has become a symbol of counter-terrorism globally”

Nearly 8,000 candidates, including those from major political parties in the ruling Mahyuti as well as the opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA), filed nominations for the 288 assembly seats in Maharashtra at the end of the process

Maharashtra Deputy CM admits that there will be friendly fights in some seats, though BJP is trying to help rebel withdraw their names; BJP, Sena wll support Amit Thackeray of the MNS for the Mahim seat

BJP has fielded Kalidas Kolambkar from the Wadala seat in Mumbai

It has some of the poshest houses in the city, mainly in Bandra West and Khar, as well as teeming slum colonies apart from middle class localities of Santacruz

Devendra Fadnavis is contesting from the Nagpur South-West Assembly constituency in the upcoming Maharashtra election

‘BJP backs Shiv Sena in Mahim’, says Mr. Shelar, withdrawing support to Amit Thackeray

Jairam Ramesh charged four questions for Prime Minister Narendra Modi who is holding rallies in Nanded and Akola on November 9, 2024