- Rahul Gandhi’s New CWC Is A Bit Of A Downer
Swati Chaturvedi writes in her column for NDTV that seven months after he was finally named President of the Congress, Rahul Gandhi has taken a huge step to prove he’s in charge – he has reconfigured the top decision-making body or the Congress Working Committee (CWC).
Digvijaya Singh, a surprise omission from the CWC, told me in April that all “70-plus leaders should retire and give Gandhi a free hand.” That has clearly not happened. Two other notable exclusions are Shashi Tharoor and Jairam Ramesh. Gandhi’s CWC has only three women including his mother and UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi, Ambika Soni and Kumari Selja. Deeply incongruous with him writing this week to Prime Minister Narendra Modi saying he should bring in the moth-balled bill that reserves 33 percent of seats in parliament and state legislatures for women.
The Congress needs to sew up alliances with formidable regional leaders such as Mayawati, Mamata Banerjee, Akhilesh Yadav and Sharad Pawar. The new CWC indicates that this will remain the forte of experienced hands like Patel and Azad.
So this is not a misadventure for Rahul Gandhi. It just isn’t a whole lot.
- Faith Vs Blind Faith
Swami Agnivesh and Valson Thampu write in their article for The Indian Express that we have criticized religions for long. This has been done almost entirely to prove one’s own religion right and the other’s religion wrong. Meanwhile, religion, per se, has inched closer to degradation. It has become imperative, therefore, to take stock of the state of religion itself.
No one thinks that hypocrisy, sexual perversions and criminal propensities are peculiar to the clergy only of one religion. It is regrettable that members of all religious communities have been brainwashed into believing that they are being pious in justifying the most unthinkable offences within their folds and protecting the perpetrators of such crimes.
The most crippling lie that religions have smuggled into us is that priests are the mediators and retailers of supernatural blessings. Take life after death, for example. It’s strange how readily we believe that people, who are inferior to most of the laity in their moral and intellectual stature, are experts in what pertains to life after death.
The holy criminals who are now being exposed are stockists and retailers of blind faith. Everyone who peddles blind faith is, from a spiritual standpoint, a criminal.
- Harvard vs Hazaribagh: Jayant Sinha and how educated politicians line up behind the mob
In her column for The Times of India, Sagarika Ghose says that in a government where the educational qualifications of ministers have often been the subject of uncharitable comments, cabinet minister Jayant Sinha, who is also a member of Parliament from Hazaribagh in Jharkhand, is almost the gold standard.
Yet it is the same Jayant Sinha who today finds himself in an ugly controversy, targeted as a bigot and apologist for communal violence. The question arises, is the urban educated politician such a misfit in today’s electoral politics that he or she is forced to line up behind the mob?
But the issue here is not legalese. Instead, it’s a chilling moral tragedy. It’s the story of how the foreign-returned ‘outsider’ airdropped into Hazaribagh hoping to retain a tough Lok Sabha seat, is forced to compromise on public morality in order to win an electoral battle. The legally proven guilty of the Ramgarh convicts may still be in some doubt. But there’s no doubt on the horrible optics of a minister, who’s sworn an oath on the Constitution, being seen in the company of those convicted of a heinous crime.
If Jayant Sinha truly wants to show regret and remain true to his educated credentials, perhaps he should pay a condolence visit to Mariam Khatoon, Ansari’s widow. Is she too not part of his constituency?
- Swami Agnivesh: First they came for Muslims. Now, they’re going after Hindu Arya Samajis
To see Swami Agnivesh sprawled on the ground Tuesday, was nothing short of startling, writes Jyoti Malhotra in an article for The Print. She says that the familiar sardonic smile that makes the Swami a household face is now creased with fear. The saffron turban must have been his strength. Now that it lies somewhere, out of sight, knocked off by a man in a saffron bandana, fear rules.
Saffron Versus Saffron. My Hinduism is greater and better than yours. It’s my time now. Move over, oldie, get out of Jharkhand. That’s what the young man in the photo seems to be telling the distraught old man next to him. The 80-year-old Arya Samaji was assaulted because another group of Hindu men believed that his version of Hinduism was too soft, too forgiving.
First, they came for the Muslim meat traders, because they didn’t like the fact that the Muslims were eating beef in Jharkhand – they weren’t. Now they are coming for the Hindu Arya Samajis, because they don’t like the fact that they are preaching a Hinduism different from theirs.
- 2019 Lok Sabha elections: Will BJP’s game plan to divide Muslim votes work?
Sunita Aron writes in her column for Hindustan Times that if you can’t win the game, change the rules. This is precisely what the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is doing ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections — systematically dividing the crucial Muslim vote as it cannot win their support.
The plan is two-fold: deepen the Shia-Sunni wedge and create a gender divide in the community by reiterating Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s commitment to delivering justice to Muslim women by banning instant triple talaq.
Thus, when Modi, in his recent rallies in Muslim-dominated Azamgarh and Hindutva-smitten Varanasi mocked the Congress, describing it as a party of Muslim men, he was sending a clear message to the community.
But can the social issue of triple talaq actually bring the BJP a windfall of support at a time when party president Amit Shah is talking about temple construction in Ayodhya before the polls and when issues like mob lynching, love jihad (a controversial term coined by fringe outfits to describe cases of what they believe are forced marriages between Muslim men and Hindu women) and ban on slaughterhouses are haunting them?