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It was a tragedy waiting to happen. The violence and killings in Uttar Pradesh’s Lakhimpur Kheri did not occur by serendipity. Like in west UP, the sugarcane growers elsewhere sat in protest over the non-payment of long pending dues for their produce from the private mills as well as the state cooperatives. The irony was […]
Arvind Kumar Sharma, the former Gujarat bureaucrat who was Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “eyes and ears” in Gandhinagar, missed the bus in Uttar Pradesh. Sharma, who joined the UP legislative council in January 2021 after resigning from the civil services, was not inducted as a minister in possibly the last cabinet expansion that was carried […]
Winning an election and re-constituting a ministry are interlinked as the latest cabinet recast in Gujarat, under chief minister Bhupendra Patel, demonstrated. In experimenting with a “no-repeat” norm, veterans such as Nitin Patel, Pradipsinh Jadeja, Bhupendrasinh Chudasma, Kaushik Patel and Saurabh Patel, some of who have been part of every government since Keshubhai Patel’s time […]
Sharad Pawar, the Nationalist Congress Party president, hammered home unadorned truths to the Congress, once his abode, in his latest interview to a Marathi news channel. Pawar, who evokes homegrown imagery to make a political point, compared the Congress to Uttar Pradesh’s zamindars of yore, feudal lords who owned boundless expanses of land, most of which they […]
Politics in Bihar is as multi-layered and intricate as the number of players, big and small, that make and mar fortunes in the legislature and Parliament. The recent kerfuffle over conducting a caste census revealed the fault lines that run deep across Bihar’s polity and the contradictions both within the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) […]
Among the undercurrents surfacing in Uttar Pradesh politics just months before the 2022 assembly elections is one that could potentially transform political and social equations in the western region and adjoining Braj and Rohilkhand. Between them, this swath of land spans the Jat belt, the “holy land” of Mathura-Brindavan-Goverdhan, and Moradabad, Bareilly and Saharanpur. The […]
Political legacies are problematic to inherit, sustain and fulfil. The Congress has partially frittered away the redoubtable endowment bestowed on the Grand Old Party (GOP) by its founding fathers and mothers. The Socialists have disintegrated into so many splinters that it’s hard to assess which of the left-over entities remembers the original principles of the […]
