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Friends of BJP: Who Are We
Friends of BJP is a subset of the educated civil society, which is BJP leaning and willing to be vocal about it. It is an associate organisation of the BJP and aspires to be a national movement, which will steer the formation of an effective and efficient Government at the centre.
Our identity, objectives, position and responses are governed by a well defined intellectual and philosophical framework. We are committed to the principals mentioned below:
- We are foremost and above all for the nation. Our fundamental objective is the security, prosperity and development of India and all Indians.
- We stand for equality and equal opportunity to all Indians irrespective or class, creed, caste, religion, ethnicity or economic status.
- We stand for civil liberties and respect the rights of the individual. Though the constitution grants these rights, the state often denies these to citizens, especially to those who are poor.
- We are committed to economic development. We believe that the state should act less as a participant and more as a facilitator and impartial regulator of economic activity.
- We believe that development of infrastructure, both physical and social, is of paramount importance in the economic development of the nation and that not enough has been done in this sector.
- We stand for a strong and secure India. We believe that the state should be more proactive in its preparation and robust in its response when it comes to the safety and security of its citizens.
- We believe that India must increase educational opportunities at all levels. India must eradicate illiteracy within five years.
- We believe that mechanism to support access to adequate, modern and effective healthcare to the disadvantaged people of India should be provided.
- We stand for probity and transparency in public life. The scourge of corruption has to be tackled at all levels in our governance structure. The state as well as its citizen needs to be eternally vigilant against illegal acts of private gain at the cost of the larger good.
- India has a diverse, rich, fascinating and valuable cultural heritage. This heritage should be adequately preserved and disseminated within and outside the country. Our culture should be used as a mechanism for promoting social harmony and building bridges with divisive elements in society.
- We believe in harmonious and cooperative relations between countries based on mutual respect and common good. Our national self interest must be clearly defined and upheld in all interaction with other nations.
Friends of BJP to be revived
Great News! In his Presidential Address at the National Council meeting in Indore on Feb 18, BJP President Nitin Gadkari has said that Friends of BJP will be revived: “We are also planning to revive Friends of BJP, an associate organisation of the non-member Well Wishers of the party. All patriotic citizens, especially all young professionals who look forward to BJP as an instrument of making India a resurgent republic are welcome to join this forum.”
We will be back with more details soon.
Maharashtra Elections
We all are privy to the transition that the BJP is going through. This must have surely raised Congress’s hopes of electoral success in the upcoming assembly elections. The assembly elections in Maharashtra are crucial in this regard where the Democratic Front government has a dismal performance to defend. It may be right opportunity for an organized opposition to rest power from the ruling coalition, which is facing anti incumbency of two terms and is struggling with grassroots dissonance. It is also likely that the anti incumbency voters have realized who the actual beneficiaries are in case they vote for MNS and other smaller outfits. This should likely benefit the Saffron alliance.
Let us know what you think should be the issues this election and your expectations from a BJP-Shiv Sena government, if voted to power.
Haryana Elections
It is no surprise that the Hooda Government, following Congress’s super showing in the Lok Sabha elections, dissolved the legislature and called for an early election. The Congress is obviously confident of its good showing yet again in the assembly elections. While it is a fact that the Congress has traditionally felt the heat against strong alliance in Haryana, it faces no such formidable opposition this time. The BJP has walked out of alliance with INLD over seat sharing disagreement. Haryana elections are dominated by caste politics and the BJP’s appeal in the past has been restricted to urban and upper caste. This is perhaps an opportunity for the BJP to increase its support base amongst other sections of the society and evolve as a dominant player in times to come. This is something that the Friends of BJP would be delighted with. There is always a prospect of post poll alliance with the INLD. Importantly the political equation in the state will also depend on how Bhajan Lal’s Haryana Janhit Congress and the BSP perform.
Let us know the key issues BJP should raise in Haryana and what is the role that you would like it to play in State politics.
Sudheendra Kulkarni
by Vijay Vikram
I can’t say that I ever fully understood Mr Kulkarni. I have always found his columns and other public utterances abstruse and rather dense, thereby finding it difficult to get a handle on his political philosophy. A rare exception to this general rule was Kulkarni’s open letter to L.K. Advani that argued for a recasting of RSS-BJP relations in the aftermath of the original Jinnah controversy. Essentially, Mr Kulkarni wanted to free up the party from micromanagement by Sangh interlopers - an admirable sentiment. His abstruseness apart, Mr Kulkarni emerges as a thinking man who represented a sober nationalism that attracted many to the party in the first place.
Kulkarni is not by any stretch a political figure of comparable national prominence to Jaswant Singh. His departure though is at least as disturbing because it represents the growing flight of intellectual capital away from the party. The cerebral right-wing talent the BJP managed to attract in the NDA years that made it the natural party of governance is being gradually weeded out. Arun Shourie, a modern day polymath is a virtual pariah, Yashwant Sinha has quit all party posts and the Jaswant Singh brouhaha is still playing out. It does seem that the party is turning to a certain atavism after the defeat. Swapan Dasgupta has argued that the once broad church of the Bharatiya Janata Party - accommodating strident Hindu assertion with centre-right nationalism - is turning into a sect with the former emerging as the overriding paradigm. Perhaps then, it is time for the urban Indian with his newfound cosmopolitanism to resurrect that ill-fated nexus of Parsi free thinkers, conventional nationalism and free enterprise.
Effective Government Spending
by Sudipto Das
I might be sounding like a broken record when I always criticize the ‘popular’ schemes like “National Rural Employment Guarantee” or on-the-house loan waiving. Even a layman in economics understands that to keep the wheel of economy of a country rolling it’s very essential to keep the consumers alive. It’s often argued that, thanks to these popular schemes, India hasn’t seen the worst of the recession in the past one year. Well, I don’t accept that. That’s too short term a perspective. In reality the government has already made a deep hole in its pocket. We’ll see serious long term impacts if the government spending is not controlled.
The ongoing drama with the swine flu has shown how much vulnerable our government is when it comes to disaster management. Thank God, that the flu is still restricted to the affluent class mainly in tier one cities. Just imagine what would have happened if the flu had attacked the hinter lands of our country? Even in the few cities, the government is not capable of providing with the basic infrastructure like the testing equipment. Even the masks required as a precautionary measure are not available in the market. Government is in dire need of cash for buying the testing equipments. I know that the panic with swine flu is a little exaggerated, but still the point remains that the government is not able to spend money in the way it should have in order to tackle the situation.
India’s total sending on health is just around 5% of the GDP, out of which only one fifth is government spending. This is a ridiculous amount of money. It’s seems like a joke that Mahatma Gandhi had said, “Health is Wealth”. The demographic dividend, that every one is talking about now-a-days, would be a myth if we don’t have healthy children growing up to strong adults. Government has a great role to play.
Let’s see some statistics (Source: http://www.nationmaster.com/country/in-india/hea-health)
Access to sanitation 72% 77th
Drug access 0% 152nd
Hospital beds 0.9 59th
per 1,000 people
Physicians 0.6 19th
per 1,000 people
These are just a few statistics. There are many such terrible things that we need to improve and that require serious government expenditure. I’m very sure that anyone, irrespective of his or her level of intelligence and financial background, would value the settting up of an efficient health center in his or her village than anything else. I just wonder what the government has been doing in all these aspects.
We are all Hindus now: Newsweek column
From Newsweek:
America is not a Christian nation. We are, it is true, a nation founded by Christians, and according to a 2008 survey, 76 percent of us continue to identify as Christian (still, that’s the lowest percentage in American history). Of course, we are not a Hindu—or Muslim, or Jewish, or Wiccan—nation, either. A million-plus Hindus live in the United States, a fraction of the billion who live on Earth. But recent poll data show that conceptually, at least, we are slowly becoming more like Hindus and less like traditional Christians in the ways we think about God, our selves, each other, and eternity.
…here is another way in which Americans are becoming more Hindu: 24 percent of Americans say they believe in reincarnation, according to a 2008 Harris poll. So agnostic are we about the ultimate fates of our bodies that we’re burning them—like Hindus—after death. More than a third of Americans now choose cremation, according to the Cremation Association of North America, up from 6 percent in 1975. “I do think the more spiritual role of religion tends to deemphasize some of the more starkly literal interpretations of the Resurrection,” agrees Diana Eck, professor of comparative religion at Harvard.
Of Jinnah, Jaswant and Hanuman…
by Vijay Vikram
It is no secret that the BJP high-command has avoided any attempt at genuine reflection on the reasons for defeat in the 2009 General Elections. In fact, the emerging consensus within India’s miniscule right-wing intelligentsia is that the BJP never quite recovered from the defeat in 2004 and continued on with the 2009 campaign on autopilot. Admittedly, the media strategy in 2009 was excellent: The clever subversion of the Congress’ triumphalist ‘Jai Ho’ with the sober ‘Bhay Ho’ jingle and the inclusion of young, IT-savvy talent for LK Advani’s personal image boosting initiative are cases in point. All this however, could not hide the rot at the base of the party. This defeat was a political defeat. It was not about image management. It was not about re-packaging Hindutva in more modern prose. The electorate rejected India’s version of a conservative party wholeheartedly.
Rajnath Singh and his ilk realise this. They realise that if the party sat down and did some actual chintan at the Chintan Baithak, their variety of conservatism would be declared an electoral liability in newly aspirational India. The resulting restructuring of the BJP would inevitably cut short the political careers of certain sections of the party. Like any political animal, this group’s primary impulse is to survive in the face of looming obscurity. It is in this context that the shock expulsion of Jaswant Singh must be viewed.
While Jaswant Singh’s sacking may not be a case of calculated news management as Vinod Mehta of Outlook suggested on a current affairs programme, it definitely hints at a totalitarian impulse aimed at homogenising the party and smothering legitimate intellectual expression.
As it happens, the period of history that this political controversy has thrown up is equally fascinating. Jaswant Singh has propounded a contrarian reading of Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s political philosophy. He is by no means the first to interpret Jinnah as a calm, secular politician. But, Mr Singh’s public role ensures that the book and the arguments contained therein receive an inordinate amount of media attention as compared to any other piece of scholarly work. The crux of his thesis, as I am given to understand is that history has been unfair to Jinnah. In a sense, Jinnah’s complicity in the Partition of India has been exaggerated and that of Nehru’s Congress has been underplayed - perhaps in order to make for a more comfortable nationalism for the Indian masses to subscribe to.
The pork-eating, cigar-smoking Jinnah clearly does not make for a very good poster boy for the Two Nation Theory and Pakistani nationalism. Jaswant Singh’s argument is that Jinnah’s mutation from secular nationalist to communal scaremonger was caused by his desire to carve out a space in Indian politics that he could call his own in the face of increasing Nehruvian hegemony. Jinnah then, crafted a constituency that evolved into Pakistan. He reserved his antipathy for Nehru and the Congress, not the Hindus. The idea of Pakistan, which germinated in the brain of Cambridge student Choudhary Rahmat Ali in 1932 become a potent political weapon in the hands of Jinnah.
Perhaps it was a tad indiscreet for a practicing politician of national prominence to indulge in revisionist accounts of the founder of Pakistan whilst he remained a serving member of a political party. Winston Churchill for example, waited till his retirement from active public life before publishing his account of the Second World War. This abrupt expulsion however, smacks of an increasingly insecure leadership in the BJP that is keen to preserve the status quo and prolong its spell in power. The party is likely to lurch from one controversy to the other till the time a new generation of charismatic leadership is allowed to emerge. Jaswant Singh in the meantime has all the time in the world to write.
What is the Nation we want to be? (Part 2)
by Amit Malviya
Possible Solution
Dr Subramanian Swamy on 19Jul09 speaking in Darmouth, Mass in US, advocated the concept of Brihad Virat Hindutava and argued its relevance to bring about a renaissance in the current secular India’s value system and thus create a unified patriotic and spiritual society. At present, he said, the Indian nation is slowly but surely sliding into a crass one-dimensional society of material pursuits which can lead to the nation’s Balkanisation.
Dr. Swamy was delivering the Special Public Lecture as guest of honour, to the delegates of the 18th International Congress on Vedanta held for three days at the campus of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. Dr. Swamy said that Hindu civilization has lasted so long, in fact the longest, is because it was a society that had found a blend and harmonization of material pursuits with spiritual values.
He further elaborated : “In the 19th century, Swami Vivekananda had propagated the concept of Brihad{Greater} Hindutva, while Sri Aurobindo and Veer Savarkar who had spoken from different perspectives, advocated a Virat[virile] Hindutva. All these revelations were made to the people in pre-political de-colonised India. But unfortunately after becoming free, the academia and political power went into the hands of Marxists and Macaulayists who were determined to reduce the Hinduness of Indians to a minimum of acceptability labeling it as obscurantist and politically chauvinist, or communal and fundamentalist, and make out the concept as a danger to secularism. He said that the history of Hinduism disproves these charges, but the slander continues. Now to end the current moral degeneration in a democratic dispensation in India, he would advocate propagating a synthesis of Vedanta, Brihad and Virat concepts.
Dr. Swamy declared that time has come to confront the Marxist and Macaulayists and challenge them to a debate a new synthesis of Brihad Virat Hindutva if they dare to debate.
Challenges
This is essentially a great concept but the challenge lies in implementing it without being perceived as exclusive and pro Hindu. The pseudo secular-communal divide in the country is so mis-propagated and wide that being pro nationalist and cultural is invariably seen as pro Hindu and hence not secular. This debate has gone on for far too long and is ingrained in people’s psyche now. The challenge is to overcome this and instill cultural pride and feeling of patriotism in the people of India and build an inclusive spiritual society. The concept also needs to be articulated in simpler terms so that the common man can understand and relate it to his daily life. Unlike most ideologies it should be contemporary and progressive. This is easier said than done !
It would be great to hear what you think.