Bachi Singh Rawat, BJP MP, Uttarakhand

Both his pair of school clothes – and he got only two pairs every year – would invariably have betel leaf-shaped patches on them. Trudging up and down hill tracts would see them get torn many times and so his mother would stitch those patches. “Now I make sure that all my clothes last at least 10 years!” says Bachi Singh Rawat. He adds, “On passing school, my father gifted me his wrist watch, which till date is my best prize and I still have it.”

Despite having donned the garb of the minister of state for defence, he has not made an increment of even a square yard in his father’s sparse farmland. But he is always aware of what grows on his two pieces of land in Thapla and Ranikhet. For he is in the farm most often to meet people when he visits home. He can be seen working on the land and even asks some visitors to put in a hand. He can barely stay in Delhi for than a month at a stretch. Then, he runs off to his native village for a clean hill breeze. After graduation, he studied law, during which he came under the strong influence of Jan Sangh, and later, via Janata Party, he came into BJP and became an MP in 1996. “My friends made in all these years fund my poll campaigns, which is why my expenses are so low. I don’t contest elections, my party comrades do.”

His monthly savings are Rs 40,000, but let that not startle you. “Our needs for my three-member family is just about Rs 20,000 a month, so the rest of my MP’s salary is saved, and I spend it on serving tea and snacks and paying for the travel expenses of the poorer people visiting him from his constituency.” As for the ADF, most of that is spent in upgrading schools in his locality.

Once he had been offered a big position and a fat purse to induce him to join Congress. “I told the person that my principles do not find echo in Congress party!”....Continue

This one's on the House

Though the rise of income has guaranteed food and clothing to the average Indians, a major portion of them still remain deprived of the third basic requirement – shelter. India has been unable to provide better, safe housing to its over 350 million middle-class population. And the demand is only increasing with another hundred million coming out of poverty, thanks to the high growth of corporate sector and its better economic performance. However, the exponential increase in demand for housing but slow pace of supply is widening the demand-supply gap rapidly, which clearly calls for immediate attention and intervention from the concerned authority.

A close analysis reveals a few basic maladies – bad management and inadequate regulations. To start with, average Indians are least motivated for home-credit, and somewhere it reflects the government’s failure to encourage people to opt for credit. Innumerable economic researches reveal that housing is one of the investment options which directly contribute to the economy in any situation. Well, our government and bureaucrats perhaps forgot that. The proportion of housing loan as a percentage of India's GDP went up from 3.4 per cent in 2001 to 7.25 per cent in 2006, yet it remains abysmally low when compared with other countries. The same in US is 54 per cent, 57 per cent in UK, 40 per cent in the European Union, and 37 per cent in Malaysia, according to the National Housing Bank, a wholly owned subsidiary of RBI. Along with this, limitations in infrastructural development and geographical differences are other primary hassles.....Continue

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Setting the pace

The elephant moves slowly but firmly. Its motionless figure is often undistinguishable from the brown background of forests, especially in the summers, till one reaches well within its striking distance. Bahujan Samaj Party seems to have acquired some such qualities of its election symbol. The party doubled its vote share in all the four state Assembly elections in the Hindi heartland – Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Delhi – touted as the semifinal before the General Elections due within next six months.

So will it repeat the feat in the finals as well – in the general elections that are due in six months time? It pretty well might. For consider: it took the BSP – founded in 1984 – four Assembly polls (with a single-digit tally each time), three Parliamentary elections and a pre-poll tie up with the Samajwadi Party in 1993 to make its presence felt in Uttar Pradesh. The party had brief stints at power there with the Bharatiya Janata Party’s support in 1995, 1997 and 2002, before it secured a complete majority in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly election last year. Those who smirk at the BSP’s tally this time – two seats each in Delhi and Chhattisgarh, six in Rajasthan and seven in Madhya Pradesh – need to wake up to some facts that are not so clearly written on the political wall. Its vote share in Delhi rose to 12; in Madhya Pradesh to 11; in Rajasthan to eight; and in Chhattisgarh to six.

Significantly, all these states have traditionally been two-party states, with almost no space for a third party. The Bahujan Samaj Party still bagged well over 10,000 votes in nearly half of the constituencies it contested in Delhi, and a quarter of those it did in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. “In Delhi, it demolished the notion that the BSP would damage only the Congress,” conceded a senior BJP leader, who naturally did not wish to be named. And he added that but for the BSP, the Congress would almost certainly have registered an even more emphatic win in Rajasthan than it eventually did.....Continue

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Dmitry’s tango in us backyard

Russian President’s visit to South America may well have been pegged as intended to unfasten business prospects for Russian business interests, but in reality it was to demonstrate that Moscow could manoeuvre in the US backyard in the midst of apprehension over Washington's interest in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. Dmitry Medvedev wrapped up a week-long tour of Latin America last week with a meeting with Fidel Castro premeditated to reinstate a coalition and reinforce his country's position in the region.

Earlier last week, Medvedev and Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez together gave the preliminary shot for a combined marine exercise in the Caribbean. The two nations also signed a nuclear collaboration accord. Also, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is visiting Ecuador to talk about nuclear collaboration with Quito.

Analysts say Russia wishes to reinforce ties with socialist regimes in Latin America in retort to US procedure to build a missile shield in Eastern Europe. Medvedev is the first Russian President to visit Cuba since 2000. Russian representatives refute that Medvedev's trip is intended to aggravate the US, but the voyage incorporated get-together with Washington's staunchest adversaries in the region.....Continue

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Inclusive growth needs to be given one more fillip to help arrest ultra movements

While the politicians are expected to do no better, what is, indeed, disturbing is that even our intellectuals, media experts and/or political analysts sometimes begin to speak their language. That’s how this dominant, hegemonic political discourse becomes a form of social and intellectual discourse, too. Sometimes, I’m compelled to believe that Bollywood offers a much better, sharper and more critical understanding of our social and political issues than our politicians, media experts and analysts put together.


Neeraj Pandey’s recent movie, “A Wednesday”, scores over several other movies on the familiar theme of ‘terrorist violence’ for two different reasons. One, because it helps us understand that one should never underestimate either the patience or the anger of a common man. If pushed too far, he may choose to find his own weird solutions to the growing menace of terrorism. Two, because it succeeds in putting human face on terror, almost inviting us to sympathise with the ‘characters’ we have only learnt to hate over the years. Neeraj Pandey doesn’t leave us in any doubt that the real question is not whether the terrorist is a Hindu or a Muslim, because he only practices the ‘religion of hatred and terror,’ something that all religions unequivocally denounce. The real question is that a terrorist, too, was a human being much before he became a terrorist. In other words, it’s the denial of social justice coupled with economic deprivation that often compels a human being, regardless of his religion, to pick up the gun. In a way, when an individual takes to terrorism, he is making a loud statement. He wants to scream and tell the society: ‘You have pushed me into the oblivion, and here I return, in my new found anonymity to throw your orderly, patterned lives into absolute ruin and anarchy.’ Terrorism is the last outpost of a civil society, triggered off by the failure of dialogue between the citizen and the state, especially when the state fails to deliver. It’s an utterly helpless scream of those citizens who wish to be heard and seen, even ready to enter a system that delivers or assures them a decent place in the mainstream. Be it Kashmir or Nagaland, Assam or Punjab, ‘terrorism’ has reared its ugly head in all those places where the process of development has given common people a miss, or wherever it has substantively failed to transform the lives of the people at the grassroots. Rather than indulge in useless rhetoric, let us give development and inclusive growth one last chance. Also let us give our people, no, not just vague promises (for they have had surfeit of these already), but a genuine reason to believe that justice is possible for all, regardless of their status, position, caste or religion. Who knows, somewhere it may help us minimise, if not eliminate, the ‘horrendous impact’ of this ‘national problem’!...Continue

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