About one year in office, (Prime Minister Narendra) Modi has moved into the unchartered water of social cleavage issues. Some of his policies arouse people’s concerns about his and the BJP’s position on communal and caste issues. Divisive policies are likely to open the Pandora’s Box of social cleavage in India, the resulted controversies of which might jeopardize his own efforts for broader economic reforms.
(The change in Sri Lanka) marks the third big Asian election in the last 12 months in which voters have installed a new leader: first in India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi thumped the incumbent Congress Party; then Indonesia, where Joko Widodo, an outsider, won over voters with his record of competence as governor of Jakarta; and now Maithripala Sirisena’s upset victory in Sri Lanka. That kind of turnover at the top must give pause to China’s Communist Party leaders, who see the mandate of heaven as an institutional birthright.
In the abstract, it’s hard to imagine a situation under which a leader retires after a decade-long tenure under which more than 137 million people were lifted out of poverty and be generally considered a disappointing failure, but that’s exactly the situation facing Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who officially announced today, as had been widely expected, that he will be retiring after this year’s elections.
Indian democracy took a turn toward ancient Athens this week after the Aam Aadmi Party (“Common Man’s Party”) went to the people a second time in an attempt to resolve a political dilemma.
The rise of regional parties has fundamentally transformed electoral politics in India, but those parties may not be the juggernauts they’re made out to be.
India’s prosperous future has hardly ever seemed farther away than it does today. The country’s ongoing economic crisis has darkened the atmosphere — and done so in a way tragically familiar to most Indians.
It was not the lethality of the AK that India feared, for it had a million-strong army to counter it. It was the psychological change that the assault rifle unleashed everywhere it went. AK stands for Avtomat Kalashnikova, and 47 denotes 1947, the year of its adoption by the Soviet military. The assault rifle made its entry in Kashmir in 1988, almost 40 years after its invention in nearby Russia…
Xinhua – Severe crisis seems to have gripped India‘s main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) with barely a year to go for the general elections. Read Here
Economist – India’s main opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), could hardly have chosen differently. At a big party gathering, in Goa, on June 9th, its leaders picked Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat, to oversee its campaign for national elections, due by May 2014. Read Here
Reuters – Veteran politician Lal Krishna Advani resigned from top positions in the main opposition party a day after the selection of controversial leader Narendra Modi to head its election campaign exposed deep rifts in the party. Read Here
