Congress President Rahul Gandhi arrived here on Tuesday morning for a court hearing in a defamation case and for other party engagements in Mumbai.

Hoardings proclaiming Gandhi as the ‘Future Prime Minister’ greeted him on the roads outside the Mumbai Airport to Thane as he was accorded a warm welcome by Congress state President Ashok Chavan, Mumbai city chief Sanjay Nirupam, Janardhan Chandurkar, Bhai Jagtap, Raju Waghmare and other senior leaders.

Thereafter, Gandhi proceeded to the Bhiwandi Court in adjoining Thane district which was virtually converted into a fortress for the framing of charges in a defamation case against him filed by a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) worker four years ago.

The case was lodged by RSS worker Rajesh Kunte who objected to Gandhi’s utterances at an election rally in March 2014 wherein he blamed the RSS for the killing Mahatma Gandhi.

Later this afternoon, Gandhi will go to Mumbai and interact with the party’s over 15,000 booth-level workers at a function in Bombay Exhibition Centre, Goregaon.

This will mark the launch of a national endeavor ‘Project Shakti’ by which the Congress President will establish direct communication between the grassroots workers and the party’s central leadership, said Mumbai Congress President Sanjay Nirupam.

In the evening, Gandhi is scheduled to have a meeting with the party’s municipal corporators and is also likely to call on Nationalist Congress President Sharad Pawar.

Days after accusing Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao of indulging in “minority appeasement”, BJP MLA T Raja Singh Lodh on Monday said only those “begging for a vote”, host Iftar parties. In a video posted on Facebook, the MLA from Goshamahal constituency in Hyderabad also said that the “green book (Quran) is responsible for spreading terrorism in India” and that he will neither host nor attend any Iftar party with those who “talk of killing Hindus”.

“These days, many Telangana legislators are busy hosting Iftar parties, wearing skull caps and taking selfies. They think if they have to do vote bank politics, they will have to think of ‘sabka saath, sabka vikas’ (together with all, development for all). This is their thinking. Those who sit with them (attend Iftar parties) are ‘vote ke bikhari’ (beggars for vote). My thinking is different,” Raja said in the video.

Launching a direct attack on the Muslim community and accusing them of “killing the Hindus”, the MLA said his religion was different as Hinduism taught giving respect to everyone. “But some religions and their religious books preach to kill Hindus as they are ‘Kafir’ (a term literally meaning non-believers but often construed as insulting to followers of other religions). How can I attend an Iftar or host one for those who talk of killing Hindus,” he said.

The BJP leader said in order to substantiate his above claims to his friend, he told him that it was mentioned in the “green book” – a reference made to the Quran, the holy book of the Muslims. “The green book is responsible for the spread of terrorism in India and it should be banned. I will fight to get it banned,” he said.
Raja also said that he dreams of an “akhand Hindu rashtra (undivided Hindu nation), construction of a Ram Temple in Ayodhya, a ban on cow slaughter across the country and the return of displaced Kashmiri Pandits. “When there are over 50 Muslim countries and more than 100 Christian countries, why can’t there be a single Hindu nation?” he asked.

This is perhaps not the first time when the MLA has made such statements. He was booked by the police several times in the past over his alleged provocative speeches. Raja had once said that the heads of those opposing the construction of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya must be chopped off.

While accusing CM Rao of “appeasing” the minorities, he had earlier posted on Twitter, “KCR wants aid from the Centre as the state is in financial crisis but for appeasement of minorities, the Telangana government is spending Rs 66 crore for Iftar party. Development over vote bank politics.”

Former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram on Monday said three out of the four wheels of the national economy have been “punctured” and held the BJP government’s “administrative incompetence”, “reckless decisions” and “policy blunders” responsible for the rising farm distress, unemployment and economic failure.

“The tyres on three of the four wheels on which the economy rides are punctured. Firstly exports: the growth rate in the last four years has been negative. Secondly, private investment: it is in the doldrums, if not dead. Gross Fixed Capital Formation (GFCF) is stuck at 28.5 per cent for three years,” he told reporters here.

“Thirdly, private consumption: it was limping until a few months ago, there is a mild uptick, and we keep our fingers crossed.”

He said the only tyre that seemed to be inflated was government expenditure.

“But here too, the government’s options are getting limited because of the pressure on the current account deficit (CAD) and the fiscal deficit (FD),” he said.

“I do not think, situation of the world economy is affecting India. What is affecting (us) is our own policy blunders, reckless decisions and administrative incompetence,” he said.

Chidambaram said the Reserve Bank of India’s confidence survey stated that 48 per cent felt that the economic situation of the country had worsened in the last 12 months.

“The survey is unlikely to have covered the most backward parts of the country or the most deprived sections of the people. Therefore, the number of 48 per cent will be actually higher,” he said.

The senior leader said farm income was not rising even at a fraction of the growth rate of the economy and farm wages were constant for the last three-four years.

“At these rates, it will take another 14 years to double farmers’ income,” he said while taking a dig at the Narendra Modi government’s plan to double farm income by 2022.

He said farmers’ despondency had turned into anger and they had come on to the streets to protest.

“The principal reasons are uneconomic price for farm produce and stagnant wages of farm labour. MSP (Minimum Support Price) is not adequate. Every farmer knows that the promise of MSP = Cost + 50 per cent is a ‘jumla’,” he said.

Chidambaram said unemployment was rampant in the country, which was a “far cry” from the Bharatiya Janata Party’s promised two crore jobs a year.

“There is great ferment in campuses across the country because young men and women know that there will be no jobs when they graduate. So far, nobody has bought the innovative idea that ‘frying pakoras is also a job’,” he said.

He questioned why the Labour Bureau Survey for October-December 2017 was not yet released.

Chidambaram said the gross NPAs (Non-Performing Assets) had risen in the last four years from Rs 2,63,000 crore to Rs 10,30,000 crore and would rise further.

“No bank is willing to lend a big-ticket loan. Credit growth to industry in the last four years was 5.6, 2.7, -1.9 and 0.7 per cent. The Banks Board Bureau (BBB) is an utter failure. Government cannot find the additional money to recapitalise banks,” he said.

When asked about fugitive businessmen Nirav Modi and Vijay Mallya, Chidambaram said: “I know, they (government) have made no efforts to get them back. In fact, I doubt if they are making any effort. Our position is that they allowed both the gentlemen to leave the county.”

He said demonetisation had caused the growth rate to decline from 8.2 per cent in 2015-16 to 6.7 per cent in 2017-18.

“The Tamil Nadu government has officially acknowledged that 50,000 MSME units were shut down in the state in 2017-18; 5,00,000 jobs were lost; and capital investment in the MSME sector declined by Rs 11,000 crore,” he said.

A flawed Goods and Services Tax has continued to haunt trade and business, he added.

Chidambaram said the social security laws and programmes have been neglected by the BJP-led central government.

“The Food Security Act has not been implemented. MGNREGA is no longer demand-driven, wage arrears have mounted. Crop insurance covers barely 30 per cent of farmers, it is a windfall for insurers. Health Protection Scheme is another ‘jumla’,” he said.

Chidambaram said there was “widespread anger” about the artificially fixed prices of petrol, diesel and LPG.

“There is absolutely no reason why the prices should be higher today than what they were in May-June 2014. It is nothing but a case of fleecing the helpless consumer.

He said if petroleum products are brought under the Goods and Services Tax (GST), their prices will decline “immediately”.

At a time when the opposition and several intellectuals have expressed fear that the BJP government is preparing to change the Constitution and make India a Hindu Rashtra, Tripura Governor and former BJP-RSS insider, Tathagata Roy has said that what was accepted in 1950 can be changed.

“So far there have been 101 amendments to the Constitution, some of them under very questionable circumstances, as in the case of the 42nd amendment, when most opposition leaders were in jail (during the Emergency).

“So after scoring a century, what are those ‘intellectuals’, Left-Nehruvian establishment to me, afraid of,” asked Roy, appointed Tripura Governor in 2015.

He has authored a 450-page biography of Syama Prasad Mookerjee, the founder of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, which morphed into the BJP.

The Governor was responding to IANS questions in an email interview that sought his response on whether or not the fear of the opposition leaders and several intellectuals “holds ground” in the light of recent events.

“That said, what man has made, man can certainly change. France has had five republics since 1792. We the people of India can change what we gave ourselves in 1950 if we think it ought to be done,” he said.

Congress President Rahul Gandhi, writer-parliamentarian Shashi Tharoor, Salman Khurshid and historians such as Ramachandra Guha have repeatedly alleged that the real aim of the RSS and the BJP was to change the Constitution.

However, Roy said the roots of evolution of India’s intellectual class lie in “minority appeasement” and what “the so-called intellectual class calls ‘secularism’.”

He said that “there is no meeting ground” between these, and “it is no wonder that that class uses choice invectives against those who believe in the ideals of the RSS. Naturally, we believe we have been portrayed in the wrong light — but then, we are quite prepared to concede that one has a right to do all that.”

Roy said that as the Governor of a state he had nothing to do with the BJP but, at the same time, his basic beliefs had not evaporated and were merely kept on the backburner.

“It is indeed true that I share the ideologies of RSS and its Vividh Sangathanas and believe in the way they function,” he said.

Roy still finds Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s definition of a Hindu — one who was born of Hindu parents and regarded India as his motherland as well as holy land — to be “unduly restrictive”.

“It is significant that the Supreme Court in 1995 defined Hindutva as a way of life rather than a religion, and declined to review its stand in 2017… As such, there is no difficulty in the Hindu mind to co-opt Allah or the Judeo-Christian God or Ahura-Mazda as part of the pantheon — in other words accept a Muslim, a Jew, a Christian or a Zoroastrian as an equal,” he said.

“But if someone says that there is no God but Allah, and if you don’t say so I’ll make you do it by force, then surely Hindutva will have an issue with that person. It is said that too much of anything is bad. This is expressed differently by saying that we must all be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains fall out,” said Roy, a civil engineer by training, who was employed by the Indian Railways and later taught at Jadavpur University in Kolkata.

Interestingly, Roy is full of praise for veteran BJP leader Lal Krishna Advani in the acknowledgement section of his book, though many veteran BJP politicians, including Advani, Yashwant Sinha and Shatrughan Sinha seem to have been sidelined by the new party high command.

“I don’t put Advani in the same bracket with Yashwant Sinha or Shatrughan Sinha. Advaniji had dedicated his whole life to the RSS and the party, and brought about a sea-change by increasing the strength of the party in the parliament from two to 88. The latest ups and downs have nothing to do with my respect for the man, which remains very, very high. Even today he is regarded as an elder statesman,” he said.

Asked of his evaluation of the new BJP high command, spearheaded by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party President Amit Shah, he said he would not like to respond to it while he is the Governor of a state but “shall be glad to answer” after May 2020 when he demits office.

According to Roy, Mookerjee’s politics had three principal features: Right-Wing, Indocentric and Constitutional.

“These were his personal beliefs. Of these, the right-wing nature and Indocentricity were or are very much in evidence in the BJS and BJP. As for being constitutional, in practical politics there are obvious difficulties in making a party in India adhere to totally constitutional methods, and this was not found entirely possible by the BJP or even the Jana Sangh. Still, by and large, the BJP remains a right-wing, Indocentric and constitutional party compared to all other political parties of India.”

Tathagata Roy joined the BJP in 1990 and rose to become the state president for West Bengal and a member of the BJP national executive.

Former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was on Monday admitted to All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) stalwart has been admitted to AIIMS for routine check-up and investigation.

Vajpayee was taken to the hospital on the recommendations of doctors. He will undergo the check-ups under the supervision of Dr Randeep Guleria.

Vajpayee was the first person from the BJP to have become the prime minister of India. In the 1996 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP had emerged as the single-largest party. Congress had won 140 seats while BJP had 161 in its kitty. Vajpayee was thus sworn in as the 10th PM of India.

The BSP had promised support to Vajpayee but minutes later in the House, Mayawati rose to speak and said that she would be opposing the government. The numbers went against the government and Congress extended its support to the third largest party Janata Dal, led by HD Deve Gowda. Vajpayee was left with no choice but to submit his resignation to the President.

In a stirring speech then, he had said: “The seats we won are not by a stroke of luck. We reached out to the people and worked hard to spread our message. And today we are suddenly being judged because we couldn’t get just a few more seats? Ok, I agree that was a little bit of our own weakness.”

“President gave us the opportunity (to form the government) and we took that opportunity. We could not succeed but that is a different matter. But we will still sit here as the largest opposition party and you will have to take our support to make this House work. Don’t ever forget that. And I assure you, we will support you in running the House properly. We assure you that while you want power, we want to work for this country and we will never sit and rest in this endeavour,” he had said in that famous speech.

Moderate polling is underway in Bengaluru’s Jayanagar constituency amid tight security, said an election official on Monday.

“Over 34 per cent voting has been registered till 1 p.m. in all the 216 polling booths in the constituency. Polling has been going on in a peaceful manner barring some EVM glitches which were rectified,” Returning Officer Mamatha told IANS here.

The constituency has a total of 312,252 registered voters.

“Polling, which began at 7 a.m., started on a brisk note and progressed moderately, registering 10 per cent voting till 9 a.m. and 22 per cent till 11 a.m.,” the official added.

Polling in the seat was countermanded following the death of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) contestant B.N. Vijaya Kumar on May 4.

The BJP nominated Kumar’s younger brother B.N. Prahlad as its candidate.

The withdrawal of Janata Dal-Secular (JD-S) contestant Kalegowda from the fray on June 5 in support of the Congress nominee Sowmya Reddy has made the electoral battle a straight contest between the two national parties.

In all, 19 candidates including nine Independents are in the fray. The other woman candidate in the contest is Nayeema Khanum of Praja Raita Raajya Paksha.

The votes will be counted on Wednesday.

The remains of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose should be brought to India from Japan, said the daughter of the Indian freedom fighter, Anita Bose Pfaff.

“I hope that we get closure on this matter and that we get the remains returned and I hope we can do this without controversy because that would be the worst thing we could do for Netaji’s memory,” Bose-Pfaff, an economist based in Germany, said on Sunday.

She was speaking in London at the launch of a book by veteran Indian foreign correspondent Ashis Ray titled “Laid to Rest: The Controversy over Subhas Chandra Bose’s Death”.

Many have refused to believe that Bose died in a plane crash in Taipei in 1945. Ray’s book lays out his investigations into the incident, drawing on 11 other reports and numerous eyewitness accounts’ conclusive evidence that Bose perished shortly after the accident.

His ashes are now kept in a temple in Japan.

Bose-Pfaff said she understood why so many people – both relatives and admirers – had been reluctant to accept the tragic account of events, pointing out that the difficulties in communicating internationally at the time meant nobody could be immediately certain of the facts.

“People like mysteries,” she added, “and my father was a romantic and tragic hero and so somehow it was not so surprising.”

But she dismissed the multiple, competing theories as to how he may have survived the crash, criticising the 2006 Justice Manoj Mukherjee inquiry commission for ignoring personal testimonies.

Ray echoed her message about Bose’s remains. “It’s about time India did something to bring the ashes to India.”

The launch of the book took place at the British Library as part of the London edition of the renowned Jaipur Literature Festival.

Ray, great-nephew of Subhas Bose, and Bose-Pfaff, who grew up with her Austrian mother, were interviewed on stage by London-based academic Somnath Batabyal in a room packed with festival attendees.

Asked about the alleged bad blood between her father and Jawaharlal Nehru, Bose-Pfaff talked about her own experience of meeting India’s first Prime Minister.

“Nehru was personally very friendly to my mother and towards me, during my first visit to India. I don’t recall us talking about his relationship with my father.”

Describing the difference between the two men, she said: “In a way, they were of the same camp but my father would not compromise even if Gandhi said so whereas Nehru would.”

Both speakers addressed the issue of Bose’s apparent fascist sympathies, explaining that he sought support from the Axis powers – specifically Germany and Japan – during World War II only because of their opposition to the British as his priority was the freedom of India from foreign rule.

Bose-Pfaff described her father’s meeting with Hitler as a “disappointment”. Ray said it had been “fractious” and that Bose had later described the Nazi leader in Bengali as “raving mad”.

Bose-Pfaff also talked about the impact on her own life of being related to such a significant political figure, explaining that living outside India meant she did not feel the pressure experienced by the children of other leaders of the freedom movement, such as Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, for example – to assume political responsibilities.

“I owe it to my mother that the legacy was not too difficult. She said, ‘your father was a great man but that doesn’t make you a great anything’. I tried to educate me to be humble.”