issue 300

24 31/05/2019 NEWS LITERATURE POLITICS FASHION ART & CULTURE KIDS RELIGION FILMS
www.samajweekly.com
BSP sees no need
to introspect over
election results
Lucknow : Even as other political parties
have gone into a huddle, dissecting their failure
in the Lok Sabha elections, the Bahujan
Samaj Party (BSP) refuses to introspect on
the issue. Immediately after the Lok Sabha
results were announced, BSP President
Mayawati issued a statement blaming the
EVMs for the poor performance of opposition
parties. Later, she held a meeting with
her 10 newly elected MPs in Delhi in which
she has given them basic directives about
their role in Parliament. She reportedly told
them that their stand on various issues would
be conveyed to them on a daily basis and
they should act accordingly. Party sources
said that since the BSP had won 10 seats,
compared to zero in 2014, and the party had
also improved its vote percentage, Mayawati
did not find any reason for introspection.
She has even refused to react to reports of
Dalits being beaten up at several places,
including Mainpuri, by Samajwadi Party
workers who believe the BSP vote was not
transferred to their candidates.
Mayawati has also been maintaining a
studied silence on the future of the SP-BSP
alliance. "She would want the Samajwadi
Party to make the first move. She will not
snap ties with the SP and RLD. They can do
so if they want," says a party functionary.
"As for the by-elections to 11 Assembly
segments in UP is concerned, the BSP, as a
rule, does not contest by-elections and SP
can draw up its own strategy." Mayawati has
also chosen not to start criticizing Prime
Minister Narendra Modi at this point. She
has adopted a wait-and-watch policy though
she will not be attending the swearing in ceremony
of Modi and his cabinet on Thursday
evening. The BSP had contested 38 seats and
won 10 seats while the Samajwadi Party,
which contested 37 seats, ended up winning
only five seats. Three members of the Yadav
clan lost their elections. These include
Dimple Yadav from Kannauj, Dharmendra
Yadav from Badaun and Akshay Yadav from
Ferozabad. The Rashtriya Lok Dal, which
was also a part of the alliance, had contested
three seats and it lost all of them.
The puzzle of BSP votes : Mainpuri
incident sheds some light
New Delhi, Did all the Dalit votes
of Mayawati get transferred to
Akhilesh Yadav’s party in Uttar
Pradesh? The crucial question has
been answered in a letter written by
UP State SC/ST Commission.
On Monday evening, the
Chairman of the commission, Brij
Lal, instructed Senior
Superintendent of Police (SSP)
Mainpuri to register a criminal case
against Yadav supporters of
Mulayam Singh Yadav who allegedly
opened fire and brutally assaulted
members of the dalit community for
not voting in favour of Samajwadi
Party despite an electoral alliance.
The injured includes a woman and a
BSF jawan of dalit community.
In his letter to the SSP, the
Chairman of the Commission has
expressed his anguish over the
shocking incident which happened
weeks after voting in Mainpuri on
April 23. The Yadavs of the Nagla
Mandhata area came to know much
later that dalits of their village have
not voted in favour of SP-BSP candidate
Mulayam Singh Yadav. For the
first time, Mayawati had personally
held a joint rally with Mulayam in
Mainpuri and had urged supporters
of the Bahujan Samaj Party to openly
vote for the alliance.
Over the non-transfer of votes,
when the arguement between the
local village Dalits and the Yadavs
took a turn for the worse, the accused
opened fire and beat up the Dalits
with sticks. The BSF jawan, belonging
to the Dalit community, managed
to escape from the spot and later
filed a complaint. The SC/ST commission
has asked the SSP to visit the
spot and ensure that dalit members of
the village are provided adequate
security. The SSP has also been
instructed that the accused should be
arrested. Though Mulsyam Singh
Yadav has won the polls by a comfortable
margin, the vote transfer
issue was being widely discussed in
the town. People were heard saying
that dalit members of certain pockets
did not vote for the SP-BSP alliance.
Woman injured in Pakistan
shelling in J&K’s Poonch
Jammu, Pakistani troopers resorted to indiscriminate shelling from
across the line of control
(LoC), leaving a
woman injured in
Jammu and Kashmir’s
Poonch district on
Wednesday evening.
A woman, identified
as Hanifa, belonging to
Baghyal Dara village in
Poonch district near the
LoC, was injured late
last evening when
Pakistan Army resorted
to unprovoked, indiscriminate shelling on defence and civilian facilities,
police sources said. The injured woman was shifted to a local hospital,
where doctors referred her to district hospital in Poonch. “Indian positions
responded effectively to Pakistan shelling,” police sources said.
New York : Former Reserve Bank of
India (RBI) Governor Raghuram Rajan is
not on social media, except for a LinkedIn
account, but fake Twitter accounts have been
set up with his name, according to a
spokesperson for his current academic institution,
the Chicago University's Booth
School of Business. Asked about some political
statements attributed to him on social
media, Sandra Jones, the school's senior
associate director for media relations,
replied in an email to IANS:
"There are some false Twitter
accounts with his name, but they
are not him." During the election
campaign in India and afterward,
social media was rife with
statements falsely attributed to
him, many of them critical of
Prime Minister Narendra Modi
and supportive of Congress
Party President Rahul Gandhi.
"They are fake," Jones said of social
media accounts claiming to be that of Rajan,
who became the school's Katherine Dusak
Miller Distinguished Service Professor of
Finance after leaving the RBI in 2016. "His
only social media activity is on LinkedIn,"
Jones wrote with a link to his latest authentic
comments on India posted on that media.
When asked by the media about what the
new Modi government should do, Rajan
wrote on LinkedIn: "I can do no better than
refer to a book that a group of us economists
published recently entitled 'What the
Economy Needs Now'."
He also posted an op-ed he and
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Economics Professor Abhijit Banerjee wrote
for The Times of India, which he said highlighted
the recommendations. Among the
recommendations were a push for decentralisation
using a "cooperative federalism"
model for the state and Centre to work
Election rout needs serious
introspection: CPI-M
New Delhi : The rout of the CPI-M in the Lok Sabha elections
needs "serious self-critical examination
by the leadership", the party has said,
adding it was wrong to assume that this
meant the demise of the Left. An editorial
titled "Left Will Overcome" in the
CPI-M journal "People's Democracy"
said a section of the mainstream newspapers
was wrong in surmising that the
Left was in terminal decline.
The Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) won just three
Lok Sabha seats -- one from Kerala and two from Tamil Nadu where
it was part of the DMK-led alliance. The CPI won two seats, both
from Tamil Nadu. "To write an epitaph to the CPI-M and the Left is
plain wrong and stems from a profound misunderstanding of what
characterizes the Left," the editorial said.
It admitted that the 2019 Lok Sabha election saw the worst electoral
performance of the CPI-M and the Communists in parliamentary
history. The editorial added that the drastic fall in the vote share
of the Left "is a matter of grave concern.
"Overall, the severe electoral setback requires a serious self-critical
examination by the leadership. This will be undertaken."
Fake currency
seized by NIA in
Gurugram, two held
Gurugram : The National
Investigation Agency (NIA) seized
fake currency with face value of Rs
1.2 crore, in denomination of Rs
2,000, in a raid here on Wednesday
and arrested two people, officials
said. The fake currency was seized in a raid on a premises in Sector
48 and the two arrested identified as Wasim and Qasim, both residents
of Haryana's Nuh district. A photostat machine was also seized
in the raid. The NIA has also filed an FIR in a local police station.
Fake social media accounts set
up in Raghuram Rajan's name
together; attention to the three distressed
sectors -- agriculture, power and banking;
creating a better business environment; and
focusing on education. In an interview
videocast earlier this month on GZERO
World, Rajan stressed the need to improve
the education sector and said his advice
would be to "put your smartest minister,
your best minister in charge of education".
Asked by the interviewer, Ian Bremmer, a
New York University professor and president
of Eurasia, an international
political consultancy, if he would
take the job, Rajan said: "I am
happy where I am, but if the
opportunity arises to do something
meaningful, I will always
take it up." During the interview,
he differentiated the Congress
party's promise of guaranteed
minimum income from the
Western concept of universal
basic income, which he said is "an income
sufficient for a middle-class person to sort of
live without a job".
But the Congress' proposal is more of "a
targeted poverty alleviation scheme", he
said. There are several programmes like subsidised
food for the very poor, around 250
million people or about a quarter of the population,
he said. "Can we give direct (cash)
transfer to those households at the bottom"
so that they can not only avoid hunger, but
also overcome malnutrition and disease, and
get a decent education to contribute to the
workforce, he asked. "I think both sets of
parties have been going towards this idea of
direct income transfers, of course, facilitated
by the Aadhar unique ID," he said, adding
this would give the poor have "money
power" and be "a way of empowering them",
"The Congress, of course, has the larger
scheme than the BJP has, but the principle is
essentially the same," he told Bremmer.