From Indore to Amit Shah's Gandhinagar, BJP Strongarming Candidates; Why Rahul Gandhi Picked Rae Bareli Over Amethi
Supreme Court looking at interim bail for Arvind Kejriwal on May 7 given the ongoing general election, Telangana Police closure report on Rohith Vemula case fuels anger
A newsletter from The Wire | Founded by MK Venu, Seema Chishti, Siddharth Varadarajan, Sushant Singh, Sidharth Bhatia, Pratik Kanjilal and Tanweer Alam | Contributing writer: Kalrav Joshi, with additional inputs by Anirudh SK
Snapshot of the day
May 3, 2024
Siddharth Varadarajan
It’s been a whole year since Manipur went up in flames. The official death toll is 224 with another 28 missing and presumed dead. Over 60,000 people have been displaced. As many as 4500 weapons were snatched from the police and security forces, most of which have yet to be recovered. More than a dozen security forces personnel have been killed and yet Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made no effort to end the near civil war or even visit the beleaguered state. Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty writes about the 10 key takeaways from the events of the past year in Manipur
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has finally returned to the key state of Uttar Pradesh but surprisingly opted to contest from Rae Bareli instead of Amethi, where Union minister Smriti Irani had created a spectacle of his absence for the past few months. Rahul contesting Rae Bareli will help counter the BJP’s claim that the Congress leadership escaped to the South for political survival, but there are some who feel his not going in to snatch Amethi from Irani, a political lightweight propped up by the BJP’s might, could also send negative signals. Unquestionably, Rahul’s shift to Rae Bareli makes eminent political sense. It has been Sonia Gandhi’s seat since 2004. She won the 2019 election by 1.67 lakh. That was down from 3.52 lakh in 2014 but it was still a huge margin of victory.
However, Congress managers felt contesting Amethi would have ensured the party’s main campaigner would get bogged down in one constituency. Many in the party felt defeating Irani was less important than campaigning for other candidates. All in all, even if this decision is seen as surprising, the presence of someone from the Gandhi family in the political fiefdom of Amethi-Rae Bareli was essential for the Congress’s political future in Uttar Pradesh.
Meanwhile, “there’s a sudden burst of cheer in the Congress and INDIA alliance camp,” reports Paran Balakrishnan:
“There are indications that the electoral picture is not as rosy as the BJP had painted. The saffron party has ignominiously buried its ‘400 seats’ boast and now even insiders are focusing on getting between 280-300. It’s looking more and more likely that they will not be able to match their 2019 numbers,” . Gandhi has positioned himself as the defender of India’s secular constitution, writes The Economist. But has the opposition leader done enough to ensure the vigour of multi-party democracy in the country? “He wants to be the champion of Indian liberalism. First he needs to save his party from irrelevance”.
The Supreme Court may consider granting Aam Aadmi Party leader and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal interim bail because of the ongoing elections. The court asked government counsel what conditions they would want if bail is given. "We are yet to decide on that and (will) hear on Tuesday. We must be open so that neither side is taken by surprise," the court said. So May 7 could be decisive for Kejriwal one way or the other.
“As the election proceeds, the number of speeches where Modi has made false claims or outrightly lied – mostly to target Muslim Indians in his quest for Hindu votes – is now in double digits”. The latest is his lie that the Congress manifesto has promised a ‘fixed quota’ for Muslims in government contracts. “Conveniently ignoring the Congress’s path-breaking promise that if in power it will ‘award more public works contracts to contractors belonging to SC and ST communities,’ Modi has once again sought to incite Hindu voters against Muslims.
Furthermore, Modi’s repeated charge that the Congress will fracture SC/ST quotas to grant reservations to Muslims is nothing but a spurious claim, writes Jay Patel. Look no further, the model state is the prime example of this. “Muslim SEBCs enjoy the benefits of reservation under the OBC category in Gujarat –under BJP rule since 1995 – and Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes have a constitutionally mandated provision for reservation which cannot be taken away without amending the Constitution”.
In Andhra Pradesh, where the BJP has an alliance with the Telugu Desam Party, the latter has said it has no intention of scrapping the 4% quota in the state for Muslim OBC communities.
Amidst the lies, propaganda and the hate that is being thrown at Indian voters – day in and day out – here’s another reality check from a village in Maharashtra about how India’s farmers are doing. Ten years ago, Modi had promised to double farmers income and end the suicide rates. However, more farmers have killed themselves in the Modi years than ever before.
Often called India’s “second most powerful man”, Amit Shah is Modi’s closest confidant and the brains behind his election juggernaut. BBC has a profile on the chief strategist — the person India and the world should really be worried about.
Curiously, his supporters and handlers in Gandhinagar are worried about the number of candidates who sought to contest the election against Shah. Ayush Tiwari reports on how three independents have alleged they were coerced into quitting the fray. This is the Surat model, where the BJP’s candidate was elected unopposed after all others withdrew their nominations. Ajoy Ashirwad Mahaprashasta reports about how the same model was pursued in Indore too, after the BJP engineered the defection of the Congress candidate. But one of the candidates there is from a small but doughty Left party – SUCI (Communist) – and his refusal to buckle led to the plan being abandoned.
The Supreme Court bench of Justices Bela M Trivedi and Pankaj Mithal has allowed former Delhi University (DU) professor Hany Babu – one of the accused in the infamous Bhima Koregaon case – to withdraw his bail plea citing “change of circumstance”. Babu’s lawyers intend to move the Bombay high court, which has granted bail to five co-accused.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has put Modi on hold. India is the third largest auto market after the US and China, but it’s only a fifth of China’s size. That gap widens for electric vehicles— where China is 60% of the world market with 8 million electric passenger cars registered last year. “Not tonight, I have a headache — says Musk to India” is how Menaka Doshi phrases the reality check as she sizes up the opportunity and challenges for India (and Musk).
“Despite recently adopting more draconian laws” and continuing to be “unworthy of a democracy”, India ranked 159, two spots higher than last year, in the 2024 edition of the Press Freedom Index, published annually by Reporters Without Borders. The slight relative improvement has happened despite a deterioration in India’s metrics because some other countries have done even worse. “With violence against journalists, highly concentrated media ownership, and political alignment, press freedom is in crisis in “the world’s largest democracy”, ruled since 2014 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and embodiment of the Hindu nationalist right,” RSF stated while releasing the data. “Recent years have also seen the rise of “Godi media” (pun for designating Modi’s “lap dogs”) – media outlets that mix populism and pro-BJP propaganda. Through pressure and influence, the old Indian model of a pluralist press is being called into question. The prime minister is very critical of journalists, seeing them as “intermediaries” polluting his direct relationship with his supporters. Indian journalists who are very critical of the government are subjected to harassment campaigns by BJP-backed trolls,” it notes. Several of India’s neighbours have ranked slightly better than it – Pakistan is at 152, Sri Lanka at 15, Nepal at 74 and Maldives at 106.
On Thursday, India lodged a strong protest with China over attempts to “alter facts on the ground” by the building of road infrastructure by the Chinese in the Shaksgam valley. “We have never accepted the so-called China Pakistan Boundary Agreement of 1963 through which Pakistan unlawfully attempted to cede the area to China, and have consistently conveyed our rejection of the same. We have registered our protest with the Chinese side against illegal attempts to alter facts on the ground. We further reserve the right to take necessary measures to safeguard our interests,” said MEA spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal, stating that the Shaksgam Valley is a part of Indian territory. According to recent media reports, satellite pictures show that China is building a road in the lower Shaksgam valley, with the road-head being just 30 kilometres from the Siachen glacier.
West Bengal governor CV Ananda Bose yesterday faced allegations of sexual molestation. He has said he will not be cowed down by “engineered narratives”. A woman employee of the Raj Bhavan in Kolkata has reportedly lodged a complaint of molestation against him. The allegation against the governor sparked off a furore in West Bengal politics just hours before PM Narendra Modi arrived in Kolkata and reached Raj Bhavan to spend the night. The ruling Trinamool Congress stated that the sanctity of the Raj Bhavan had been ‘tarnished’. The governor, however, dismissed the allegation and issued a statement saying that the ‘truth would triumph’. “If anybody wants some election benefits by maligning me, God bless them,” Raj Bhavan quoted the governor as saying in a press release issued a couple of hours after news broke. As governor he has absolute immunity from prosecution.
India on Wednesday said it hoped that Palestine’s application to become a full member of the United Nations would be reconsidered and endorsed. New Delhi also reiterated its long-standing support for a two-state solution – which would entail creating a Palestinian state separate from the state of Israel – to resolve the conflict in the region.
Amit P. Mehta, an Indian born judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, will issue a landmark antitrust ruling in a Google case that's the most significant federal suit challenging a tech giant since the government took on Microsoft in the 1990s. The New York Times has a profile of the judge who “came to America with his family when he was 1 year old. His father, Priyavadan Mehta, was an engineer; his mother, Ragini Mehta, a laboratory technician. They settled in suburban Baltimore.”
Rohith Vemula file closed by cops
Telangana police have closed the Rohith Vemula file and absolved BJP leaders Smriti Irani, Bandaru Dattatreya, Ramachandra Rao and former Vice Chancellor of Hyderabad University P Apparao of any indirect involvement in his January 2016 death by suicide. The closure report, obtained by The Newsminute, alleges that Rohith was not a Dalit and claims that he took his own life because he was afraid this would be discovered.
According to the report, Rohith took his life as “he had his own problems and was not happy with worldly affairs” and absolved university administration and political leaders including Vice Chancellor Appa Rao, against whom the students filed the case. Despite his stellar academic performance, the report also blames Rohith for “appearing to be involved more in student political issues in the campus than studies.”
The closure report has been met with protest and disbelief and the Congress government is sure to come under pressure to have the matter of the iconic student leader’s death re-examined.
High Court: Manual scavenging is “state-sanctioned casteism”
‘State-sanctioned casteism’ is what the Madras High Court has said on the continuation of manual scavenging. The court, in a significant move, has widened the definition of the word ‘sewer’ under the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013, to include storm water drains. On April 29, Chief Justice Sanjay V Gangapurwala and Justice Sathya Narayana Prasad condemned the ‘dehumanising practice’, saying that it continues because of “deep-rooted social norms, caste-based discrimination, and systemic failures”.
ED castigated in court
Noting that the Enforcement Directorate (ED) was putting obstacles in the way of the accused in exercising their fundamental rights, a special court in Mumbai granted bail to travel agency Cox & Kings Group Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Anil Khandelwal and internal auditor Naresh Jain in a money laundering case related to Yes Bank. While granting bail, special judge MG Deshpande, observed that the ED had a constitutional obligation to ensure expeditious trials to conclude the trial within a reasonable time, reports Vidya. “It is the constitutional obligation of the ED to ensure expeditious trials in this case are concluded within a reasonable time. There has been a significant failure on the ED’s part to fulfil this constitutional obligation with respect to this case. Therefore, this significant failure of the ED itself qualifies the two applicants (for bail),” the court ruled.
The Long Cable
In Picking Rae Bareli, Rahul Gandhi Signals His Fight is With Modi, Not One of His Nominees
Seema Chishti
Rahul Gandhi’s decision to pick up the gauntlet in Rae Bareli marks the end of an era and the beginning of another. Of course, it was clear when Sonia Gandhi opted to enter the Rajya Sabha earlier this year that she would not be contesting from here again. She wrote a note to Rae Barelians thanking them for their support to her. But who would be tasked with taking the baton and running with it was still up in the air.
Rahul Gandhi is a seasoned politician with a career of 20 years in the Lok Sabha. Fifteen of these have been from Amethi, his late father’s constituency, before he lost the seat in 2019. Given its long association with the Nehru-Gandhis, Rae Bareli too holds special significance for Rahul. In India’s first general election, the seat was won by his grand-father, Feroze Gandhi. Both seats also serve as a political bond between the Congress’s first family and Uttar Pradesh. UP sends the maximum number of MPs to the Lok Sabha. It has also sent the maximum PMs. After all, a proud Gujarati, Narendra Modi also chose Varanasi to stake his claim to the prime ministership.
In 2019, Rahul Gandhi lost Amethi to the BJP’s Smriti Irani but won the Wayanad seat in Kerala. Coming back to UP in 2024 to take the battle deep into what is seen as the most comfortable state for the BJP was essential for him to earn his spurs among critics uncomfortable with him only making his case in a CPI seat in the deep south. Any claims to being serious about taking on the BJP’s might means a battle in UP. Moreover, taking the battle to UP also shifts the nature of the electoral contest, which so far the BJP has been desperate to frame as a ‘done deal’ thanks to the Ayodhya temple. Rahul Gandhi walking into the fray in UP means that battle has been joined.
Then comes the question of which of the two ‘family’ seats he should have chosen. The fact that a chorus of critics is lamenting his not fighting from Amethi this time around is evidence enough of the trap it would have been. Rather than being railroaded into this seat and locked into a battle of false prestige, the Congress has made clear that it is fighting the 2024 election on its own terms. Rahul’s decision to leave Amethi to a local Congress stalwart allows the party to focus on larger issues, notwithstanding the Godi media blitzkrieg.
Never at a loss for insults and spiteful remarks – which she mistakes for grit and assertive politics – Smriti Irani has been battling Rahul Gandhi in her mind for weeks now. Most of her recent public statements have betrayed a certain jumpiness about the Congress leader’s possible arrival in Amethi. The Rahul Gandhi of today, post the Bharat Jodi yatras, is quite different from his 2019 avatar and the national mood today is not what it was five years ago. It is precisely for these reasons that the BJP was keen to pin the Congress leader down in Amethi.
As is the BJP’s wont, TV cameras, reporters and godi debate had been planned in advance to ensure Gandhi gets caught in a sophomoric framing that made it a ‘Smriti versus Rahul’ fight, diminishing the real battle with Modi that Gandhi is now trying to wage on behalf of both INDIA and India.
Picking an old Congress worker and loyalist, KP Sharma, to fight Amethi is most of all, a signal to Irani. It is a strong rebuff to her and her party’s plans of reducing Rahul Gandhi’s campaign – over the month that remains of the general election – to a series of ‘reactions’ to every vituperative soundbite she can dish out on national TV, which the BJP almost fully controls now.
Fighting Amethi would have invariably meant Rahul Gandhi’s 2019 defeat repeatedly being dredged up, making it a tough prestige battle. It would have also detracted from the time available for other campaigning nationally when, without the resources (and holograms) that the BJP has, the opposition has personal campaigning as it’s one calling card.
Never mind the BJP hosting a record number of dynasts – its own, stolen and borrowed from other parties – but ‘dynasty’ is a charge the BJP reserves for the opposition, particularly the Gandhis. Had Rahul Gandhi returned to Amethi, and Rae Bareli been given to another family member (presumably his sister, general secretary, Priyanka Gandhi) there would be very little separating the Congress from other family-parties with multiple family members in important positions. The same persons angry at not seeing a ‘Smriti versus Rahul’ framing would have carped about ‘dynasty’ then.
There was speculation that Mallikarjun Kharge could be fielded as a candidate from Rae Bareli. The benefits from that, no doubt would have been immense. Political patrimony being handed to a self-made Dalit Congress president from south India would have had deep political significance. But Rahul Gandhi himself entering the fray from here signals that the Congress is not re-fighting the 2019 election but taking the 2024 one head on, where it is ready to stay pitched in grounds that have been called inherently hostile to it.
Reams have been written about the Congress being over in UP. So this decision is as much shrewd calculation and tightening the Congress’s Hindi belt as it is a recognition of what is truly the oldest family seat in the state and the country. Rae Bareli ensured that UP returned at least one Congress MP in even as hostile a time as 2019. Rahul’s grandfather, Feroze Gandhi held this seat in 1952, then 1957 again before his death a year later. After him Indira Gandhi contested from here, losing only once, dramatically to Raj Narain in 1977. She, like Rahul Gandhi, sought southern seats when things soured for the Congress, but returned. Sonia Gandhi also quit Bellary and held on to Rae Bareli in UP as home when she wanted to assert that she and her party were ready for the long haul and very much in the fight for India’s soul.
Reportedly
That Beti Bachaao was a warning by the BJP about its intentions gets reinforced every so often. In the patriarchal world of the Hindutva Rashtra, there is no place for women trying to make their own way outside the parivar fold. BJP ally, candidate from Haasan, Deve Gowda’s grandson, Prajwal Revanna, with stories of sexual abuse perpetrated by him evident in multiple videos and his easy escape to Germany, is only important for the BJP if it is made to become an ‘issue’, else Modi was happy to personally go and ask for a vote for him, as he did on April 14 in a public rally. Then, the control of strongman BJP MP, Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, who brought Olympian women wrestlers out on mats in Jantar Mantar, remains intact. He has thanked the BJP for keeping it all in the parivar by giving his son the BJP ticket for Kaiserganj. Wresters lBajrang Punia and Saakshi Malik have hit hard at the BJP.
Deep dive
Leading business editor TN Ninan unearths home truths about the Indian economy. He finds that “despite all the capital expenditure by the central government […] overall fixed capital formation has been below earlier levels, recovering only now to match the 31% figure of 2013–14.” He concludes that while it can be said that the economy is growing rapidly and many economic indicators are flashing green, “But the path that India has chosen, of promoting national business champions, has its limits. Economic distress is widespread, which cannot be handled forever with welfare handouts or religion as an opiate.”
Prime number: 1/3rd
The Supreme Court of India has mandated that a minimum of one-third of the posts in the Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA) be reserved for women. The apex court’s order specified that for this year, three executive members, two senior executive members, and the treasurer of the SCBA must be women. The court also directed that the post of SCBA Treasurer be reserved for women in the upcoming elections for the 2024–2025 term.
What the court intends to do about the glaring gender imbalace in the higher judiciary is not known,
Opeds you don’t want to miss
Patricia Mukhim writes on Manipur. One full year has passed. No one cares — certainly, not the Union Government. “Manipur needs a calming hand. It needs a leadership that can bring Meiteis and the Kuki-Zos to the talking table. But a year has passed and there are no visible signs of peace-building. The warring communities have not met, even at common platforms outside Manipur.
“It has been more than around four months that a unique initiative of doing readings from Ambedkar has been forcibly stopped, show-cause notices being issued and even punitive action being taken against Dalit teachers, but there is no murmur of protest about it and despite being in the know of these developments, the top bosses of the UGC or University Grants Commission are silent over it,” writes Subhash Gatade on a distinct feature in New India, which bars in reading Ambedkar.
Harsh Mander focuses on two assaults by statute on Indian secularism comparing how “the Nuremberg laws both stripped Jewish Germans of citizenship rights and criminalised inter-religious marital and sexual unions. The Reich Citizenship Law made only Germans eligible to be Reich citizens. These two Nuremberg laws reduced Germany’s Jews to non-citizens and criminalised marriages and sex between Jews and Germans. Do laws passed in Modi’s India carry echoes of the Nuremberg laws?”
India’s transformation into a beacon for majoritarian extremists comes with sinister consequences for itself and its South Asian neighbours – with Sri Lanka no exception, writes Tisaranee Gunasekara.
While spying may be a normal State activity, recklessly expanding its span of operations has resulted in India’s friends drawing a red line, which they believe the Modi regime has crossed, writes Bharat Bhushan.
Hindutva’s consolidation of a varna autocracy is destroying the republic, writes Hartosh Bal, who sees the tyranny in India getting worse if Modi wins a third term.
With an election under way, the future of Indian science is on the ballot, says Yamini Aiyar on the challenges of doing social sciences in India today. “The documented drop in academic freedom is part of a broader decline in India’s vibrant culture of public debate”.
Mehul Devkala writes on people’s manifesto for this election and much hyped Gujarat Model. “It is Somnath in Gujarat from where L.K. Advani started the Rath Yatra for the Ayodhya temple. It polarised the state and later the whole country. It paved the way for the foundation of the BJP regime in Gujarat”.
Sobhana K Nair on what the voters are saying and what the journalists are listening to. The toughest thing to do in electoral reportage.
Changing the demographic composition of the state of Jammu & Kashmir is a key tactic to reduce the Muslim majority there. This is what Shimon Peres, the Israeli leader, had suggested to LK Advani for a demographic change in Indian-occupied Kashmir – the only way to fix the Kashmir problem, recalls Azad Essa.
Listen up
On the Rachman Review podcast from The Financial Times, listen to The Foreign Policy’s editor-in-chief, Ravi Agarwal, on the new idea of India, represented by Modi – and where he will take the country if he wins another term in office
Watch out
Watch the Wire Wrap this week steered by Jahnavi Sen in conversation with Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty and Sanjay K Jha. They discuss Manipur, the controversial role of the Election Commission in not properly monitoring the ongoing election campaign and the Revanna case.
Over and out
Sagar Tetali writes about Telugu Cinema, its interlinks with misogyny and the worrying gender dynamics. Read here.
Here’s a picture of the week — one of the important takeaways and reminders of the people who are at the receiving end of the increase in the temperature.
That’s it for today. We’ll be back with you on Monday, on a device near you. If The India Cable was forwarded to you by a friend (perhaps a common friend!) book your own copy by SUBSCRIBING HERE.