Posts

Kejriwal Helped By Media Taking You For A Ride

Image
The politician used every past associate of his to climb the ladder of fame and success, and a large section of the journalistic fraternity agreed to be cheerleaders of his fake movement with initial help from the UPA government and waylaid RSS swayamsevaks   S ome days ago, Times Now went ballistic over a claim by Kumar Vishwas of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) that the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) chief ministerial candidate Kiran Bedi had a soft corner for the party she is now in even during the Jan Lokpal (JLP) movement of 2011. The claim sounded strange to this columnist who was a part of the movement, albeit with a fair dose of scepticism. Here was a political poet known for his fondness for former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and eulogies dedicated to current Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was asserting that Bedi, not he, was the BJP’s mole in India against Corruption (IaC)! But my amusement was not substantive enough to merit a full-fledged artic

Another Rabble-Rouser?

Image
I f you have seen the crowd during the August 2011 movement led by Anna Hazare and then if your jaws dropped when you saw lakhs turn up to hear BJP’s then prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi even in the south Indian state of Kerala where the party was near absent, you have seen nothing. You must know PV Rajagopal, president of Ekta Parishad, who commands a following of lakhs of landless and homeless people across the country, concentrated mostly in the central provinces though. Rajagopal addressing one of his mammoth rallies in 2012 If you have not seen the size of a crowd Rajagopal can lead, it is because New Delhi, then a Congress bastion, did not allow his procession to ever reach the country’s capital. Which government of a democracy would not turn jittery at the sight of a disciplined queue at least 1,00,000 strong comprising emaciated bodies and impoverished faces of tribal folk and other poor people entering the capital of the country after