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Priyanka Gandhi’s entry into UP politics has sent political opponents into tizzy
Conventional political wisdom, in the absence of credible caste Census data, classifies 52 per cent of the state’s population as ‘Backward Classes’, 18 per cent as Dalits, 5 per cent each of Brahmins and Thakurs and Muslims as 17 per cent of the people. Smaller castes and sub castes are said to constitute the remaining three per cent.
The caste cauldron of eastern Uttar Pradesh has witnessed Kurmis float the ‘Apna Dal’ and the Rajbhars forming the Bharat Samaj Party. Boatmen and fishermen in eastern UP also are clamouring for better representation in politics. They will want their pound of flesh and bargain hard for seats. The small parties have small pockets of influence but are said to be important. Some say they are more important in 2019 than they were in 2014. Can they win half a dozen seats on their own or play the spoiler and, if so, for whom?
Eastern Uttar Pradesh took an active part in the freedom struggle and has been a hot bed of politics for long. With the passage of time, people have become politically aware and have responded to leaders like Ram Manohar Lohia and Chaudhary Charan Singh in the past.
“But as you can imagine, this is a snakepit,” quips a regional Congress leader. “It is going to be an uphill task for Priyanka Ji. She has very little time, less than two months, before the general election and it would certainly require a Herculean effort on her part,” he quips.
But that she means business became evident in less than 48 hours of her arrival in Lucknow, when she, flanked by the general secretary in charge of western UP Jyotiraditya Scindia and Keshav Deo Maurya of Mahan Dal, announced a poll alliance with the small party active in western UP.
“I welcome Keshav Maurya ji. We will fight the elections jointly. Rahul ji has given us the task of creating a political atmosphere in which everyone is taken along and all sections of the society are represented,” Priyanka said. “We will contest with full might,” she asserted.
Predictably, the Bharatiya Janata Party, which desperately wants to ensure that it does not lose too many of the 71 constituencies it won in 2014, has reacted with disdain in public. But its growing concern at Priyanka Gandhi Vadra catching eyeballs, time and space in the media, especially Television, is manifest in even casual conversations.
“Television has been Modi Ji’s turf and we have milked it for the past five years and more. But suddenly TV channels are devoting considerable time following Priyanka Gandhi Vadra and discussing the impact she may have,” admitted an old BJP hand. While the BJP has largely bought media space, he grudgingly conceded that the Congress was receiving ‘ free publicity’ ever since it was announced that Priyanka Gandhi Vadra would formally hold charge of eastern UP.
The party is divided on how to counter the threat posed by her. While knives are clearly being sharpened to launch vicious attacks as and when she starts moving out and address public meetings, there are doubts that the move might boomerang and fail to yield much political dividend.
Ignoring her is another option that has been discussed, confide BJP insiders. But the thinking is to evolve a strategy as and when she slips. BJP leaders believe that while she possibly has a better command over Hindi, she eventually may not prove to be much of an orator.
“Election rallies require rousing speeches, sharp barbs, an ability to get the crowd to laugh and rage – and there is no match for Narendra Modi,” says a BJP leader with satisfaction, convinced that Priyanka Gandhi Vadra is far too polished to make much of a difference on public platforms.
Another BJP strategy is to belittle her experience and performance in the pocket boroughs of the Congress in Amethi and Rae Bareli. “How many Assembly seats could she win for the Congress,” is what BJP workers have been advised to ask in public in an attempt to play down her impact.
But the worry shows and notwithstanding their stance in public, on Monday Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath abandoned a review meeting with district magistrates to huddle with senior party leaders following the six-hour road show in Lucknow by Priyanka Gandhi Vadra.
Says Alok Kumar Rai of the Faculty of Management Studies at BHU (Varanasi), “The strategy of playing down Priyanka Gandhi may actually have the opposite effect.” The attack on the dynasty, say observers, is stale and weak and the other approach, of saying that Priyanka Gandhi Vadra has been inducted to cover up the failure of her brother, may actually enhance her public stature.
By all reckoning, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra’s entry into UP politics seems to have upset all political applecarts, at least for now. Keshav Dev Maurya of Mahan Dal (right), a small party in western Uttar Pradesh, announced on Wednesday that it would contest the election in alliance with the Indian National Congress. He is seen in this picture with Jyotiradiya Scindia ( left) and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra
Adm. Michael Gilday, chief of Naval Operations, rebuffed pointed interrogations by GOP lawmakers who grilled him over his decision to recommend sailors read a book deemed by some conservatives as anti-American.
The U.S. Navy’s top admiral also defended moves to address and root out racism and extremism in the forces as well as its efforts to bolster inclusion and diversity, which have prompted criticism from some conservatives and Republican lawmakers.
“Do you personally consider advocating for the destruction of American capitalism to be extremist?” Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., asked Gilday during a House Armed Services Committee hearing Tuesday, referring to a passage from Ibram X. Kendi’s book “How to Be an Antiracist,” which argues capitalism and racism are interlinked.
Banks continued to interrogate the admiral over specific quotes from Kendi’s book, which was a No. 1 New York Times best seller in 2020, and statements he had made elsewhere in the past.
Visibly distraught, Gilday fired back:
“I am not going to sit here and defend cherry-picked quotes from somebody’s book,” he said. “This is a bigger issue than Kendi’s book. What this is really about is trying to paint the United States military, and the United States Navy, as weak, as woke.”
He added that sailors had spent 341 days at sea last year with minimal port visits — the longest deployments the Navy has done, he said.
“We are not weak. We are strong,” Gilday said.
Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., also challenged the admiral by citing specific quotes from the book and asked him how those ideas laid out by Kendi would further advance or improve the Navy’s power.
Gilday responded by arguing the importance of transparency and open dialogue about racism.
“There is racism in the Navy just as there is racism in our country, and the way we are going to get out of it is by being honest and not to sweep it under the rug,” he expounded, adding that he does not agree with everything the author says in the book.
The key point however, he said, is for sailors “to be able to think critically.”
The exchange was the latest in vociferous complaints from some conservative leaders and lawmakers who suggest the armed forces are becoming a pawn for the country’s culture wars and “wokeness” ideology, as the military takes steps to address issues of racial inclusion, extremism, racism and white supremacy.
And only last week, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., accosted Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin about Kendi’s book, which Cotton said promoted “critical race theories” at a different Senate Armed Services Committee hearing where Austin was testifying.
Days earlier, Cotton and Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas — two combat veterans — launched a “whistleblowers” online platform to report examples of “woke ideology” in the military.
“Enough is enough. We won’t let our military fall to woke ideology,” Crenshaw, a former Navy SEAL, said in a tweet.
Also in February, Austin instructed a one-day stand-down across the Defense Department pausing regular activities to address extremism and white nationalism in the ranks — an issue Austin declared as a priority after a number of rioters at the U.S. Capitol in January were found to have military backgrounds.
The stand down completed in April was an effort to better understand the scope of the problem of extremism in the ranks, Pentagon press secretary John F. Kirby said in a briefing then.
Earlier, Austin had revoked a ban on diversity training for the military.
More recently, in May, a U.S. Army animated ad focused on soldier diversity — featuring the real story of a soldier who enlisted after being raised by two mothers in California — drew criticism and political backlash from some conservative lawmakers.
“Holy crap,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said in a tweet. “Perhaps a woke, emasculated military is not the best idea. . . .”
Cruz was referring to a TikTok video that compared the U.S. Army ad with a Russia campaign that showed buff soldiers doing push-ups and leaping out of airplanes, adding that the contrast made the American soldiers “into pansies.”
The confrontation Tuesday is also the latest in reproaches by Rep. Banks, who is a Naval Reserve officer, and other GOP members over Gilday’s recommendation to include Kendi’s book in the Chief of Naval Operations Professional Reading Program.
In February, Banks sent a letter to Gilday arguing that the views promoted in the book are “explicitly anti-American” and demanded Gilday explain the Navy’s decision to include it on the reading list or remove it.
Gilday responded to Banks in a letter obtained by Fox News saying that the book was included on the list because “it evokes the author’s own personal journey in understanding barriers to true inclusion, the deep nuances of racism and racial inequalities.”
Lamborn and Rep. Vicky Hartzler, D-Mo., also wrote a letter to the admiral to convey their concern about the inclusion of Kendi’s book as well as Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow” and Jason Pierceson’s “Sexual Minorities and Politics.”
The GOP lawmakers argued the books “reinforce a view that America is a confederation of identity categories of the oppressed and their oppressors rather than a common homeland of individual citizens who are united by common purposes,“ Lamborn and Hartzler wrote, according to Fox News.
Our understanding of events refines with time. New developments reframe the issues, and prompt reassessment of the solutions applied, their design and outcomes. What does looking back on the 1991 reforms in 2021 tell us?
For three decades, India celebrated and criticised the 1991 reforms. The reformers of 1991 say that the idea wasn’t only to tide over a Balance of Payments (BOP) crisis; the changes they brought in went beyond the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) conditionalities for the bailout. The reforms, they insist, were ‘home-grown’. In the years leading up to 1991, technocrats in government had been thinking and writing about how India’s economic policies had been blocking the country’s rise to potential and the structural changes needed. If the broad range of reforms—including tearing down the industrial license permit raj, an exchange rate correction, and liberalising foreign direct investment and trade policies—could be launched within a matter of days of a new government joining office, they argue, it is because the blueprints were ready, waiting for the go-ahead from the political leadership.
The reformers of 1991 say that the idea wasn’t only to tide over a Balance of Payments (BOP) crisis; the changes they brought in went beyond the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) conditionalities for the bailout.
At least two well-regarded technocrats that were important in the 1991 reforms disagree—publicly and in off-the-record conversations. In a media interview last month, one of them, the economic adviser in the reforms team, Dr Ashok Desai, suggested that if there were any reformers in government before the IMF “forced” India to liberalise in 1991, “they hid themselves very well”. According to him, after the BOP crisis was resolved, finance minister Dr Manmohan Singh turned “dead against reforms”.
The multiple versions of the reforms story make it difficult to separate fact from romance. It cannot be disputed, though, that the 1991 BOP crisis was a turning point for the economy. India had tided over BOP crises earlier with loans from the IMF, repaid them prematurely, and avoided going through with the bailout’s conditionalities. 1991 was singularly different because India was on the brink of default, which is likely to have forced politicians to set politics aside and listen to technocrats. Any default on external obligations would have meant hurting India’s credibility grievously and an inescapable sense of national shame. The government probably took the view that there was no choice other than to take corrective steps. Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao named Dr Manmohan Singh, who had been a technocrat in government and was well regarded in global policy circles, as his finance minister. Dr Singh clearly had the Prime Minister’s, his party’s and the IMF’s trust. Records irrefutably show that the Congress party’s acceptance of the reversals in the interventionist economic policies of the first four post-Independence decades was not secured by the Prime Minister. He had delegated the task of tackling doubts and resistance within the party to his ministers, in particular, the finance minister and the commerce minister, and an aide in his office. The finance minister defended the reforms on the floor of the house in Parliament.
National Public Radio (NPR) ignited a social media firestorm Thursday night over a tweet that appears to mock capitalism, despite taxpayer dollars accounting for much of the organization’s annual budget.
The outlet posted a story titled “And Now, Crocs With Stiletto Heels” that explores a curious new collaboration between luxury fashion brand Balenciaga and Crocs, the rubber slipper company responsible for fashion faux pas among the millions of comfort-clinging owners nationwide.
The caption accompanying the article, which was written in both uppercase and lowercase letters, appears to mock the collaboration: “CaPitAliSm bReEds InNovAtiOn,” it reads.
The tweet’s language sparked outrage on social media, with figures like conservative Tim Young calling out the irony in NPR’s three-word post.
“You wouldn’t exist without capitalism, clown who is tweeting on behalf of NPR,” he wrote.
“Job at public news station wouldn’t exist wo capitalism,” another user echoed. “Are you guys ok?”
“Our tax money shouldn’t pay for this,” one person expressed.
“It’s still a hell of a lot better than communism at breeding innovation, even if some of the products are silly,” one woman fired back.
