BJP: Well-deserved win
By Vijay Darda | 20-10-2014 Congress: Self-inflicted loss The assembly elections in Maharashtra and Haryana had assumed a significance beyond the ambit of merely determining the shape of the political formation that would be ruling these two states. Coming within four months of the biggest success achieved by prime minister Narendra Modi in bringing […]
Alliances: Living beyond expiry date
By Vijay Darda | 22-09-2014 Quite in sync with the coalition era, we are accustomed to alliances and grand alliances in our state politics, and have never dreamt of an era of a single party rule, so we cling to the belief that whatever be the internal and external tensions these arrangements would survive […]
Making judges suspect post-facto
By Vijay Darda | 08-09-2014 In April 2013, when Chief Justice P Sathasivam ordered the quashing of the second FIR against Amit Shah in the Tulsiram Prajapati case nobody could have predicted that he had a ‘deal’ with the BJP. Indeed, at that time the Modi campaign had not even started, so the question […]
Getting better from worse: The Congress challenge
By Vijay Darda | 07-07-2014 After the May 2014 General Elections, the Congress party has been reduced to its worst-ever position in the history of democratic politics in our country. In states like Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra where it has been holding an unchallenged position for decades, it has been brought down to a […]
Cong self-goals mount Rahul’s losses
By Vijay Darda | 31-05-2014 After the UPA-II got power in 2009, the common perception in political circles was that at some point of time during the course of the next five years the Congress leadership in government would pass from the hands of Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh to Rahul Gandhi. This was […]
Kejriwal: Anarchy as strategy
By Vijay Darda | 17-03-2014 Let us face it. After the Delhi assembly elections in December 2013, when the Aam Aadmi Party emerged with 28 seats as a major player it shocked politicians, media players and a lot of other know-alls. But the common people did heave a sigh of relief. There was a […]
Electing 16th Lok Sabha, onus on the people
By Vijay Darda | 10-03-2014 The high democratic ideal of a government, of the people, by the people and for the people places a great responsibility on the people. They have to use their collective sovereign power wisely when electing a government. Through more than six decades of working with the largest democracy in […]
Telangana: Doing the right thing, the wrong way
By Vijay Darda | 17-02-2014 The legitimacy for separate Telangana is an issue beyond debate. There is historical evidence to establish it, and there is an increasing amount of documentation to assert that political leaders too have accepted it. But then we know from experience, that the right thing seldom gets done. The people […]
Decency needed in dialogue
By Vijay Darda | 28-01-2014 In recent times we have seen a flurry of some very unbecoming public conversations. There has been the scenario of the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi daring the Samajwadi Party leader Mulayam Singh Yadav to transform UP into a Gujarat, and then observing that the latter cannot do […]
AAP: Hope and revolution combine
By Vijay Darda | 06-01-2014 Way back in the 1980s, it was the then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi who spoke of India marching into the 21st century on the wings of information technology. The rest of the world scoffed at him. When he spoke about computers, the rest of the politicians used to argue […]