My Columns: Without Fear and Favour

Narendra Modi’s Three Nation Visit By  Deepak Parvatiyar April 17, 2015 Rate this post Rate this It is no coincidence that the US President Barrack Obama, especially praised Modi for his vision of India in his special article in Time magazine at a time when Modi was still in the middle of of his three-nation visit to France, Germany and Canada. Business diplomacy,  hard-selling India as the best destination for foreign investment to give fillip to his “Make In India” campaign and terror concerns seem the core of Narendra Modi’s foreign policy ever since he took charge as the Prime Minister in May last year. Besides, India’s quest for a permanent membership of the United Nations Security Council, and to meet its energy concerns through nuclear power are the two other distinctive features of Modi’s foreign visits and negotiations. Besides, the emphasis on India’s youthfulness and the implorations to shun the “old perceptions” about India are im...

Bihar to be the first state to allow NRI Voting By  Deepak Parvatiyar April 15, 2015 Rate this post Rate this Till the provision was amended in 2010, Section 20 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 disqualified a non-resident Indian (NRI) from getting his/her name registered in the electoral rolls. The earlier provision of 1950 entitled every Indian citizen who attained the legal age of voting and “is ordinarily resident in a constituency” to be registered in the electoral rolls in that constituency. However, till 2010, when the first amendments were made to the existing law, the term “ordinarily resident” had excluded citizens who had migrated to some foreign country, a person of India origin as well as someone who was born outside India. In 2010, the Representation of the People (Amendment) Bill was passed to allow the non-resident Indians to vote in the elections. However the process was cumbersome as the overseas Indians were required...

Bail to Lakhvi and Its Impact on India By  Deepak Parvatiyar April 13, 2015 Rate this post Rate this Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, the suspected mastermind of the 26/11 Mumbai attack and top Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) commander, has yet again been released on bail by a Pakistani court. His release on the morning of 10 April is the third time in less than four months that the dreaded UN-designated terrorist has been granted bail by the Pakistani courts. It was on 18 December 2014, when a Pakistani anti-terror court in Rawalpindi granted the bail to Lakhvi for the first time. The bail had been granted to Lakhvi against a bond of PKR 500,000 by an anti-terrorism court just two days after the Peshawar school massacre wherein 132 children and nine staff were killed by Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan. However, strong protest from India forced Pakistan to reorder his detention the very next day. Thereafter, on 8 January 2015, he was granted bail in a six-year-old...

Similarities and Differences Between Indian and American Elections By  Deepak Parvatiyar April 10, 2015 Rate this post 1 Vote In his first media interview, eight months after becoming the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi quipped that he found it “amusing” how people, who did not talk about a ‘Modi wave’ in 2014 Lok Sabha elections, “are now engaged in intense discussion” regarding such a wave. He was replying to a question on the perceived end of the ‘Modi wave’ in Delhi assembly elections. How India Elects Its Prime Minister? Obviously, the last general election was remarkable for the fact that it was contested very much on the pattern of the presidential elections in the United States of America. It was all about the creation and marketing of Brand Modi – the BJP’s PM candidate, a la the US presidential elections. This was very unlike the Westminster system of democracy, modelled after the politics of the United Kingdom, that India follows. In th...

Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana – How successful is it? By  Deepak Parvatiyar April 8, 2015 Rate this post Rate this On September 2 last year, soon after the ambitious Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana was launched, we wrote in these columns that the real challenge was to keep the accounts that would open under the PMJDY alive. ( http://www.elections.in/blog/jan-dhan-yojana-a-too-ambitious-scheme/ ). We had written that the government need not rush the ambitious plan of financial inclusion without a proper action plan. More than half a year later, the PMJDY seems to have progressed steadily although the scheme still faces several teething troubles. In September, we had pointed out that the rush to open the accounts to meet the deadline set by the Prime Minister meant that there was no proper screening of the account holders. Besides, what was also required was a survey at the rural level to identify the financially excluded population to avoid dup...