Development

A quick rollback of the Railway Budget – new minister Mukul Roy will toe Mamta’s line

This has been a very surprising and strange week in Indian politics. In today’s world, with coalition politics, you can see the pressure that the Prime Minister faces, and the PM has mentioned this a number of times already – with statements to the effect that the pressure of coalition politics puts pressure against taking hard decisions. Consider the current situation – the Congress party has had to back-pedal on many laws / policies that it believes is for the public good (or will project the Congress as a party of reform). Examples abound such as the Lokpal Bill, the National Counter Terrorism Center, FDI in retail, Pension Bill, etc. In many cases, the Congress has got support from the BJP for many reform oriented proposals, but the partners of the Congress would not allow these bills to be enacted (consider the case of the proposed Pension law, or some other reform laws).
It is now becoming clear that the Congress Government is reconciled with the fact that there will be only very gradual changes that it can make, with only populist measures being such that they will get support. You only have to see the case of the current Railway Budget. For many years now, the Railways has been seen to be a resource drain on the general budget, not able to generate revenue of its own (and even the acclaimed time of Laloo Prasad Yadav when the Railways was seen to have a surplus is derided as creative accounting); conditions in the Railways are pretty bad. Mamta Banerjee was the last minister who was presenting the Railway Budget, and she seemed to consider this as the Railway Budget for Bengal rather than for the country. The current situation was that the Railways has a pretty bad reputation in terms of the number of accidents that happen and where people die, where the condition of facilities at the train stations and in the trains is pretty bad, where the website of the Railways can be slow or non-working for days and nobody really seems to care, and so on. Food in even the prestigious Shatabdi is pretty bad, with days when the food is good being counted as a bonus.
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Uttar Pradesh elections – some challenges facing Akhilesh Yadav

In the 1984 elections, after the sudden death by assassination of Indira Gandhi, her son became the new Prime Minister and in the polls soon after, he got an astounding number of parliamentary seats giving him a huge majority – with 411 MP’s out of a total possible of 543, this was a huge mandate that he got. However, due to some misguided policies and some wrong steps (opening the locks of the Ram Janambhoomi, the Muslim Personal Law Bill, the huge controversy over the Bofors deal and a group of advisors who did nothing but mis-manage his relations with the country and the media. By the time of the 1989 elections, the support for Rajiv Gandhi and the Congress significantly declined to 197 seats.
The above example just shows that just because a party gets a huge number of seats in a particular election does not mean that this honeymoon will carry over into the next election. In fact, closer home in Uttar Pradesh, the performance of BSP in the 2007 election and then in the recent elections shows how fickle public support can be. Now, with the Samajwadi Party making a huge win in the elections, and then nominating Akhilesh Yadav to be the Chief Minister, the SP can set the ground for continuing this winning way in the future, or crash and burn in the next few years. Here are a few points for the same:
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The whole drama about reservations for Muslims and its politics – primarily in Uttar Pradesh

For the past few days, in addition to the many caste calculations going on in the UP electoral scene, there is another twist that has been added to the whole discourse. This is related to political parties trying to attract the Muslim vote and what they can do for it. Now, getting support from a community is not a problem, but doing it only for electoral purposes and at the time of elections continues to be a problem, especially when it is so blatant.
A series of reports over the years have concluded that Indian muslims over the years have a level of development which is lower than that of the general population, and nobody can really doubt these conclusions. Further, over the years, a number of trades that had traditionally a higher proportion of Muslims (such as weavers) were affected by economic movements, further reducing the economic growth of the community. These were items that the Governments of the day should have handled, with targeted economic and development measures that laid a lot of emphasis on economic development that would increase the empowerment level of Muslims in the country.
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