[Reader-list] Farewell to our Humid Weimar

[Kshmendra Kaul]

I have taken in two significant impressions from the events:
 
1. The Congress Party's (which has much to answer for when one thinks about "what is wrong with India) seeming willingness to risk losing "power" for the sake of sticking to positions that they declare are "in the Nation's interest". 
 
2. The politicking in Mayawati's pronouncement "The nuclear deal is anti-Muslim". I believe that the BSP is the most (and perhaps only) significant political intiative in post-Independence India. But this statement ...
 
K


--- On Fri, 7/11/08, Shuddhabrata Sengupta <shuddha at sarai.net> wrote:

From: Shuddhabrata Sengupta <shuddha at sarai.net>
Subject: [Reader-list] Farewell to our Humid Weimar
To: "sarai list" <reader-list at sarai.net>
Date: Friday, July 11, 2008, 4:37 PM

Dear All,

I find it sad that all those who live in India are being sent  
headlong into a period of turbulence following the unilateral  
decision by the so-called Left parties in response to the Indo-US  
Nuclear Deal. In all likelihood, if the government of the day fails  
to pass the test of numbers on the floor of parliament, India will  
head straight for early elections. The likely beneficiary of this  
process will be the BJP, and if, going by the extensive coverage that  
the Hindu, usually the mainstream media mouthpiece of the so called  
Communist Party of India (Marxist) has given to L.K. Advani (the  
billowing PM in waiting of the BJP), then, it needs to be read as a  
sign of things to come. A covert entente cordiale between the so  
called Left and the Right in Indian politics. Or, in other words,  
Prakash Karat handing L.K. Advani the prime-ministership on a  
platter. A decade or so ago, while Harkrishen Singh Surjeet was  
'managing' the Congress on behalf of the CPI(M), a similar covert  
entente cordiale between the so called Left and the Congress (which  
matured into a full fledged partnership) was as unthinkable, as what  
augurs, when the 'Patriots' of the Left and the Right begin dancing  
their secret tango.

In this entire episode, everyone has come out in glorious colours,  
the Congress with its pathetic kow-towing to US interests under the  
stewardship of George Bush, the Left with its myopic Nuclear  
patriotism and its abdication of any responsibility towards  
developing a programme that is critical of the Indian state's Nuclear  
military ambitions, the BJP with its sabre rattling, the Socialists  
with their usual cynical opportunism.

And so ends the brief humid Weimar of the Indian Republic. Let us  
celebrate its demise by recalling how pallid and banal it has already  
become.

I guess we should all now get accustomed to the idea of  Narendra  
Modi as a possible Union Minister of the Interior in the forthcoming  
years.

best

Shuddha


Shuddhabrata Sengupta

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