'In India, leaders campaign in talk mode, but they prefer to govern in silent mode. For years, former prime minister Manmohan Singh was bitterly attacked for being too silent, a trait that eventually became a metaphor for his ineffective leadership. Many called his 10-year rule "a decade of official silence." But it was going to be vastly different with the new prime minister, Narendra Modi. During his four-month-long campaign this year, Modi spoke breathlessly on almost every national and local issue. He gave stump speeches, blogged, tweeted, Facebooked.
The recent Lok Sabha polls had shown that an election could be won “without Muslim support” and it was time the minority community learnt to respect Hindu sentiments, VHP chief patron and senior RSS leader Ashok Singhal has said. Narendra Modi — an “ideal swayamsevak” — would deliver on the Hindutva agenda unlike the first NDA government, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad supremo and one of the longest serving senior Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) leaders told HT in an exclusive interview. The right-wing Hindu leader, who had a front-row seat at Modi’s swearing-in, said “tables had turned”.
"The Manickpur police arrested the Vasai taluka chief of the BJP on Tuesday after the Election Commission (EC) cracked its whip against the organizer of Narendra Modi's 3D rally for not taking adequate permissions to erect a pandal on government-owned land in April. Uttamkumar Bhaskar Nair, the BJP president in Vasai, was arrested under IPC Section 171(h) for making illegal payments in connection with an election, and sections 37(3) and 145 of the Bombay Police Act. He was granted bail the same afternoon by the Vasai court, said sub-inspector Vijaykumar Dhumal of the Manickpur police.
'The Right to Food Campaign is flummoxed with the resounding silence of the Finance Minister on the National Food Security Act (NFSA), 2013, in his Budget Speech for 2014-2015 presented in the Lok Sabha on 10th July, 2014. This is in sharp contrast to the BJP’s pre-election manifesto, which clearly committed, “BJP has always held that ‘universal food security’ is integral to national security. BJP will take steps to ensure that the benefits of the scheme reach the common man and that the right to food does not remain an act on paper or a political rhetoric.”
'AFTER all its grandstanding about upholding high standards of propriety and morality, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) finds itself in a tight spot as far as Union Minister of State for Chemicals and Fertilizers Nihal Chand Meghwal is concerned. There has been a growing outcry for the Minister’s resignation after a Jaipur court summoned him and 17 others in a sexual assault case. The case relates to the complaint by a 20-year-old woman from Sirsa in Haryana accusing her husband and 17 others, including the Minister, of raping her over several months in 2011.
'Two RSS pracharaks — Ram Madhav and Shiv Prakash — will join BJP shortly in a move which seems illustrative of RSS's desire to take a stake in the Modi government. Party sources said RSS spokesperson Ram Madhav and Shiv Prakash, who sees Sangh's activities in Western UP, will join the BJP as part of the large-scale organizational changes in the party which are due anytime now. Both are likely to be general secretaries in the team of the new party president who is about to take over from Rajnath Singh...
"The 16th Lok Sabha elections have culminated in something that anyone who looks closely at the history and functioning of this Brahminical Hindu nation could have easily expected. These elections announced the victory, however incomplete, of the right wing Hindutva party- BJP. The sheer number of seats (282 on its own) and the thumping majority has surely shocked many, including perhaps the BJP. This so-called "clean sweep", however, doesn't represent the real aspirations or choices of the Indian population.
' Narendra Modi’s barbs at the UPA government in the last one year and his poll-time rhetoric have become the core of the Congress’ ammunition to take him on. The party on Monday hurled back at Prime Minister Modi some of his statements attacking the UPA in the context of price rise and Chinese incursion into Indian territory in Ladakh.
"Suresh Soni, senior leader of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or the RSS, reportedly compared May 16 -- the day Lok Sabha election results were declared and the BJP emerged victorious -- to August 16, 1947, the day after India won its independence and the erstwhile British rulers finally left the country. Mr Soni, a joint general secretary of the RSS, made the comments while addressing 161 first-time BJP MPs at a two-day training camp organised by the party at Surajkund on the border between Delhi and Haryana, said sources..."
"Industrialist Aditya Birla, who came under investigation by the CBI in the coal allocation case, was the largest contributor to BJP donating Rs 7.50 crore through his General Electoral Trust in 2012-2013. The Trust had donated Rs 26.6 crore to the BJP between 2004-2005 and 2011-2012. Incidentally, Birla's name came up for investigation during the last months of the UPA regime. The Birla group did not make any contribution to Congress in the last financial year after being its top donor with a donation of Rs 36.4 crore between 2004-2005 and 2011-2012.
