In Politics some scripts will play again escapism is the problem, not the solution
the former Prime Minister–Mahathir was accompanied by PKR deputy president Azmin Ali and former Umno division leader Khairuddin Abu Hassan. this new alliance in the opposition. While dismissing those criticisms drenched in schadenfreude, take note of the cogent arguments against the former Prime Minster “hijacking the opposition for his own agenda”. the claim by Bersatu protem committee president Muhyiddin Yassin is merely an assumption and is meant to distract BN, but the ruling coalition would not take the bait.
If former Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad is really a spent force, then why is UMNO so afraid of him? Furthermore, why is it that most UMNO operatives I talk to fly into paroxysms of rage whenever the subject of political prisoner Anwar Ibrahim is broached?
While personality politics of course plays a role in this matter, the real reason – the most important reason – is that these former UMNO members did what is anathema to UMNO. They split the Malay vote
The wide spectrum of justice can breed paradox.
a good dose of empathy is vital. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, empathy is “the feeling that you understand and share another person’s experiences and emotions”. by the recent upsurge in the Kashmir Valley are asking themselves why voters are so agitated. Here is my empathy thought-experiment on the reasons.
The reconciliatory handshake between former premier Dr Mahathir Mohamad and jailed PKR de facto leader Anwar Ibrahim - whom he had sacked as his deputy and vilified 18 years ago - is proof that there are truly no permanent enemies in politics, analysts said.
Political analyst Associate Prof Ahmad Ghazali Abu Hassan said he viewed the occasion as a healthy development, and a sign of a matured democracWhile the cordial courtroom meeting between former opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim and his nemesis Dr Mahathir Mohamad is unprecedented, PKR secretary general Rafizi Ramli said it remains to be seen whether this would have any tangible outcome.
“There have been a series of events that you’d thought would never happen. But in terms of how it affects society and the political scenario, it is actually quite arbitrary.
As politics buzzes towards another general election; as conversation and opinion polls chase each other along an entertaining circumference; as reasons advance and propositions retreat; as issues climb on the graph of voter-impact, and reasons get dissected with a surgeon’s scalpel, one gut cause for popular anger seems to have eluded the attention of pundits and their hangers on: justice.
PKR deputy president Mohd Azmin Ali has expressed confidence in straight fights in the next general election, even with Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia’s (Bersatu) arrival to the political arena and the prospect of an early election.
Corruption is another synonym for injustice, for it is robbery of people’s resources. Corruption is not exchange of wealth between the rich; it is the people’s money accumulating in limited pockets. they were siphoning off money collected from taxes.
Justice is neither expected nor offered in a dictatorship, which is why it becomes such an intense demand when a dictator falls. But justice is intrinsic to democracy. An ordinary crime is punished through law; political culpability meets its fate in elections. When justice is denied, it lingers in the mind; you can dull its edges, as in the Sajjan Kumar case, but it will haunt you from some corner of the national conscience. Every election is a judgement on justice. The verdict may not be perfect, but it works.
move was seen by the others present in court as Mahathir giving moral support to Anwar, whom he sacked in 1998 as deputy prime minister, based on their common objective
When you look at some basic statistics, like the fact that half of the world’s data was created just in the last 10 months, meaning, half of the world’s data, in the history of mankind, was created in less than the last year. It’s truly shocking.
The pace of change that we’re seeing is completely radical.… You had the wave of lean, you had the wave of outsourcing, and now we’re seeing the wave of productivity driven by data and analytics, enabling organisations to refine the way that people work together, the way that processes perform, and the way assets are productive.
The biggest thing I see has nothing to do with data science, mathematics or data storage, it has to do with legal and governance frameworks. Most of the clients I work with are multinational.
They’re dealing with different legal domains across countries. They’re dealing with different issues of consumer protection, different levels of employee protection.
Just having a legal framework around what data they can use and what they can’t, how they can process it and what they’re allowed to do with it — it’s a huge challenge, just getting your head around the legality of what you’re allowed to do with the data you have, what consumers are allowing you to do with it, what employees are allowing you to do with it.…
You hear a lot of times from companies, “Oh, we anonymise everything.” That gets people a little bit scared, and they have that inclination to protect some information from you.
There have been a series of events that you’d thought would never happen. But in terms of how it affects society and the political scenario, it is actually quite arbitrary.
As politics buzzes towards another general election; as conversation and opinion polls chase each other along an entertaining circumference; as reasons advance and propositions retreat; as issues climb on the graph of voter-impact, and reasons get dissected with a surgeon’s scalpel, one gut cause for popular anger seems to have eluded the attention of pundits and their hangers on: justice.
PKR deputy president Mohd Azmin Ali has expressed confidence in straight fights in the next general election, even with Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia’s (Bersatu) arrival to the political arena and the prospect of an early election.
“I am always an optimist,” he said today when asked.
MCA president Liow Tiong Lai has rubbished Parti Pribumi Bersatu's (Bersatu) claim that a small vote swing in the next general election could see 45 BN seats go to the opposition. also read this Datuk Johari Umno supreme council m
the former Prime Minister–Mahathir was accompanied by PKR deputy president Azmin Ali and former Umno division leader Khairuddin Abu Hassan. this new alliance in the opposition. While dismissing those criticisms drenched in schadenfreude, take note of the cogent arguments against the former Prime Minster “hijacking the opposition for his own agenda”. the claim by Bersatu protem committee president Muhyiddin Yassin is merely an assumption and is meant to distract BN, but the ruling coalition would not take the bait.
If former Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad is really a spent force, then why is UMNO so afraid of him? Furthermore, why is it that most UMNO operatives I talk to fly into paroxysms of rage whenever the subject of political prisoner Anwar Ibrahim is broached?
While personality politics of course plays a role in this matter, the real reason – the most important reason – is that these former UMNO members did what is anathema to UMNO. They split the Malay vote
The wide spectrum of justice can breed paradox.
a good dose of empathy is vital. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, empathy is “the feeling that you understand and share another person’s experiences and emotions”. by the recent upsurge in the Kashmir Valley are asking themselves why voters are so agitated. Here is my empathy thought-experiment on the reasons.
The reconciliatory handshake between former premier Dr Mahathir Mohamad and jailed PKR de facto leader Anwar Ibrahim - whom he had sacked as his deputy and vilified 18 years ago - is proof that there are truly no permanent enemies in politics, analysts said.
Political analyst Associate Prof Ahmad Ghazali Abu Hassan said he viewed the occasion as a healthy development, and a sign of a matured democracWhile the cordial courtroom meeting between former opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim and his nemesis Dr Mahathir Mohamad is unprecedented, PKR secretary general Rafizi Ramli said it remains to be seen whether this would have any tangible outcome.
“There have been a series of events that you’d thought would never happen. But in terms of how it affects society and the political scenario, it is actually quite arbitrary.
As politics buzzes towards another general election; as conversation and opinion polls chase each other along an entertaining circumference; as reasons advance and propositions retreat; as issues climb on the graph of voter-impact, and reasons get dissected with a surgeon’s scalpel, one gut cause for popular anger seems to have eluded the attention of pundits and their hangers on: justice.
PKR deputy president Mohd Azmin Ali has expressed confidence in straight fights in the next general election, even with Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia’s (Bersatu) arrival to the political arena and the prospect of an early election.
Corruption is another synonym for injustice, for it is robbery of people’s resources. Corruption is not exchange of wealth between the rich; it is the people’s money accumulating in limited pockets. they were siphoning off money collected from taxes.
Justice is neither expected nor offered in a dictatorship, which is why it becomes such an intense demand when a dictator falls. But justice is intrinsic to democracy. An ordinary crime is punished through law; political culpability meets its fate in elections. When justice is denied, it lingers in the mind; you can dull its edges, as in the Sajjan Kumar case, but it will haunt you from some corner of the national conscience. Every election is a judgement on justice. The verdict may not be perfect, but it works.
move was seen by the others present in court as Mahathir giving moral support to Anwar, whom he sacked in 1998 as deputy prime minister, based on their common objective
When you look at some basic statistics, like the fact that half of the world’s data was created just in the last 10 months, meaning, half of the world’s data, in the history of mankind, was created in less than the last year. It’s truly shocking.
The pace of change that we’re seeing is completely radical.… You had the wave of lean, you had the wave of outsourcing, and now we’re seeing the wave of productivity driven by data and analytics, enabling organisations to refine the way that people work together, the way that processes perform, and the way assets are productive.
The biggest thing I see has nothing to do with data science, mathematics or data storage, it has to do with legal and governance frameworks. Most of the clients I work with are multinational.
They’re dealing with different legal domains across countries. They’re dealing with different issues of consumer protection, different levels of employee protection.
Just having a legal framework around what data they can use and what they can’t, how they can process it and what they’re allowed to do with it — it’s a huge challenge, just getting your head around the legality of what you’re allowed to do with the data you have, what consumers are allowing you to do with it, what employees are allowing you to do with it.…
You hear a lot of times from companies, “Oh, we anonymise everything.” That gets people a little bit scared, and they have that inclination to protect some information from you.
There have been a series of events that you’d thought would never happen. But in terms of how it affects society and the political scenario, it is actually quite arbitrary.
As politics buzzes towards another general election; as conversation and opinion polls chase each other along an entertaining circumference; as reasons advance and propositions retreat; as issues climb on the graph of voter-impact, and reasons get dissected with a surgeon’s scalpel, one gut cause for popular anger seems to have eluded the attention of pundits and their hangers on: justice.
PKR deputy president Mohd Azmin Ali has expressed confidence in straight fights in the next general election, even with Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia’s (Bersatu) arrival to the political arena and the prospect of an early election.
“I am always an optimist,” he said today when asked.
MCA president Liow Tiong Lai has rubbished Parti Pribumi Bersatu's (Bersatu) claim that a small vote swing in the next general election could see 45 BN seats go to the opposition. also read this Datuk Johari Umno supreme council m
Very curious. When Barack Obama suspended his campaign for re-election to supervise relief for victims of a terrible hurricane on the East Coast, there was applause even from his opponents. Republican strategists later suggested that this intervention provided the momentum that ensured an Obama victory. But when Narendra Modi stepped into Uttarakhand, very hurriedly followed by Rahul Gandhi, voices rose in protest and some columnists brandished a long pen to call them ambulance chasers.
Obama wanted votes. So do Modi and Rahul Gandhi. What is so terribly wrong about persuading voters that you can govern by proving you can deal with a crisis? What is so venal about politicians wanting to indulge in politics? There is a very welcome downside to this: if you leap into the fray without knowing how to jump, the negative backlash will be ferocious. Accountability is every democracy’s insurance policy against incompetence.
A few elements in media, quite unable to resist pomposity, slipped into stupidity — fortunately they were marginal. The news website for Hotmail, owned by Microsoft, framed a “Yes or No” poll in cringe-inducing terms that bashed the whole community of Indian politicians. It offered a choice between “Yes, it is natural for selfish politicians to take credit” and “No. Politicians must not stoop to such low levels”.
May I suggest a similar poll about Microsoft? “Yes. Microsoft is a multinational which would never dare to describe an American politician as selfish because he or she tried to help citizens during a natural calamity”. And: “No. Pompous amateurs like us must never reduce webspace media into a heckling circus with the IQ level of a garrulous judge on a reality show”.
What did we expect those in charge of governments to do? Go off on holiday while their citizens were in danger? Did some pundits carp because Modi, always a favourite lightning rod, got the idea first? Would they have queued up to applaud if some other Chief Minister had led the way? There is no adequate answer to such questions because the truth is often hidden in the subconscious.
Rahul Gandhi, to his credit, understood what some journalists did not, that the people’s view would not be swayed by media pulpit oratory, but by the quality of relief work in affected areas. He may have even tested this proposition with a quick opinion poll, which is now almost obligatory in any serious campaign process. People are not silly. They do not blame politicians for an act of nature. But neither do they forgive governments that are unable to respond to the administrative challenge which comes in the wake of such a tragedy. If the Congress is in trouble in Uttarakhand it is not because Gujarat or Punjab officials rushed to fill their portion of the vacuum, but because the state government was missing from action.
There has always been space for tension in the wide territory over which the paths of media and politics criss-cross. This is perfectly normal, and should even be encouraged. What is fascinating is the constantly evolving dynamic of this relationship.
Politicians have always got upset at honest journalism: which, primarily, is placing in the public domain information that those in power would prefer to keep concealed. Exposure hurts their prospects of re-election. Uttarakhand, like any crisis, offered an opportunity to expose. The highest circles of UPA, for instance, must have squirmed at the news item that relief trucks organised by Congress and flagged off by Mrs Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi were stranded because drivers were not given sufficient money for fuel. This is the kind of story that travels well through public chatter.
In an innovative reversal, journalists are now beginning to lay down rules on how politicians should do their job. We are not talking corruption here, but the rather more vague “moral ambience” of decision-making. Both politicians and journalists once set standards for themselves; we now seem intent on setting standards for each other. Judgement is so much easier than introspection.
We shall see how this plays out, particularly with an election season underway. Tensions will peak as politicians seek to rise in the estimate of voters, and journalists try to puncture them. With so much at stake, it is almost inevitable that “facts” will sometimes be twisted for partisan ends, and that “truth” will be manipulated to defame opponents. This is going to be a particularly tough election, because power is neither gained nor surrendered easily.
Fortunately, the Supreme Court of both professions is the citizen. Wherever ego might lead a journalist, or an exaggerated sense of power take a politician, the true measure of worth is determined by the court of public opinion. There is no journalism without an audience. There is no political office without a voter. This is the balance that keeps our system sane.
Margaret Thatcher, who led Britain’s Conservatives from confusion into the promised land of three election victories, believed that a political party must serve as a vehicle to capture power, not limp along as a platform for views. Ideas were a mirage unless anchored in the oasis of government.
The BJP is in search of its Thatcher. Transformative change often needs the gloom of a crisis . There are two models for revitalisation. In 1969 Mrs Indira Gandhi split Congress because it had become a hippopotamus, wallowing in its own quagmire. Thatcher, straddling the same span between collapse and opportunity in 1975, did not wield an axe because she was confident that her party could accommodate the past without sacrificing the future. Both Mrs Gandhi and Thatcher were called divisive, but they understood that they had to be on the positive side of the dividing line. They had to offer solutions to a despairing electorate.
It has taken about a quarter century for a generational challenge within BJP to rise from simmer to surge. The party became a credible force in 1989, when it won 85 Lok Sabha seats. Under AB Vajpayee and LK Advani, BJP climbed to 180 MPs and deftly crafted the NDA to fashion a stable alliance. But questions inevitably arise during the forlorn years of defeat, when fusion unravels into confusion.
Alliance politics also has two models, informal and formal. Mrs Gandhi launched coalition culture in Delhi with a breathtaking swivel in 1969. She grasped the hand of Marxists who had been imprisoned by her father Jawaharlal Nehru for suspected sedition just seven years before, during the epochal war with China. But she would not let them into her Cabinet. Narasimha Rao survived through informal relationships. Atal Behari Vajpayee preferred formal partners. UPA has managed a decadelong coalition with both formal and informal allies. There is nothing sentimental about power. Mrs Indira Gandhi kept the Left onside only as long as she needed them, for either domestic or foreign policy. (The Left was very helpful in forging her alliance with the Soviet Union before the Bangladesh war.) Smaller parties have drawn their own lessons. The principal one is unsurprising. They can maximise their benefits only when a Congress or BJP is vulnerable enough to listen, but not weak enough to die.
The present impasse is more complex. Both government and opposition have disappeared, the first replaced by aggressive paralysis, the second by rampant turmoil. A Congress that cannot pass an ordinance on food security is a passenger stranded on a platform long after the train has passed. A BJP torn by internal and external dissent is a train that has not left the station.
History is never so silly as to repeat itself, but there are echoes. We are in a phase similar to Rao’s last year in office. Both Congress and BJP seem as friendless now as they did nearly twenty years ago. When circumstances become so fluid, small parties test how far they can swim, and look for a port only after having measured their strength. Ambitions rise, for they know coalitions will emerge after elections, not before. Both NDA and UPA were post-election formations. For every Deve Gowda waiting for an astrologer’s prediction to come true, there are three Gowda advisers waiting to become finance minister of India. The pressure to buy a lottery ticket becomes huge.
Politics becomes a siren. Ideology is tailored to opportunity. The BJP-Janata Dal (U) marriage developed eczema long before divorce, but convenience camouflaged differences. Nitish Kumar wed BJP when the Ram temple was at the top of BJP’s agenda, and remained in Vajpayee’s Cabinet after the Gujarat riots because he needed BJP’s help to become chief minister of Bihar. And BJP had no problems in Bihar with what it described as “minority appeasement” elsewhere.
The casino is being cleared once again. Old bets are off. But politicians can only come to a new table with chips loaned by familiar vote banks.
Alas, if you depend too much on past arithmetic, you could miss emerging algebra. Politics as usual is insufficient for an India in churn. Old constructs have weakened visibly. Marxists are no longer principal guardians of “Left-secularism” ; for Nitish Kumar and Naveen Patnaik, Mamata Banerjee will do very nicely instead. The Third Front is not what it was in 1996 and 1997, when it could elect a PM. It is a bargaining instrument to maximise the cash flow to Bengal, Bihar and Odissa as price of support to the next Union government.
Who will form it? Simple, again. Position play will surrender to numbers. When Vajpayee got 180 seats, the BJP did not look as saffron as it did when it had only 85 MPs. Which party will get the MPs? Whichever understands the mood of the moment. As another successful vote-winner , Bill Clinton, told his opponents on his way to the White House: It’s the economics, stupid.
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