Politics

Making post-result analyses of elections can be great fun. With the advantage of hindsight, all you need to do is Google up a bit, and speak to ten people. And, you can easily land up with vacuous, click-bait lists such as: Ten reasons why Mamata made a comeback, 13 facts about Mamata's landslide victory, Six things you should know about the Left debacle in West Bengal, and so on. Precious few of them would answer the elementary question: why did the majority of the people in West Bengal vote...

The heat and dust generated by the hateful and acrimonious exchanges over the Karnataka government's decision to celebrate the birth anniversary of Tipu Sultan will settle down sooner or later. As in all other debates, there are merits and demerits in the arguments being put forward by both proponents and detractors; but what has been missing from most contentions is the role of the man central to the conflagration – the state's chief minister, S Siddaramaiah. Before one delves into the...

The accord between the Government of India and the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isak-Muivah) is definitely not an accord by any measure; what has been announced, if anything at all, is only a statement of intent. Most of the ongoing discourse has either bordered on "whataboutery" or been academic speculation. Neither is off the mark, and yet neither is fair. For, the history of Naga insurrection is a history of failed accords, one of repeated acts of treachery and skulduggery by the...

Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah on Tuesday owned responsibility for the Congress defeat in the elections to the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Pailke (BBMP). But only had he been a bit more graceful, for in the same breath he asserted that it was not a referendum either on himself or his party. Siddaramaiah perhaps suffers from the Ostrich Syndrome, or is too arrogant to accept reality. The Chief Minister has been parroting this referendum line for a while, and only because he saw the writing...

Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah has staved off an immediate political crisis by asking for a probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) into the lottery scandal, but his worries are far from over. Barely two months after the state government had knocked at the CBI’s doors to ensure that there was a fair probe into the mysterious death of IAS officer DK Ravi, little could Siddaramiah have imagined that he would again have to seek the help of the country's top investigating agency to...

Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, who completed two years in office on Wednesday, will find the going get tougher by the day. Two elections are looming large on the horizon, and neither augurs well. The first is a prestige issue. The state government has been directed by the Supreme Court to hold elections to the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) within August 5, something that Siddaramaiah has been stalling for a while. Being asked to hold elections, itself, is a loss of face for...

The issue of splitting up the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) into smaller corporations, under some pretext or the other, has cropped up on a number of occasions in recent times. Only that, this time it's more than an academic exercise – a split definitely seems quite on the cards. What is, however, ironic in the ongoing babble over the pros and cons of a possible trifurcation of the BBMP is that many have changed opinions as times have changed. In January 2013, at a seminar on...

The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) always gets it left, right and centre when it comes to governance. And, if good governance were to be about participatory democracy, the BBMP would be reckoned to be an abject failure. For over 20 years, various ruling dispensations in the state had virtually ignored the Constitution (74th Amendment) Act, 1992, which devolves power to basic units of governance in cities and towns called ward committees. The result was a lack of transparency in civic...

If financial health is to be taken as the bottomline, the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) has been lying comatose for a while, kept alive only by alternately conniving and obliging state governments irrespective of political ideologies. The BBMP is a financial disaster for many reasons, the prime among them being the tendency to live beyond its means, not mopping up enough revenue for itself, and, of course, rampant corruption at all levels of the corporation. It has only been doing...

The Karnataka Chief Minister has been insistent that the state capital has grown too big in numbers, and, is therefore unmanageable. It is this reason that Siddaramaiah has been propping up as the official explanation to split up the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP). Bengaluru has definitely grown, and is a big mess in itself. The BBMP is currently the largest municipal corporation in the country with an area of 712.54 sq km under it. With a population of 8,443,675 according to the 2011...