With less than a month to go for the Lok Sabha elections to conclude and a possible Narendra Modi-led NDA government at the Centre, there is growing rhetoric from the […]
Category: Opinion
Personal Opinion of Kunal Majumder on issues of importance
Those of us who have been part of the Delhi political journalism circuit are well aware of a slew of anti-Manmohan Singh pieces in all leading publications in the last […]
A few weeks ago, I was caught in a debate with three ‘liberal’ journalist friends on how the media should deal with this creature called Rahul Gandhi. With the advent […]
The apex court judgment to set aside the 2009 Delhi High Court judgment on section 377 is a retrograde step towards equal rights for all citizens
A slew of articles have appeared recently in foreign press, including Time Magazine, Foreign Affairs and The Economist, on the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s leadership abilities. After the departure of Pranab Mukherjee from the finance ministry, the PM has taken over his original job. He is credited for having fathered the economic liberalisation process in India as finance minister in the 1990s. However, somewhere between the criticism and counter-criticism and the rhetoric on good and bad economics, people seem to have missed the original reason for the mess in the Singh government. One of the first agencies to criticise the government was Standard and Poor’s (S&P), which pointed out 10 reasons for a possible downgrading of India’s credit ratings. Five of these reasons were clearly political: divided leadership, Sonia Gandhi holding no cabinet position, an unelected PM who has no political base, his limited influence over the cabinet, and the Congress party being divided on economic policies.