Off with his head

By 
Tavleen Singh

From

http://www.tavleensingh.com/article_detail.php?aid=306

 

Last week, when it was announced that there were plans afoot to set income tax sleuths on to those who invest in Gujarat, my first reaction was disbelief. Surely not, I thought, not when foreign investors are fleeing India in droves, not when the Reserve Bank has itself pointed out ominously that foreign direct investment in India has dropped by nearly 40 per cent in recent months. Why would a prime minister whose expertise lies in the field of economics allow such insanity to go ahead?

The reasons could most certainly not be economic, so I started searching for political reasons and realisation quickly dawned. Narendra Modi has long been seen by political pundits in Delhi, especially those of Congress persuasion, as the only man who could in 2014 challenge their glamorous young prince and so he must be destroyed. Besides he has been flying too high for his own good, has he not? Always holding those conventions to boast about ‘vibrant’ Gujarat and always making jokes about the Congress Party that the silly old ‘aam aadmi’ laughs his head off at without noticing that they are laughing on the same side as a merchant of death, a ‘maut ka saudagar’. Remember when the financial scandals started falling out of the central government’s cupboard at so alarming a rate and how he made that speech in which he said ‘munni badnaam hui’. How dare he? Who did he mean? The Congress Party or she who leads it? So off with his head.

Not easily done politically because somehow he has managed, wretched man, to keep winning elections (with even Muslims voting for him), so someone in Delhi came up with the cunning plan to destroy him economically. Ordering income tax raids on political opponents is an old Congress practice that was used recklessly and with powerful effect by first Mrs Gandhi during the Emergency and then again by V P Singh when he was Rajiv’s finance minister. He went too far, though, because he started to raid Rajiv’s friends and so he had to go. But to get back to Gujarat. Under that ‘maut ka saudagar’, its economy has climbed to dizzying heights. Even a casual visitor can see the speed at which roads get built, the availability of electricity in remote villages, the check dams that help irrigate areas that have never seen irrigation, the primary health centres that actually work. Investors see much more. They see an administration that is less corrupt than most and a chief minister who fulfills his promises. If he tells you that he will make land available to you in a week, he ensures that this happens, and if he promises a single window to clear your projects, he delivers.

These are not things that Congress chief ministers can do because their primary concern is to ensure that the ‘high command’ is kept happy by regular and large infusions into the coffers of the party. They can get away with no governance at all as long as they do this. Then they have to ensure that they pay regular obeisance to the party’s ruling Dynasty and by the time all this is over, there is little time for doing anything else. So the best governed states in India are those that are not run by Congress chief ministers and the only way to keep them in check is to curb them in every possible way. If it is income tax raids in Gujarat, it is unwieldy schemes like the NREGA in Bihar. You see when the central government puts in place a scheme like this then the state government loses some of its own control over funds and welfare policies. They regularly complain about this but their complaints fall on deaf ears because this is an area in which Sonia Gandhi and her cabinet, the National Advisory Council, are personally interested.

The end result is that India, so glittering, so full of allure only six months ago, is now beginning to look like it did before economic liberalisation. It is beginning to look like a dangerous country to invest in and in this bleak scenario there is Gujarat that has so far continued to shine like a beacon where foreign and Indian investors are concerned. This cannot be allowed to happen because it makes the rest of India look even worse than it already does. Besides, we all know that Narendra Modi is an evil man, a merchant of death, so who cares if all his efforts to make Gujarat rich and prosperous are endangered by famously corrupt income tax inspectors. Of course, there is the small problem that the people of Gujarat may suffer as well but since they have been regularly rejecting Congress at election time who cares about them. Off with their heads as well.

Dirty tricks by Congress

Kanchan Gupta

From

http://kanchangupta.blogspot.com/2011/03/dirty-tricks-department.html

piteful act, deplorable deed
The Congress is just not reconciled to the idea of Gujarat, more specifically Narendra Modi, showing the way to rapid development and inclusive growth through good governance. Hence, every effort is made by the Congress, through the UPA Government, to harass Modi and stall Gujarat's progress. Having failed to deliver anything that even remotely resembles the Gujarat model in the States where the Congress is in power, the party leadership has responded with limitless hate and spite. The CBI has played hand maiden to the Congress in its deplorable endeavour.

The latest object of Congress envy is Vibrant Gujarat, the hugely successful investors conference hosted by the Gujarat Government and a brainchild of Narendra http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifModi, which has played a significant role in fuelling Gujarat's success story. At this year's Vibrant Gujarat, MoUs for projects worth Rs 1237570.48 crore were signed. This despite the Congress instructing the Union Ministry of Finance to warn public sector banks against participating in the investor summit in any manner. Complaisant babus in the Ministry eagerly conveyed the message to bank chairmen; that didn't quite do the trick. Nor did the campaign by 'friendly' media to run down the initiative help the Congress.

So now the Congress, once again through the Union Ministry of Finance, has instructed the Income Tax Department to make life difficult for the Modi Government by scaring away investors who signed MoUs. The Income Tax Department hahttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifs http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifdhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifutifully
obliged its political masters of the day by issuing a notice on February 17 to Gujarat’s Industries Commissioner, demanding details of Memoranda of Understanding signed during Vibrant Gujarat earlier this year. Never before has something so extraordinary happened.

As I have said in the editorial I wrote for The Pioneer, a State Government is at liberty to raise funds and invite investments to further development and propel growth. That the Government of Gujarat has raced past others is a tribute to the quality of governance under Narendra Modi’s tutelage which no Congress leader can ever achieve — either in New Delhi or in State capitals. To try and scuttle the efforts of the Government of Gujarat and arm-twist potential investors into staying away from the State is tantamount to disallowing States to function freely.It's a crudehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif assault on federalism.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

As my friend and commentator on the INI blog,Nitin Pai, tweeted on Thursday: "So now the UPA govt is using the Income Tax department to bully/threaten investors in Gujarat. Anti-national fascism on display."

If the intention behind the notice had not been mala fide, the Income Tax Department, or for that matter the Union Finance Ministry, need not have served a notice. All that they needed to do was get the details from the Vibrant Gujarat website. For all those who are interested, you can access full details of the MoUs here.

Gujarat poll results 2002-in Cho Ramaswamy's view

From

www.hvk.org/articles/1202/168.html

This article was written after the Gujarat poll results in 2002...

Author: Cho S. Ramaswamy Publication: The Hindu Date: December 20, 2002 URL: http://www.hinduonnet.com/stories/2002122005291100.htm

 Everything is lost; tragedy has struck; the heavens have fallen; after this it could only be the deluge; God � if there be one � save the country; the BJP under Narendra Modi has won a thumping two-thirds majority in the elections to the Gujarat Assembly. The major English newspapers and the Star TV, which had adopted the Congress under Sonia Gandhi as the only possible saviour of the pride of this nation from the clutches of menials � to borrow a description from the Election Commission � are still trying to recover from the shock delivered by the people of Gujarat. How could this happen? The media is still analysing the results of the Gujarat elections to discover what went wrong. Actually, nothing went wrong and that is the problem of the media. Caste-wise division of Hindus, as hoped for by the Congress and the media, did not happen. The ten- month interval managed by the Election Commission, between the Godhra incident and the elections, did not erase the horrendous affair, as hoped for by the media, from public memory. Opinion polls, cheaper by the dozen, did not influence the voters. The Sonia magic, which is supposed to inspire and unite secular Indians against the communal and hardcore Hindus, did not work. The voters did not buy the Congress propaganda that it was the Vishwa Hindu Parishad which had torched the train in Godhra. Nor did they eat out of the hands of a section of the media which accused Mr. Modi of having engineered the ghastly post-Godhra riots. It was the media which went wrong by attempting to suit its reports to its wishes. The Congress had to be shown to have gained substantially since the last Assembly elections, and what better way of doing it than by harping everyday on the fact that the party now had Shankersinh Waghela, who had polled 11.7 per cent in the last elections? Some 34.9 per cent of the voters had voted for the Congress in 1998 and Waghela would be importing 11.7 per cent of his own spurious Hindutva vote, making in all a grand total of 46.6 per cent which was higher than the BJP's vote share by about 2 per cent. The expectation of the media was arithmetically correct, but politically naïve. Turncoats do not carry their voters with them wherever they go; much of the baggage gets confiscated at the hustings, if the defector heads for a destination not liked by his supporters. And this is what happened to Waghela's vote; while his followers in the last elections might have liked the BJP less than him, their hostility towards the Congress has obviously been more intense than their disappointment with the BJP. His votes were repossessed by the voters to be cast in favour of the BJP, which anyway was more near to them than the Congress. It was not only the arithmetic of the media which went wrong. Its chemistry went awry too. The expected blending of three powerful groups � the Kshatriyas, the Harijans, and the Adivasis � and their mixing with the minorities to produce a winning position for the Congress just did not occur; nor did the stand-off between Keshubhai Patel and Narendra Modi filter out the Patels, for use by the Congress. The media's physics was erroneous too; the energy generated by the Election Commission did not, as anticipated, light up the fortunes of the Congress. So, instead of staring at Gujarat to find out what went wrong, the media would do well to look inwards and realise that it missed to notice the obvious. The Congress refuses to even acknowledge the enormity of the threat of terrorism. In Kashmir, the first thing that the Congress - PDP Government did after getting sworn in was to disband the Special Operations Group and release several militants. This would not have inspired the confidence of the people of Gujarat, who had experienced the havoc that terrorism could wreak at Godhra and in the Akshardham temple. The fact of being a border State with Pakistan could only have intensified their concern. The BJP was seen as the only party which at least had the mind to tackle terrorism with determination. Add to this the fact that the BJP has been winning the last two elections in the State, and that Narendra Modi was seen as a person who would deliver � the people could not have been expected to support the Congress. But then, the media could have an excuse; it laid great store by the Election Commission. Had not the EC ensured that there was a sufficient time lapse between the sight of the burning train and the polling date? And did not the Commission wait before announcing elections, till the Supreme Court gave the opinion that elections cannot be postponed indefinitely? Had not the Commission, targeting an individual leader as had never been done before, announced that it would videograph the meetings and speeches of Narendra Modi, thereby delivering the message to the electorate that here was an undesirable leader fit only for single-minded surveillance by the Commission? Did not the Commission outlaw all references to Godhra in the election campaign barely eight months after the incident though it had never objected to the exploitation of the demolition of Babri Masjid in campaign after campaign even years after its occurrence? Had not, two months after the electoral rolls were revised, another revision done by the EC, again breaking new ground? And by way of providing that little bit of delicious extras, had not the Election Commissioner heaped on the officials of Gujarat and the BJP men such sweet epithets as menials, jokers and mad men? In all fairness to the media, one has to concede that this inspired animation of the EC, along with the beloved KHAM factor, might have benumbed the best of minds, disabling them from noticing the ground realities. And the media has, albeit with more than a tinge of obstinacy, at least reacted to the result. Two did not. Sonia Gandhi, who rushed with her comments about the Kashmir election, took four days to react to the Gujarat results; the Election Commission, which did not lose much time before praising the people, and patting itself on the back for the Kashmir polls, has not come out with any comment on the completion of the Gujarat elections. The two appear to be comrades in distress, and perhaps are entitled to their period of mourning. (The writer was a Member of Parliament and Editor, Thuglak magazine)  

Congress CM joins Modi fan club

From


http://deshgujarat.com/2011/05/31/na-bhuto-na-bhavishyati-maharashtra-cm-says-praising-gujarats-agriculture/






Maharashtra’s Chief Minister Shri Prithviraj Chavan yesterday praised Gujarat’s development in the area of agriculture.This news has come at a time when Gujarat Congress is going to start farmers agitation in the state against Modi govt.

Speaking in Marathi at Ahmednagar’s Mahatma Phule Agriculture University yesterday, Maharashtra Chief Minister said, “Gujarat’s Agri growth rate is 11 per cent consistently for last ten years.”
He further said, “We are familiar Gujarat’s situation that they get Narmada water but the way agricultural production happens there, their one year produce is equal to our ten years produce. Though some fundamental changes are now initiated(in our state), their growth rate is 11%, which has never been witnessed before and never would happen in future(na bhuto na bhavishyati). While they are having 11% growth rate in agriculture, our growth rate in agriculture is merely 4-4.5%. Whether we would be able to achieve same growth rate as Gujarat or not, we have to think about that.”

India awaits the NaMo Model

By
Kanchan Gupta


From


http://www.dailypioneer.com/310885/India-awaits-the-NaMo-Model.html


There’s something eternal about folktales. No matter how old they are or how often they are retold, they still remain as relevant as they were when they were first told. What is most enduring about folktales is that they are neither culture nor society specific. The stories of Panchatantra are an example of how the wisdom contained in folktales is not limited to national borders and transcends cultural barriers. We may believe that folktales belong to the past and are irrelevant to our times. But it’s amazing how they reflect contemporary mores irrespective of their vintage. For instance, there’s a Cossack folktale I have recounted in the past because it helped explain attitudes and concerns of our times. That folktale came to mind while watching a television debate late Friday evening on last week’s Vibrant Gujarat investors’ conference in Gandhinagar. So here’s the story told all over again.

A young Cossack, who was a gifted horseman, dreamed of owning the best steed in the village where he lived. So he toiled and saved money to buy his dream horse, and eagerly waited for the annual animal fair that was held in a nearby village. At last, the big day came and our young Cossack set off for the fair, dressed in his Sunday best. He inspected all the horses on sale and finally found a stallion with a flowing mane, flaring nostrils, rippling muscles and a glistening white fleece. This was the horse he had dreamt of and toiled for! The owner asked for a huge sum, our young Cossack paid the money without even bothering to haggle over the price. Horse bought, its proud new owner mounted the steed and cantered home. He rode straight to the village square where his fellow Cossacks gathered every Sunday evening for raucous drunken revelry, dismounted and called them over to show off his new horse. A collective gasp was heard as the Cossacks gathered around: None had seen a more handsome stallion than this. One of them patted the horse and praised his strength; another counted his teeth and declared he couldn’t be more than a year old; a third ran his fingers through the mane and sighed. The village elder was so impressed that he declared the stallion the official stud of the village horse collective and ordered a fresh round of vodka for everybody. Then along came the village cynic, who was also the local correspondent of Pravda and the designated Cossack ‘intellectual’. He walked around the horse, went back to where he had been sitting sipping vodka, struck a pose similar to Rodin’s Thinker, got up after a while, walked back to the horse, lifted its tail, sniffed and declared, in a stentorian voice similar to that in which judges give their final verdict, “The horse stinks.”

That verdict of the cynic-intellectual-journalist Cossack, who could see nothing good about the stallion over which everybody else was swooning and for whom the ultimate test was to lift the horse’s tail and check whether his rear orifice stank, came to mind while watching the host of the television debate pompously waving aside the spectacular success of this year’s Vibrant Gujarat and declaring, in a caustic, dismissive voice, that promised investments worth more than India’s foreign exchange reserves mean nothing as the State is still “haunted by the riots of 2002” and Chief Minister Narendra Modi is “tainted” by the violence. Amazingly, he kept on repeating this point despite one of the panellists, a Muslim from Gujarat, forcefully asserting, more than once, that Gujaratis have moved on, Gujarat has moved ahead. That, in a sense, is the problem with our Left-liberal journalists, bogus intellectuals, pseudo-secularists and intellectually bankrupt commentariat without whom south Delhi would have been just another colony, no different from the colonies of east Delhi. They remain stuck in 2002 when Gujarat erupted in fury following the ghastly slaughter of 59 pilgrims returning from Ayodhya who were burned alive when a coach of Sabarmati Express was set on fire by a Muslim mob at Godhra on February 27. In the violence that followed, by all means far less gruesome than communal riots India has seen in Congress-ruled States — the massacres at Nellie and Bhagalpur come to mind — and nothing comparable to the ghastly anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984, both Muslims (790) and Hindus (254) were killed. The scale and magnitude of the violence, which nobody condones, was blown out of proportion and immeasurably magnified by activists like Teesta Setalvad, who now stands accused of forgery, perjury and serious fraud, and her ilk, as well as their myriad admirers in media who seek to mould public opinion by manipulating information and by repeating the same lie, Goebbels like, a million times and more.

But the furious rant that emanates from television studios and the campaign of calumny to which newspapers take recourse when it comes to defaming and demonising Mr Modi does not, in any manner, reflect the mood in Gujarat or the popularity of the man whom India’s disproportionately empowered Left-liberal journalists, bogus intellectuals, pseudo-secularists and intellectually bankrupt commentariat love to hate. Mr Modi, dubbed “maut ka saudagar” by Ms Sonia Gandhi in a speech drafted by a Bollywood script-writer, has won successive Assembly elections, decimated the Congress, and taken Gujarat to dizzying heights of development, growth and prosperity. In recent local elections, more than 100 Muslims contested and won on a BJP ticket. It would be facetious to suggest people have forgotten 2002; but the present and the future of Gujarat have dimmed memories of those terrible days. That’s how it happens. But not for our Modi-bashers who are caught in a time-warp and suffer from selective amnesia: They keep on harping about 2002 as if that year marked the beginning of communal strife in India. The macabre tantalises them more than anything that is bright, positive and fruitful.

With last week’s Vibrant Gujarat resulting in the signing of MoUs worth $462 billion for projects that would create more than five million new jobs, Gujarat now glitters among all the States of the Union. It could be argued that not all the MoUs will fructify. True, but if the trend so far is any indicator, Gujarat can look forward to more than a third of the promised amount coming in — that would still mean half of India’s foreign exchange reserve and more than a million new jobs! The ‘Modi Model’ is working brilliantly for Gujarat; States like Madhya Pradesh and Bihar which have borrowed elements of that model are also reaping a rich harvest. India awaits the day when the ‘Modi Model’ will become the ‘Indian Model’ and propel the nation, not only Gujarat, to greater prosperity for all Indians. Ironically, our Left-liberal journalists, bogus intellectuals, pseudo-secularists and intellectually bankrupt commentariat will benefit from that too.

Is it time to acknowledge the Gujarat ‘miracle’ ?

By
Swapan Dasgupta
From:
http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/right-and-wrong/entry/is-it-time-to-acknowledge-the-gujarat-miracle

It is a commentary on the bizarre priorities of our information order that investment commitments totalling $450 billion, equalling nearly onethird of India’s GDP, are either ignored or put on par with anodyne political statements. This, however, is not the occasion to lament the lack of even-handedness in the treatment of anything remotely connected to Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi. It is the time to celebrate something that is fast becoming undeniable: the emergence of Gujarat as the economic powerhouse of India. 

Last week, there was a stark contrast between a Gujarat bubbling with optimism and the rest of the country despairing over economic mismanagement and missed opportunities . It is not that all the MoUs signed at the fifth Vibrant Gujarat summit will be translated into reality. Many will remain paper commitments . But when the who’s who of Indian industry line up to proclaim their faith in Gujarat as a wholesome place for investment, having already put their money where their mouth is, neither India nor the rest of the world can afford to be in denial.

The proclamations of faith in Gujarat are all the more meaningful because they have been made despite the Centre’s unremitting displeasure with anything that could bolster Modi’s credentials. Modi doesn’t usually win awards for being the “Reformer of the Year” or for innovative governance. In fact, he doesn’t even make it to the shortlist. But he has invariably secured an unequivocal thumbs-up from those who have a real stake in the emergence of India as a world economic power.

The skeptics, who insist that the rise and rise of Gujarat has little to do with the state government, are partially right. Entrepreneurship and business are part of the Gujarati DNA, a reason why Mukesh Ambani stated that Reliance Industries has always proudly cloaked itself in the Gujarati business ethos. But Gujaratis have been under no obligation to sink their money into Gujarat: from Dholera to Durban, the world has been their karmabhoomi.
The reason Gujarat has registered the highest , double-digit GDP growth in the past decade owes much to the targeted, business-friendly approach of its government. Four features stand out. The first is quick decision-making—what Modi has dubbed the “red carpet, not red tape” approach. Ratan Tata, for example , recounted how the land allotment for the Nano project was completed in just three days, a quick-fire decision that has fetched Gujarat some Rs 30,000 crore in Tata group investments and direct employment for some 50,000 people. 

The second feature is the curious phenomenon of the near-absence of political corruption at the top. Even Modi’s worst enemies will not deny that the chief minister’s fanatical personal integrity has had a salutary trickle-down effect. Irritated by politically inspired extortion , industry has identified Gujarat as a place where it is possible to do ethical business.

Third, Gujarat since 2002 has been marked by social peace. Particularly important for industry is the absence of rural unrest, which unseated Tata Motors from West Bengal and is now so marked in Maharashtra and Karnataka . This is because Gujarat has bucked a national trend and is witnessing high growth in agriculture—last year the sector grew by 9.9%. This means that farmers now have a stake in the larger prosperity of the state and aren’t swayed by populists and Maoists.

Finally, the growth of Gujarat has been spurred by a philosophy of “minimum government and maximum governance”. In plain language , this means that the state government has concentrated on creating the infrastructure for growth and left it to the private sector to get on with the job of actual wealth creation. In Gujarat, politicians don’t talk the language of class conflict; they too mirror the preoccupation with dhanda (business). So all-pervasive is the respect for enterprise that even the children’s amusement park in Ahmedabad has created kiddie games centred on the use of virtual money!

The extent to which this vibrant Gujarati capitalism will benefit Modi’s national ambitions is difficult to predict. But one thing is certain . As Gujarat shines and acquires an economic momentum of its own, more and more businesses will find it worthwhile to channel a major chunk of their new investments into Gujarat. The Centre may not like the resulting uneven growth but the alternative is not to thwart Gujarat by political subterfuge—such as preventing public sector banks from engaging with the state government and the whimsical use of environmental regulations. Gujarat has shown that accelerated and sustained growth is possible when the state plays the role of an honest facilitator, rather than a controller.

Modi didn’t create the Gujarati character; he was moulded by it. He merely gave it a contemporary thrust and an ethical dimension. If politicians focused on these, India will be a much better place.

Why this blog?

Hi Friends,




I am an ordinary citizen,who loves India.I pray for the Indian team to win matches,Condemn terrorist attacks,feel sorry for the victims,feel irritated at Corruption,vote regularly,want India to become No 1 in every thing.I respect all relilgions,and take much pride in our unity in diversity.After all consideration,I believe Mr.Narendra Modi is the man who can be trusted with the job of elevating our country to great heights..The title of the blog is taken from Mr.Cho S.Ramaswamy's Tughlak Anniversary 2008 function in Chennai where Mr.Modi was the Chief guest..if you have any article on Mr.Modi,mail it to anjalilawson@gmail.com