PM dedicates Op Sindoor success to Mahadev
Addressing a public meeting in his parliamentary constituency Varanasi, the Prime Minister also accused the Congress of repeatedly insulting the valour of the armed forces and even terming 'Operation Sindoor' a "tamasha" (spectacle).
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Hindustan Times
10 minutes ago
- Hindustan Times
‘Some don't agree to share power': DK Shivakumar's cryptic remark at Congress event
Karnataka deputy chief minister DK Shivakumar on Sunday highlighted the importance of political sacrifice and power-sharing and how leaders nowadays are reluctant to do the same. Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah with Deputy CM and state Congress President D K Shivakumar(PTI) Though Shivakumar didn't name anyone, his remarks have reignited speculation about a rift with Karnataka CM Siddaramaiah over a rotational chief ministership – a deal the latter firmly denied. Speaking at the AICC-organised event titled 'Constitutional Challenges' in Delhi on Sunday, Shivakumar lauded the Gandhi family's contributions to the party and praised Sonia Gandhi's decision to not assume the post of Prime Minister in 2004. 'When Sonia Gandhi was asked by the President to take oath as the Prime Minister, she said, 'For me, power is not important.' She decided that a Sikh, a minority, and an economist could save the country and should become the Prime Minister,' Shivakumar said, calling it an unparalleled act of political sacrifice. In an apparent dig at leaders unwilling to step aside, he added: 'Has anyone in such a big democracy made such a sacrifice? Does anyone even sacrifice a small position today? Some MLAs and ministers share power, but some of us don't even agree to share power. Even at the panchayat level, many don't.' Earlier last month, chief minister Siddaramaiah had dismissed speculation of a mid-term leadership change, asserting he would complete the full five-year term. 'Am I not sitting here as the Chief Minister? Where is the vacancy?' Siddaramaiah said in New Delhi. 'DK Shivakumar himself has clarified this, and I'm saying the same, there's no vacancy for the CM post,' he had said. His statement was seen as a clear attempt to shut down persistent talk of Shivakumar being elevated to the top post in the latter half of the government's term. 'Congress's history is India's history' In his concluding remarks at the Delhi event, the deputy CM further talked about the grand old party's legacy and the Gandhi family's role in maintaining unity within the organisation. 'Congress's history is the country's history. The Gandhi family has kept the Congress Party united, and the Congress Party has kept the country united,' he said, according to an official party release.
Indian Express
10 minutes ago
- Indian Express
Congress and the OBCs
Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi last month admitted that the Congress had 'fallen short' in its relationship with Other Backward Classes (OBCs), which allowed the BJP to build political support among these communities. 'I do feel that when it came to OBCs, the Congress party's understanding of their issues, the challenges they were facing and the type of actions that the party should have and could have taken, we fell short,' Rahul said at a gathering of his party's MPs and Telangana leadership on July 24. 'We opened the space for the BJP because we were not responsive to the aspirations, to the desires of the OBCs,' he said. Rahul was not wrong. Congress has indeed missed several opportunities to reach out to these castes. It has also failed to claim credit for policy changes with regard to OBCs that were, in fact, initiated by Congress governments. Here's a short history. Inaction on Kalelkar report The clamour for greater political representation for the backward classes, as well as demands for reservation for these communities on the lines of the quotas in government jobs for the Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs), began soon after Independence. In 1953, the government of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru set up the first Backward Classes Commission under Rajya Sabha member Dattatreya Balkrishna Kalelkar, popularly known as 'Kaka' Kalelkar. The Kalelkar Commission report, submitted to the government on March 30, 1955, formulated criteria for identifying socially and educationally backward classes, and made several recommendations for their uplift. These included a caste census in 1961 that was to be advanced to 1957, treating all women as a class as 'backward', and reserving 70% seats in technical and professional institutions for qualified students from backward classes. The recommendations were, however, not unanimous, and three of the members were opposed to the acceptance of caste as a criterion for social backwardness and reservation in government jobs. Kalelkar himself wrote a long letter to President Rajendra Prasad expressing his disagreement on a number of issues. The report was tabled before both houses of Parliament but never discussed. Nehru's government did not implement it. First quota for OBCs Meanwhile, OBCs in the Hindi heartland had already begun to move towards the socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia. Until Lohia's untimely demise in 1967, his anti-Congress politics was powered by these communities. By the 1970s, OBC politics had gained significant momentum to pressure state governments to take decisions regarding OBC reservation. For instance, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Hemwati Nandan Bahuguna in October 1975 appointed the Most Backward Classes Commission under the chairmanship of Chhedi Lal Sathi. This first push for an OBC quota in UP came under a Congress government. And it was another Congress government, of Chief Minister N D Tiwari, that the state cabinet announced a 15% quota in government jobs for OBCs in UP, in April 1977. Within a week of this decision, however, Tiwari's government was dismissed by the Janata Party government of Prime Minister Morarji Desai that had routed the Congress in the Hindi heartland in the post-Emergency elections of March 1977. As a result, it was the Janata government in UP, led by Ram Naresh Yadav, which ultimately implemented the OBC quota — and also took the credit for it. The Mandal challenge In 1978, Prime Minister Desai constituted a new commission for the OBCs. The Second OBC Commission, headed by former Bihar Chief Minister B P Mandal, submitted its report to the government on December 31, 1980. By this time, the Congress under Indira Gandhi was back in power. Over the next nine years, however, neither Indira nor her son and successor Rajiv Gandhi implemented the Mandal Commission report, which recommended a 27% quota for OBCs in central government jobs and public universities. It was only in 1990, that the government of Prime Minister V P Singh announced its intention to implement the report, unleashing a wave of OBC assertion and fundamentally altering the politics of North India — to the Congress' detriment. In his 2006 biography of V P Singh, Manzil Se Zyada Safar, Ram Bahadur Rai quoted the former PM as having said: 'Congress leaders were obsessed with power equations. They were least concerned with the social equations and changes taking place… and thus unable to read the Mandal phenomenon.' The BJP, at that time still considered a largely Brahmin-Bania party, however, was far more flexible. For instance, it projected OBC leaders such as Kalyan Singh, a Lodh Rajput, in UP, to counter Mulayam. As Mulayam's support base outside the Samajwadi Party's Yadav-Muslim core started to fragment, Kalyan rallied smaller OBC communities behind the BJP, eventually forging a non-Yadav OBC vote bank. The BJP would eventually revamp its leadership at every level to accommodate OBCs politically. This was crucial from the late 1990s onwards, as the Panchayat Raj Act and reservation of seats in every level of three-tier rural and urban panchayats, provided an avenue for many OBC leaders to emerge from the grassroots. This was even as Congress' organisation continued to erode, and struggled to truly accommodate OBC politics. In UPA years In 2006, Union Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh pushed through 27% reservation for OBCs in admissions to central educational institutions, which had been pending since the implementation of the Mandal report. This was one of the biggest decisions in favour of OBCs, and a defining moment in OBC politics — but hardly any political gains accrued to the Congress. In 2010, the UPA-2 government tried to move for a caste census. Then Law Minister Veerappa Moily wrote to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh about collecting caste/ community data in Census 2011. But Home Minister P Chidambaram opposed the decision in Lok Sabha. Singh's government ultimately decided to conduct a full Socio Economic Caste Census (SECC) instead. The SECC data was published in 2016 but remains unavailable today. The Narendra Modi government has said it is 'not reliable'. This means that seven decades after the Kalelkar Commission recommended a caste census, there is still no precise estimate of India's OBC population. Rahul Gandhi's push for a caste census in recent years is an acceptance of the many missed opportunities during decades of Congress rule in the past, and a realignment of the party's politics with a view of taking on the BJP.
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Business Standard
10 minutes ago
- Business Standard
Sanjay Dwivedi writes to PM Modi, demands aid for Pahalgam victims' kin
Sanjay Dwivedi, father of Pahalgam terror attack victim Shubham Dwivedi, has written two letters to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and demanded compensation for the families of the April 22 deadly attack victims and a grant of "martyr status". He also described AAP MP Sanjay Singh as "one of the few leaders who stand with truth", and highlighted the issues of the families of the Pahalgam terror victims in Parliament. Dwivedi, while speaking to the ANI, said, "He is one of the few leaders who stands with the truth. He presented our issues in the Parliament with all his might... I hope he will stand by our demands in the future too... I have written two letters to the Prime Minister (demanding compensation for the families of the victims and for the victims to be given the 'martyr' status). This is not a matter of party politics. This is a national issue." Sanjay Singh on Sunday met the family of the Pahalgam terror attack victim Shubham Dwivedi during his visit to Kanpur. After the meeting, he spoke to reporters and called on the Union government to grant martyr status to victims. The AAP Rajya Sabha MP stated that he had also raised the demand during the ongoing Monsoon session of Parliament. Singh said, "I had raised this point in the Parliament that the victims' families demand that all those who died in Pahalgam should be given the status of martyrs. Shubham's father also demands that the tragic incident that happened cannot be compensated in a lifetime, but the Prime Minister (Narendra Modi) and the government should definitely take the steps they can. This will also be a message against terrorism." The AAP leader also criticised the government over what he termed a "delay" in providing compensation for the families of the victims."The government must provide compensation and jobs to the families of the Pahalgam terror attack victims. There has been a lot of delay in that," Singh said. Shubham Dwivedi was among the 26 people killed when terrorists opened fire on a group of tourists and locals in Baisaran Valley near Pahalgam. Indian armed forces carried out Operation Sindoor on May 7 to avenge the terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir's Pahalgam on April 22, which killed 26 people. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
