Congress Ousts BJP In Election Upset

Is this a good thing apart from the fact Sonia Ghandi is immeasurably better looking than Atal Behari Vajpayee?

India is big and important surely someone has an opinion…

Fuck me. Is no-one interested in the world’s largest democratic exercise? It may have a significant impact on your lives. Now if it only had a snappy topic title like Vajpayee drools on Sonia Ghandi’s Breasts then maybe some of the worldly political pundits in this forum would have something to say.

I think its a good thing in that the election was AFAIK completely peaceful and the voting was not strictly along party and or caste lines but instead was along the various issues.

I’m not entirely comfortable with the fact that Ghandi is a Ghandi… it would be nice to see some new political blood in the second most populated nation on the planet.

Bugger me. Probably the world’s second most important election this year and someone, a moderator no less, has expressed a glimmer of interest. Given the wealth of intelligent posters on this forum, I am astonished that the fact that Congress has ousted the BJP in a shock election upset barely registers on the interest barometers. This election has the potential to re-arrange the geo-political nature of south asia and beyond and the intelligentsia here are more bothered about endless variations on the Iraq theme. Yawn.

Although Vajpayee deserves credit for stabilizing the situations somewhat with Pakistan and for his stewardship of the economy, the fact remains that many of his coalition partners were HINDU nationalists and members of the upper castes. I am sure the Muslim minorities, the poorer castes, people of the centre-left, and people who value multiculturalism (first non-Indian in such a position of power) are rejoicing. I don’t think it will change anything. India and the Philippines are two nations where the elite should be taken out and beaten with a stick. Both nation’s elite have done a huge disservice to their nations by lining their pockets and ignoring the structural poverty.

From what I’ve read it doesn’t seem that anyone expects it to change “geo-political nature of south asia and beyond”. Probably the most it will do is disilusion the poorer people of India yet again as their lives continue pretty much as they did before the election.

Now anybody associated with Shin Seva must be jailed for all the Muslims and Southern Indians they’ve slaughtered.

(It’s amazing they do so well in Bombay, where nearly 40% of the population is eithe gay or Muslim.)

Re swearing in of Sonia Ghandi

… the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) said it would boycott the swearing-in ceremony, with only outgoing PM Atal Behari Vajpayee attending.

Party president Venkaiah Naidu said if she became prime minister, it would be a black day in the history of independent India.

“The BJP has decided to give vent to the sense of outrage felt by millions of patriotic Indians,” he said.

(news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/3721863.stm)

how very mature and multicultural!

I see no big shift because of this election. The only worry is among investors about backsliding on economic reform, particularly privatization. What’s the big news?

That said, I do believe that India will increasingly be a committed partner to US efforts. Right now, we see a very nice alliance developing between Turkey, Israel, the US and India. We should encourage this for all it is worth. The problem before was not so much that the US had a bad attitude toward India but that India had a completely unrealistic and ahem “lofty” foreign policy. Now, that it has become more realistic, I believe that we will see a richer and more developed India that will pay an important and useful role in the region. A role that will be very much aligned with US interests in the region and er a “win-win” situation.

Read what Guardian idiot No. 1 has to say…

guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Co … 40,00.html

Monbiot the commie chomskyite of course is against the free-market approach that has existed in India for merely a decade. It naturally led to high rates of growth and a reduction in poverty. Monbiot most ludicrously attacks the McKinsie plan which was responsible for said reform, pointing to a similar disastrous effort which reformed and privatized business in Pinochet’s Chile. Disastrous in Chile? Last time I looked, the country was No. 1 in Latin America. No? Have I gotten something wrong here?

Also, the rise in poverty and unemployment that followed the plans initial implementation in Chile also followed a disastrous experiment with nationalization of industry and business throughout Chile in the mid-1970s and political and economic stability for several years thereafter, but can anyone in their right mind say that Chile is not more successful, prosperous and healthy today because of it? Why not the same for India? which has after all been impoverished by bureaucratic socialist governments for 50 years prior to the reforms. One merely needs to look at Calcutta’s fall from pre-eminent trade and finance status with its Marxist governments and perpetual strikes to see that socialism does not work.

Chile maybe a success now but was it worth all the people that Pinochet had tortured and murdered?

You’re right Butcher Boy:

It would have been much better to leave Chile as Cuba so that it could rot for another 40 years and where after all are the most people being killed and tortured Chile? or Cuba?

I thought Chile was still democratic when Pinochet siezed power - it just had a left wing government that Kissenger et al. did not like. Maybe i’m wrong.

BB:

You are right in that you are wrong. Chile was ostensibly democratic but Allende was elected with a plurality and bent on a course of privatization and strikes and labor unrest that pissed off most of the population. The US was concerned but no one has ever proved that the US was directlly involved or that the coup was CIA sponsored. I think that enough Chileans were pissed off to handle that on their own but feel free to prove me wrong with any facts that you might have suggesting otherwise.

The US is, as you put it ‘ostensibly democratic’ but Bush came second in the total amount of votes. Unfortunately election rules can lead to uncomfortable outcomes sometimes. This does not mean that military coups are a good idea. As you point out, plenty of people were getting pretty pissed at Allende, enough to pressure him out in the end, and if not straight away, then at the next election - he hadn’t cancelled it right? Whilst there is still no smoking gun in the US involvement theory declassified documents show that the CIA was running operations to undermine Allende for sometime and that they knew of the military plot to overthrow him. Much of the documentation released has important info blanked out. The following quote from the cnn story linked below does not increase confidence in the proposition that the CIA knew about the plot but did nothing to help it:

…a Senate committee chaired by Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, had confirmed that the CIA had participated in covert operations in Chile, and that the agency had attempted to foment a military coup in 1970 after Allende had been elected president

To me it seems that Chile had to put up with a Military junta for 17 years, which carried out a terrorist bombing in Washington, and was responsible for the death or disapearance of some 3000 people, in order to remove a democratically elected president who would most likely have been forced from office anyway. Do you think the families of those 3000 people think it was worth it? (think of the families of the victims of 9/11 for some perspective)

http://www.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/americas/11/13/cia.chile.02/[/i]

[quote=“BroonAle”]
India is big and important surely someone has an opinion…[/quote]
My favourites are palak paneer, malai kofta and aloo gobi. I used to like chana masala, but I find that the older I get, the more it gives me gas.

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