While govt dithers on implementing Greater Bengaluru Act, BJP moves court seeking polls to BBMP
Bengaluru: The Supreme Court's order to Maharashtra's State Election Commission to notify local body polls within four months Tuesday has offered a glimmer of hope that long-delayed elections to the civic agency in Bengaluru would be held soon. However, the issue is whether polls would be held under the new Greater Bengaluru Governance Act (GBGA) or Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) Act.While a bunch of petitions seeking a direction to the govt to conduct civic polls is pending before the Supreme Court, three BJP functionaries — Guatham Kumar, Narayanaswamy (both former mayors) and former deputy mayor S Harish — have impleded with the prayer that the civic polls be held under the BBMP Act.The passage of the Greater Bengaluru Governance Act (GBGA) has left polls hanging in the balance. Although it is more than 15 days since governor Thaawar Chand Gehlot gave his assent to the GBG Bill and the govt notified it in its gazette, the urban development department (UDD) appears to be dithering on implementing it and is yet to announce the 'appointed day' (from when the legislation comes into force). This has cast a shadow on city civic polls, which have been delayed by more than four years.A senior UDD official explained that, technically, BBMP Act remains in force and that the govt will have to conduct elections to existing BBMP seats if the Supreme Court orders elections immediately. "But we are working to implement GBGA and the appointed day will be announced soon," the official said.Meanwhile, leader of opposition R Ashoka of BJP said he has consulted legal experts and will soon challenge the GBG Act in court. Former deputy mayor Harish claimed the govt "has no intention of facilitating civic elections". "The move to bring in GBG Act is just a ploy to delay elections further. We will bring this to the court's notice," he said.Soon after GBG Act was signed into law on April 24, deputy CM DK Shivakumar, who holds the Bengaluru development portfolio, had said that he would hold an all-party meeting to discuss its implementation. The objective was to build consensus and pave the way for civic body elections. But Shivakumar is yet to hold that meeting.The joint house committee that scrutinised the GBG Bill had set a 120-day deadline to implement its provisions once it was enacted. This entails identifying the Greater Bengaluru area, creating new city corporations (up to seven) and identifying new wards within each corporation."We know 15 days have gone by, but steps are being taken by UDD to announce the appointed day," said Rizwan Arshad, Congress MLA who headed the joint house committee. "Procedures to implement the new Act will be expedited. The govt's intention to facilitate elections within four to six months from now will be achieved."
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Time of India
an hour ago
- Time of India
SC deadline nears, illegal buildings in protected Aravalis face bulldozers
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Indian Express
an hour ago
- Indian Express
Congress's Revanth Reddy has praise for this old RSS hand: Who is ‘Ajatashatru' Bandaru Dattatreya
At an event held last Sunday in Hyderabad to launch Haryana Governor Bandaru Dattatreya's autobiography, 'Prajala kathe, naa atma katha' (The story of people is my life story), Telangana Chief Minister and Congress leader A Revanth Reddy called Dattatreya an 'Ajatashatru' (one who has no enemies), saying he has been a leader who commands bipartisan respect much like former Prime Minister late Atal Bihar Vajpayee did. Similar sentiments were expressed on the occasion by several dignitaries and leaders cutting across party lines, including ex-President Ram Nath Kovind, former Vice-President M Venkaiah Naidu and Andhra Pradesh CM and TDP supremo N Chandrababu Naidu, with Kovind describing Dattatreya as a 'rare leader' who has been a 'friend to all'. The 77-year-old Other Backward Class (OBC) leader, Dattatreya, who hails from Hyderabad, started his public life in 1965 when he joined the RSS, the BJP's ideological fountainhead. He was appointed as an RSS pracharak in 1968. He continued to hold various positions within the Sangh and its affiliated outfits till 1979, when he was Seva Bharati's pramukh, before joining the BJP. 'Dattatreya had been one of the BJP leaders since its inception. In 1980, he was posted as the BJP secretary in undivided Andhra Pradesh,' one of his close aides told The Indian Express. In Hyderabad, Dattatreya was known as a BJP leader who used to attend even the smallest of public functions. 'It was not easy to work as a BJP leader then and get the support of people who belonged to various parties back in the 1980s. He undertook this connect with people like a personal mission and succeeded in it to the surprise of many,' a Congress leader said. Dattatreya held different positions in the Andhra Pradesh BJP, including its general secretary from 1981 to 1989. In 1991, he was elected to the Lok Sabha for the first time from the Secunderabad constituency (in Telangana now). He was re-elected to the Lok Sabha four times from Secunderabad from 1991 to 2014, even though he also suffered losses a few times. 'It was not easy to win over such a long period in Secunderabad as a BJP candidate then. It showed the public trust he enjoyed over the years,' Dattatreya's aide said. The BJP first named Dattatreya as the Andhra Pradesh party unit president in 1996. He again served as the state party chief from 2006 to 2009. Besides, he also played various roles in the party at the central level – from being the party's national secretary to its national executive member and national vice president. He also served as the Union minister of state (MoS) in the governments led by both Vajpayee and Narendra Modi. In the Modi ministry 1.0, he was the MoS (independent charge) of labour and employment from November 2014 to September 2017. During this period he worked closely with various labour unions in the country for the welfare and uplift of workers in both organised and unorganised sectors, his aide said. In his autobiography, Dattatreya states, 'One of the significant strides made during my tenure (as MoS, labour) in 2015 was the substantial increase in minimum wages across both agricultural and non-agricultural sectors.' In 2014, he also served as the chairperson of the parliamentary committee on welfare of the backward classes. A political observer close to Dattatreya told The Indian Express that his elevation in the BJP ranks could be attributed to his proximity to the RSS. 'His rise in the BJP was completely driven by his deep-rooted connection to the RSS. Without the RSS' backing Dattatreya would not have made it to the Union MoS's position'. In his long political innings, Dattatreya has however also faced several controversies. He was booked as one of the prime accused in a case of abetment of suicide of University of Hyderabad (UoH)'s PhD scholar Rohith Vemula. Months before Vemula's death by suicide in January 2016, Dattatreya was accused of having written a letter to then Union HRD Minister Smriti Irani to seek action against some UoH students including Vemula for their alleged 'casteist, extremist and anti-national' activities. Vemula, who identified as a Dalit, had written a suicide note in which he said, 'My birth is my fatal accident', which found resonance across the country as a searing indictment of the country's caste reality. The Hyderabad police however filed a closure report in the case in 2024, claiming that Vemula was not a Dalit and that 'external pressures' did not lead to his suicide. It gave a clean chit to Dattatreya and other accused. Vemula's suicide sparked nationwide protests against the discrimination of Dalit students in educational institutions. Dattatreya had denied any wrongdoing in the matter. 'The BJP did not remove him from his MoS position during this entire episode,' noted a student leader from the UoH. In the Modi government 2.0, Dattatreya was sent to Himachal Pradesh as the Governor. In 2021, he was named the Haryana Governor, a post that he still holds.
Indian Express
an hour ago
- Indian Express
Decode Politics: ‘Bharat Mata', ‘Mother India', ‘Vande Mataram': As another row erupts, what lies beneath
IN THE SPACE of a week, Kerala has seen two rows break out over a portrait of 'Bharat Mata'. First, the LDF state government relocated its World Environment Day celebrations from the Raj Bhavan, claiming that the photo of Bharat Mata on display at the event was 'one used by the RSS'. But, days later, Governor Rajendra Vishwanath Arlekar paid tributes to the same image during Goa Day celebrations at the Raj Bhavan. Objecting to the use of the image at Raj Bhavan, CPI leader and Agriculture Minister P Prasad said, 'A seat of a constitutional body should not be using this.' Arlekar, who recently took over as Governor after a long period of fractious relationship between the LDF government and Raj Bhavan, hit back, saying, 'Whatever be the pressure from whichever quarters, there will be no compromise whatsoever on Bharat Mata.' State BJP leader N Hari also attacked the LDF, claiming 'they are afraid to say Bharat Mata… due to vote bank politics'. While the symbolic icon of Bharat Mata, or Mother India, has often been depicted in art, there is no official version of the portrayal. The image used at the Kerala Raj Bhavan, for instance, depicted Bharat Mata holding a saffron flag in front of a relief map of India. The Left objected to this. Another image, used by the CPI for a local party event in the middle of the row incidentally, showed Bharat Mata carrying the Tricolour. As the BJP celebrated the Left's use of the image, the party hastily withdrew the same. In the history of modern Indian art, Bharat Mata has adorned the canvas of only two artists of repute. The first was the product of the Bengal Renaissance, Abanindranath Tagore, who first visualised the Indian nation as the Mother. The second was the modernist M F Husain, whose painting of Bharat Mata was banned and trashed – and he was forced to spend his last years outside his country. The imagery first appeared in the works of artists and writers in Bengal, much before it was used elsewhere in the context of India's national movement for Independence. Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay's 1882 novel Anand Math contained the hymn to the motherland Vande Mataram, which became the mantra of the freedom movement, and the official song of India after Independence. The novel depicts the three faces of Bharat Mata as Goddesses Jagaddhatri, Kali and Durga. Two decades later, in 1905, after partition of Bengal under Lord Curzon, Abanindranath painted his iconic Bharat Mata, a woman in saffron robes, with a serene face and halo around her head, beads and scriptures in her hands. The revolutionary Aurobindo Ghose wrote in a letter to his wife Mrinalini Devi in August that same year: 'I look upon my country as the Mother. I adore her, I worship Her as the Mother. What would a son do if a demon sat on his mother's breast and started sucking her blood?' Mother India retained her symbolic force through the national movement, even though the metaphor often changed with the speaker who employed it. In The Discovery of India, written by him in jail in the 1940s, Jawaharlal Nehru recounted his experience when people greeted him with slogans of 'Bharat Mata ki Jai'. 'Who was this Bharat Mata, Mother India, whose victory they wanted?… Mother India was essentially these millions of people, and victory to her meant victory to these people,' he wrote. The first major enunciation of the Mother India concept came in the writings of Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya. 'The foundation of our nationalism is Bharat Mata,' he wrote. 'Remove Mata, Bharat will be reduced to just a piece of land.' However, this was merely a paraphrasing of what Bankim had written nearly a century ago, when he elaborated on the notion of Mother India as a woman having the characteristics of Sujala, Suphala (overflowing with water and laden with fruits) and Dashapraharana Dharini Durga (Goddess Durga with her 10 weapons), Lakshmi and Saraswati. The imagery was also used in popular media and Hindi cinema – the iconic frame of actress Nargis, with a yoke and two babies, was an unforgettable cultural intervention, in 1957's film Mother India. Several historians have pointed out that the Bharat Mata visualised by its pioneers was more a 'Banga Mata', or Mother Bengal, with the deities they invoked being Kali and Durga, often their family deities. In Vande Mataram, Bankim called upon only the 'sapt koti' or seven crore people of Bengal. The first critics of the metaphor too came from among its inventors. Fifteen years after the Partition of Bengal, in August 1920, Aurobindo underlined the limits of the slogan and sought a greater mantra: 'We used the Mantra Bande Mataram with all our heart and soul… (but) the cry of the Mantra began to sink and as it rang feebly, the strength began to fade out of the country… A greater Mantra than Bande Mataram has to come.' The first two paragraphs of Bankim's Vande Mataram were adopted as the national song after Independence. The government did not retain the verses that mentioned either 'sapt koti', or the eulogies to the Goddesses Durga and Lakshmi. The obvious reference to Bengali nationhood was removed. Almost up to Independence, few underlined the religious overtones of the slogan, and it remained an essential mantra of an occupied country, a rallying call for its people. It found little resistance from other communities until 1947, when during the Partition riots, 'Bharat Mata ki Jai' was perceived as a communal slogan, the same as 'Allah-o-Akbar'. But, barring some isolated voices against Vande Matram, Mother India remained a largely benign concept that did not attract controversy. During the Ram Janmabhoomi movement of the late 1980s, however, 'Bharat Mata ki Jai' was used for communal mobilisation. Now Bharat Mata was an aggressive image, carrying swords and other weapons, and sometimes riding a tiger. The Anna Hazare movement of 2011, one of the biggest mass mobilisations of recent decades, which shook the Central government and paved the way for the emergence ultimately of Arvind Kejriwal's Aam Aadmi Party, used the image of Bharat Mata as the rallying point for an anti-corruption crusade. More recently, in February 2023, the Indian Council for Historical Research, an autonomous body under the Ministry of Education, faced 'objections' over a photo of Bharat Mata in its office, alongside pictures of President Droupadi Murmu and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In early 2016, after allegedly anti-India slogans were raised at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, leading to a sedition case against its then students' union president Kanhaiya Kumar, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat said that youth should be taught to chant 'Bharat Mata ki Jai'. AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi shot back, saying he would not chant 'Bharat Mata ki Jai' even if a knife were put to his throat, prompting the Shiv Sena to tell Owaisi to 'go to Pakistan'. RSS general secretary Dattatreya Hosabale then referred to Owaisi as 'anti-national' and a 'traitor'. Later, in March 2016, AIMIM MLA Waris Pathan was suspended from the Maharashtra Assembly for refusing to say 'Bharat Mata ki Jai', even as he said he was willing to chant 'Jai Hind'. At the time, the BJP, Congress, Shiv Sena and NCP together backed a resolution to suspend Pathan for the remainder of the Budget Session. However, weeks after the controversy, BJP veteran L K Advani called the row over the slogan 'meaningless', while Bhagwat said nobody should be 'forced' to say 'Bharat Mata ki Jai'. In 2020, in the aftermath of the Delhi riots, former PM Manmohan Singh said the slogan was 'being misused to construct a militant and purely emotional idea of India that excludes millions of residents and citizens' while speaking at the launch of a book titled 'Who is Bharat Mata'.
