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In the aftermath, buildings of Dharali village are submerged in sludge
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Express Tribune
20 minutes ago
- Express Tribune
India's tipping point
It was a unique disruption. For a nation whose birth witnessed the displacement of 10-12 million on religious lines and the broad-day murder of 1- 2 million, political disruption usually means slaughtering a couple of thousand. But here was an ostracised man, after enduring an 11-year-long defamation campaign, claiming to set off a nuclear bomb in Indian politics with just one presentation. When Rahul Gandhi began, the tech support's ineptness was palpable. But he kept going. First, he explained the methodology and selection process for his research. Then came the information. The opposition leader in the Lok Sabha (lower house of parliament) told the audience that of the 543 constituencies, his team had chosen one in Karnataka for the audit. This Bangalore Central constituency includes seven Vidhan Sabha (provincial legislative assembly) segments. Out of these seven, six voted for Congress, but in one (Mahadevapura), the BJP outperformed Congress by a whopping 114,000 votes, changing the outcome of the Lok Sabha seat in favour of Modi's party. He then described the obfuscation tactics of the Indian Election Commission (ECI), which refused to hand over digital or machine-readable voter list data. The seven-foot-tall pile of paper that was given made it impossible to use optical character recognition, so it had to be done manually. It took forty of his team members six months to sift through all that data. But the results were stunning. In one Vidhan Sabha constituency, they found over a hundred thousand irregularities. Of these, 11,965 were duplicate voters, 40,009 had fake or invalid addresses, 10,452 were bulk voters with a single address, 4,132 had fake photos, and 33,692 had abuse of the first-time voter form. Given that Congress lost the Lok Sabha seat by 32,707 votes, the above irregularities could easily have played a part. And then he dropped another bombshell. In the state of Maharashtra, in the five months between the Lok Sabha elections (in which the ruling coalition performed poorly) and the Vidhan Sabha elections (which the ruling coalition swept), 10 million new voters were registered. The election commission was not prepared to share this data. I believe in Hanlon's Razor: never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence. So, initially, I was sceptical. But could the election commission act more guiltily? You be the judge. First, it asked Mr Gandhi, who is mononymously called Rahul, to submit an affidavit under a clause that makes the investigation task impossible. Shortly afterwards, it shut down public access to its websites in states where the results are in contention ostensibly to block any further scraping of data. Rahul had already pointed to the undue haste by the ECI to destroy the CCTV footage even though, given today's compression and storage technology, there is no need to do that. This brought to mind the electronic voting machine case before the Lok Sabha elections, where the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) and noted activist lawyers like Bharat Bhushan went to the Indian Supreme Court with the request to manually count the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trails (VVPATs — the paper record of each vote). The court rebuffed the idea with extreme prejudice. During the past eleven years, the ECI has actively resisted calls for transparency regarding the election data. In a democracy, transparency is the linchpin of the system. It is the job of election bodies worldwide to ensure the transparency of their elections. And here you have this active opacity that fights back. So, Rahul was not wrong. With one presentation, he has delegitimised every election held after Modi took over. In the middle of all this, rumours spread that the Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar, who recently retired after overseeing the Lok Sabha elections, had fled to Malta. These days, Malta has entered our news cycles, too. But we will discuss that another day. Understandably, this has caused quite a stir in Indian politics despite the mainstream media, the government and the ECI's incredible efforts to trivialise the matter. When, without identifying the constituency, Rahul announced he would share evidence of electoral malpractice with the public, Modi took Amit Shah to meet the president and hinted at Shah being his successor at a ruling coalition meeting. It is common knowledge that Modi's seat from Varanasi is also in contention, where he lost during the first six rounds and then magically pulled ahead by 152,513 votes in the seventh. A small election showed that the draconian grip of the Modi-Shah duo was slipping. The elections of the Constitutional Club of India were recently held. This is a club of lawmakers. In it, a BJP candidate who fell out of Modi-Shah's favour managed to defeat another BJP candidate supported by the ruling duo. It is believed that Yogi Adityanath, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh and the party's most popular leader after Modi, is making his presence felt. His supporters are openly defying Shah's dictates. Cracks within the coalition are also becoming visible. As I mentioned in previous pieces, immediately after the Lok Sabha election results, it was claimed that Modi had assured the RSS that he would step down as PM at 75. He turns 75 next month, but despite the Sangh's open signalling, no one expects him to leave just like that. That is why all parties involved will put maximum and unrelenting pressure on the duo to relinquish power. Rahul is already starting a padayatra (journey by foot) in Bihar. But he has already set a chain of events in motion that will likely lead to a nationwide agitation. It is said that when such agitations occur, the RSS, if it wishes, can choose to participate silently. It happened with Anna Hazare's anti-corruption campaign, after all. No wonder Modi lavished his party's ideological fountainhead (RSS) with high praise in his Independence Day speech. When Modi came to power, he had many sponsors. Western intelligence agencies from the Five Eyes countries and Mossad thought Congress actively resisted joining the Western camp. Indian billionaires were worried because of their mounting NPA debt liabilities. The Indian intelligence community wanted more autonomy. And the RSS wanted to spread its wings. One by one, Modi has offended all of them. His foreign and economic policies are teetering on the brink of disaster. The system's opacity has grown so much that it resembles what physicists call a black box. On top of that is the drubbing India received in the four-day war with Pakistan. There is no denying that Indian politics is entering a decisive phase. But life goes on. His surrogates and allies may likely feel the urge to terrorise his critics both at home and abroad. But they should heed this sincere advice: stop the aggression and start covering your tracks while you have time. The endgame will leave you with nothing but pain and regret.
Express Tribune
20 minutes ago
- Express Tribune
Pak-Afghan relations: winds of change?
Are we in for a radical change in Pak-Afghan relations after an unprecedented move by proponents of the former Northern Alliance, many of whom now embody the National Resistance Front (NRF) of Afghanistan, led by Ahmed Masood, the son of the late Ahmed Shah Masood? Or does a rude shock await the new Kabul regime through new alignments involving Tajikistan, the historical base of the Northern Alliance? But before delving into the Pak-Afghan issue, let's look at three critical developments in the current "world in flux". President Donald Trump's peace and tariffs offensives are indeed enforcing recalibration, if not major shifts, in global alliances. Trump's meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin — regardless of immediate outcomes — marks a defining moment both for their bilateral relations and the present turbulent geopolitics. Secondly, after China's upfront posturing on the tariffs issue forced Trump into extending the deadline for trade negotiations, Indian business executives and Prime Minister Narendra Modi are slowly upping the India card with their anti-America rhetoric. This is triggering calls across India for boycotting McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Amazon and Apple, among others — all prompted by US tariffs on exports from India, which is the biggest market for Meta's WhatsApp and beverages like Pepsi, Coca-Cola or Starbucks. India, being the world's most populous country and the fourth largest economy, certainly sees value in leveraging its soft power vis-à-vis a strident Trump, not ready to bend - at least for now. Thirdly, and it relates to the messaging, Trump's policies on tariffs and conflict are radiating with a "sobering" effect on the smaller and weaker stakeholders across the globe. And one wonders if the Independence Day felicitations from the traditionally pro-India and anti-Taliban NRF, a successor to the Northern Alliance, also flow from President Trump's indirect messaging. The unprecedented NRF message (congratulations to Pakistan and its people on the occasion of the country's Independence Day) comes in the context of an argument that present Taliban government leaders often peddle in private; Northern Afghan groups would brand us as "pro-Pakistan if we shunned the historical Afghan position on the border issue." It is worth recalling that when the US launched its bombing of Kabul on October 7, 2001, in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks in New York and Washington, their partner on the ground was Masood's Shoorae Nazar, then led by Marshal Faheem. Masood had been assassinated by Al-Qaeda militants disguised as journalists in his native Takhar province only two days before the 9/11 attacks. The entire politics of Shoorae Nazar was anti-Pakistan, pro-India, and they had always leveled allegations that sounded like coming from India. Most of their leaders lived in India before and after the 9/11 attacks. Even Masood Khalili, who was injured in the attack on Ahmed Shah Masood, was taken to India for treatment. It is nothing but ironic that following decades of acrimonious posturing, the successor to Shoorae Nazar — NRF — has extended an olive branch to Islamabad through an encouraging Independence Day message. Now that the late Ahmed Shah Masood's son has formally congratulated Pakistan, Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi also sent similar greetings to his Pakistani counterpart, Ishaq Dar, according to an official announcement from Muttaqi's office. The exchange of greetings also coincided with the celebration of "Victory Day" — when the Taliban regained power in Afghanistan on a Sunday, August 15, four years ago. Does the festive mood - a mix of hope and goodwill — around Pakistan's Independence Day, Afghanistan's "Victory Day", followed by the Afghan Independence Day on August 19 coupled with positive messaging from the NRF offer a chance to Afghans in general and to the Taliban regime in particular to build on their expression of goodwill for Pakistan? Can the development help Afghans embrace the reality of Pakistan as it has existed since 1947, abandon the old clichéd narratives that often belittle and accuse it of treating Afghanistan as a colony, and move on in favour of an equal-footed cordial relationship between the two uneasy neighbouring countries? Have the winds of change begun blowing to improve Pak-Afghan relations, or should the NRF felicitation gesture signal something ominous to Pakistan, particularly at a time when both China and Russia have courted the Taliban leadership, with Moscow recognising the Kabul regime to the displeasure of the Trump administration? How would Taliban leaders view the recently concluded Pakistan-Tajikistan Counter-Terrorism Exercises Dosti-ll (August 4-9) in a country that historically served as the base for Shoorae Nazar during the anti-Soviet jihad? Dushanbe, the capital, also symbolised the shelter and support (including from India) to Ahmed Shah Masood's militia in its fight against the Taliban until the 9/11 events, and continues to be the hub of NRF activities.
Canada News.Net
27 minutes ago
- Canada News.Net
Shubhankar Sharma needs strong second round to make cut
Copenhagen [Denmark], August 16 (ANI): Shubhankar Sharma opened his campaign at the Danish Golf Championship with an even-par 71 at the Par-71 Fures Golf Klub, leaving him tied for 70th and in need of a strong second round to make the cut. The Indian golfer, who has not made a cut since the Indian Open in March, will be eager to turn his fortunes around and extend his week in Denmark. Veer Ahlawat carded a 2-over 73, placing him tied for 113th and facing an uphill task to progress, as per a press release from the Danish Golf Championship. Sharma began well with a birdie on the sixth but faltered with three straight bogeys from the eighth to the tenth. He recovered with birdies on the 12th, 16th, and 18th, offsetting a bogey on the 14th to finish level par. At the top of the leaderboard, England's Marco Penge produced a flawless bogey-free round of 7-under 64, setting a new course record and taking a two-shot lead. His round featured birdies on the third, sixth, 11th, 13th, and 14th holes, capped by an eagle on the 18th. Penge, who has recorded six top-30 finishes in seven starts this season, currently sits fifth in the Race to Dubai standings. Five players share second place, two shots back, including 2018 Open Champion Francesco Molinari, former Danish Golf Championship winner Rasmus Hjgaard, Canadian Aaron Cockerill, Germany's Jeremy Paul, and Scotland's Marc Warren. Rasmus carded eight birdies in his 5-under 66. Last year's runner-up, Lucas Bjerregaard, is tied for seventh with six others. Nicolai Hjgaard had a memorable day, holing out for eagle twice in the space of three holes. After being two over through 10 holes, he eagled the par-4 12th from 111 yards and repeated the feat at the 14th from 144 yards, later adding a birdie on the last for a 3-under 68 and a share of 14th place. (ANI)
