INDIA Bloc Has To Give Sole Focus On Assembly Polls In Bihar By Year End
The INDIA Bloc constituents are finally meeting in New Delhi on Saturday, July 19 to discuss the strategy for the monsoon session of the Parliament beginning on July 21 as also an assessment of the developments in the country including increasing threat to the electoral democracy in the third term of Narendra Modi's India.
The last full meeting of the India Bloc was held on June 5, the day after the announcement of the 2024 Lok Sabha election results on June 4. The discussions took place in a mood of optimism as the BJP's tally came down from the earlier level of 303 to 240 in 2024 polls. Though Narendra Modi formed his NDA government for the consecutive third term with the help of other allies including JD(U) and TDP, the reduction of 63 seats in BJP's Lok Sabha tally was a positive omen for the opposition INDIA Bloc. The Bloc was hopeful of carrying on this process in the coming state assembly elections.
But the electoral results since the last Lok Sabha elections have come as a big disappointment to the India Bloc. NDA has won the assembly elections in Haryana and Maharashtra neutralizing the gains of the Congress and other partners in 2024 Lok Sabha elections. Further, the BJP also made a clean sweep of the by polls in Uttar Pradesh taking over the seating seats of the Samajwadi Party. Only in West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee led Trinamool Congress bucked the trend by retaining all the seats and defeating the BJP even in its seating seats.
In this background, the most important assembly election is taking place in Bihar in October/November this year which has assumed crucial importance for the survival of electoral democracy in India. The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls initiated in Bihar by the Election Commission of India (ECI) at the instance of the Union Home Ministry is intended to weed out the names of a huge number of minorities and poor people from the voters list on the plea of non-submission of relevant documents including new ones. Many former chief election commissioners have questioned this SIR and the ECI's bid to hurry up with the process which has so many complications.
The SIR is politically motivated. It is the brain child of the BJP's think tank, not the ECI. The ECI is only carrying out the agenda despite Supreme Court's caustic observations in its hearing on July 10. The Booth Level Officers (BLO) are carrying on SIR without taking note of the Supreme Court bench observations though the next hearing is scheduled on July 28. The experiment by the Home Ministry and the ECI on Bihar is being followed nationally and the next two important targets are West Bengal and Assam. Four states-West Bengal, Assam, Kerala and Tamil Nadu are going for assembly elections in March/April next year apart from Puducherry. Of these states, the SIR will have special consequences in Bengal and Assam as both states contain large number of minorities who are the target of BJP. In Bengal, the BJP leader Subhendu Adhikari has started a campaign that the Aadhaar and election identity card should not be recognized in respect of Muslims as these were 'forged'. In fact, he is demanding disenfranchisement of the Muslims in the 2026 assembly polls.
In Assam, the situation is more serious right now. Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has launched a war against the minorities in his state and he is spreading this menace to the other north eastern states. Sharma is the convenor of the NE region on behalf of the BJP leadership. The state government has recommended deportation of a large number of minorities though the legal cases are continuing. The problem is that the targeted persons are very poor and they have little means to get legal assistance to fight the state government machinery. On Thursday, a person belonging to the minority community was killed and many injured during the process of eviction in Assam's Goalpara.
All these developments have serious consequences for the future of parliamentary democracy based on the core values of the Indian constitution. Bihar is the beginning, if this bid succeeds in Bihar, the Narendra Modi government will implement the SIR with vengeance in Bengal and Assam. INDIA Bloc has to devote lot of time on this SIR issue and Bihar elections. All efforts must be taken to ensure that the SIR is stayed by the Supreme Court bench on July 28 hearing. If SC does not stay the SIR, the bench has to ensure that the poor and the minorities get due time and opportunities to produce their identity cards. This should be written, not oral.
The Bihar elections results can be a turning point in the national politics. There are enough possibility of the Mahagathbandhan winning in Bihar in the next polls by year end if the constituents keep a strict vigil on the rolls revision process and prevent any bid by the BJP and RSS cadres to delete the names of the genuine citizens of the state belonging to the minorities and the Dalits. The recent RSS conclave has decided to give all attention on Bihar elections. As a consequence, a large number of RSS pracharaks are now engaged in rolls revision work. Their aim is to delete the names of minorities from the list as much as possible.
The functioning of the INDIA Bloc needs to be discussed if the opposition parties want the Bloc to be a dynamic and vibrant body to take on the BJP. There is need for a permanent secretariat and chief coordinator or convenor. For more than a year, the INDIA Bloc meeting was not called just because the Congress Party leaders did not feel the need. Now suddenly, Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi contacted the leaders and scheduled the meeting in two day's notice. This is no way of running such an important body which wants to replace the BJP led government. There should be some operational norms for the INDIA Bloc. The Saturday meeting, though through video, should decide on that.
But right now, all the efforts will have to be on defeating NDA in Bihar in October/ November polls and this is linked with consistent fight against the BJP inspired ECI moves to remove the names of the voters who are supposed to vote for the INDIA Bloc in Bihar elections. This is the primary task of the INDIA Bloc parties, though the leaders are expected to raise other issues in Parliament during the monsoon session including India's diplomatic isolation in the recent days, rise in unemployment level and the demands of the central trade unions on the basis of which the general strike was observed on July 9. (IPA Service)
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Arabian Post
2 days ago
- Arabian Post
Union Ministry Of Labour Still Peddling False Narrative On Joblessness In India
By Dr. Gyan Pathak It is ridiculous. Union Government of India is still hiding behind a questionable extrapolation on employment based on Reserve Bank of India's KLEMS (Capital, Labour, Energy, Materials, and services) database, and informed the Lok Sabha on July 24 that India added 17 crore jobs between 2017-18 and 2023-24. The Centre led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been peddling this false narrative right from the Lok Sabha election campaign in 2024, which is still going on. The Union Minister of State for Labour and Employment Shobha Karandlaje in a written reply has provided a camouflage of data based on KLEMS, Union Government's PLFS data, and ILO outlook of 2024 and claimed that those data indicated 'improvements signalling higher engagement of the working-age population in productive employment' rejecting claims of joblessness, especially among India's youth. The reply of the Union Ministry of Labour and Employment has come just a day after it had rebutted a media report questioning the credibility of India's unemployment figures. The ministry had defended its Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) calling it 'globally recognized' and aligned with international standards such as those set by the International Labour Organization (ILO). It is to be noted here, that PLFS has recently transitioned into a new methodology and periodicity, and has started monthly reports on employment and unemployment since April 2025, the first report of which came in May. It included both rural and urban data. PLFS has replaced the old Labour Survey on Employment and Unemployment since 2017-18, and has started giving yearly data for rural areas and quarterly data for urban areas with a delay of at least three months. The new methodology of PLFS has warned that it is not comparable with the old data. Nevertheless, the Minister has compared the old PLFS data and the new PLFS data. In absence of the realtime data from the government, people had to depend on the private data, such as one from the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE). The unemployment data from CMIE has been always much above the official PLFS data. Government has been campaigning against the private data and urging people not to believe them. They have urged the people to believe on official PLFS data, the reliability of which has always been questioned and considered stale. Irony is that the Union government, including the Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not believe the PLFS data, and therefore they have been relentlessly quoting the extrapolated data from the RBI's KLEMS database. They why should people believe the PLFS data? The new monthly PLFS data on employment and unemployment is also not generally believed, both by the common people and experts. Only a few days ago the Reuters poll of independent economists has said that the Indian government's data is inaccurate and masks the severity of joblessness and underemployment. Several of the experts said that the true jobless rate is around twice the official figure. Over 70 per cent of independent economists polled, 37 out of 50, said that the official unemployment rate at 5.6 per cent in June, is inaccurate. It was on this report, the Union Ministry of Labour and Employment, said on July 23 that Reuters poll relied on 'unverifiable perceptions' adding that while 'expert opinion can offer valuable insights, it cannot be a substitute for large-scale, representative, and methodologically robust surveys.' In the parliament, the Union Ministry of Labour and Employment has said, that the number of employed people in the country rose to 64.33 crore in 2023-24 from 47.5 crore in 2017-18. Since it is based on extrapolation from the RBI's KLEMS data, it is worth visiting the KLEMS data to know the falsehood that is being played though the false narrative of the government. Earlier, government has given this data even in the Rajya Sabha. First thing to note the Government's official PLFS data does not given the employment figures at the level of the extrapolation from the RBI's KLEMS data. It is the reason because of which Centre has been repeatedly quoting KLEMS to show high employment figures, while PLFS shows low employment figures. RBI's data shows that in 2014- 15 we had 471.46 million employed persons, which rose to 472.04 million in 2015-16. For the year 2016-17, when millions of MSMEs were closed and most of them reduced their operation up to 75 per cent after the demonization in November 2016, and millions of workers lost their jobs, the RBI data showed 1.2 per cent increase in employment which increased to 473.2 million. For the year, 2017-18, when even NSSO data showed 45 years high unemployment rate at 6.1 per cent, the RBI data showed that employment increased by 1.8 per cent to 475 million. For the year 2018-19, RBI data on employment showed a jump of 17.6 per cent to 492.6 million. In 2019-20, RBI data showed a jump in employment be 41.8 per cent that rose to 534.4 million. The more mysterious RBI data came for 2020-21, the year of the lockdown and COVID-19 crisis when the entire economy came to a halt. RBI data said that employment jumped to 31.2 per cent for that year and it reached to 565.6 million. The next COVID-19 crisis year was 2021-22, and the RBI data showed 11.9 per cent jump in employment which reached to 577.5 million. It should be noted that when India's GDP growth rate turned negative about (-6 per cent) in 2020-21 due to lockdown of the economy, RBI's data show jump in employment. For 2022-23 the data showed 19.2 per cent jump to 596.7 million, and for 2023-24 the jump was 46.7 per cent to 643.3 million. It is strange that the Union Government still quoting this RBI data which are questionable. The reality is that government employment data is inflated. Unpaid household helpers are counted as employed, and also persons who got 1 hour of work. Own account workers, that are self-employed, are on the rise, and earning very low below the survival level. About 90 per cent of the employment are informal, and lack social security. Underemployment is rampant. The Union Minister of State for Labour and employment has given the record employment figure from RBI's data base for the year PLFS data shows that a total of 58.4 per cent of the total employed people in 2023-24 were self-employed. The percentage of self employed has risen from 55.8 per cent in 2021-22 and 57.3 per cent in 2022-23. It is indicative of the declining job opportunities in the labour market which enforcing people to become either helping hand in household enterprises or own account worker so that they can survive amidst lack of social security coverage. Regular wage and salaried jobs have been almost stagnant, the PLFS 2023-24 shows. It was 21.5 per cent in 2021-22, declined to 20.9 per cent in 2022- 23, and reached 21.7 per cent in 2023-24. Share of casual labour in the work force was also declining which was 19.8 per cent in 2023- 24, but was 21.8 per cent in 2022- 23 and 22.7 per cent in 2021-22. (IPA Service)
Dubai Eye
3 days ago
- Dubai Eye
India-UK trade deal signals Modi's priorities as New Delhi eyes EU, US pacts
India's trade deal with Britain is a sign of New Delhi's new gradual shift to opening up its markets while shielding crucial sectors from competition and could be its template for future agreements, government officials and analysts said on Friday. Signed on Thursday and hailed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi as "a blueprint for our shared prosperity", the deal with the UK represents India's biggest ever strategic partnership with an advanced economy. It comes at a time rising global trade tensions and at a pivotal moment for India's historically protectionist trade strategy, as the Asian giant looks to strike similar deals with partners including the EU, US and New Zealand. Under the pact, India notably agreed to cut tariffs on imported British vehicles, opening up competition for a domestic industry that makes up nearly 7 per cent of the Indian economy. "This is a policy shift, especially as India has long used high tariffs to protect domestic manufacturers," Ajay Srivastava, founder of Global Trade Research Initiative and a former Indian trade negotiator, told Reuters. The easing of its protectionist stance also applies to government procurement and pharmaceuticals and will likely be replicated in deals with Brussels and Washington, he added. But it remains a cautious shift. Under the UK deal, auto imports will be capped under a quota system to shield local manufacturers, and tariff reductions will be gradual. India has committed to reducing auto tariffs from over 100 per cent to 10 per cent over 15 years, within an annual import quota starting at 10,000 units and rising to 19,000 in year five. Tariff reductions on whisky and other goods will also be phased over several years to allow domestic industries to adjust. RED LINES India has stuck to its red lines in the deal, making no concessions on agricultural items such as apples and walnuts or dairy products including cheese and whey. "There is no question of opening up the agriculture or dairy sector in any trade negotiation - be it with the EU, Australia, or even the US," a senior Indian official said. The calibrated strategy aims to leverage trade for economic growth, the official said, but the government will continue to shield millions of Indians dependent upon subsistence farming and low-margin work. Indian farmers are eyeing broadened access to the UK's $37.5 billion agriculture market under the deal. And Indian exporters will benefit from zero tariffs on goods including textiles, footwear, gems, furniture, auto parts, machinery, and chemicals. "With zero tariffs, India's garment exports to the UK could double in three years," said N. Thirukkumaran, general secretary of the Tiruppur Exporters Association. "This also paves the way for the EU agreement, which could bring even bigger gains," he added. But the strategy could face a major test in negotiations with US President Donald Trump's administration, which has used the threat of steep tariffs to pressure trading partners into making concessions. Trade Minister Piyush Goyal told Reuters on Thursday that India is also hopeful of reaching a trade agreement with Washington that includes "special and preferred treatment". But the US is pushing for greater access to India's agricultural and dairy markets.
Zawya
4 days ago
- Zawya
India-UK trade deal signals Modi's priorities as New Delhi eyes EU, US pacts
India's trade deal with Britain is a sign of New Delhi's new gradual shift to opening up its markets while shielding crucial sectors from competition and could be its template for future agreements, government officials and analysts said on Friday. Signed on Thursday and hailed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi as "a blueprint for our shared prosperity", the deal with the UK represents India's biggest ever strategic partnership with an advanced economy. It comes at a time rising global trade tensions and at a pivotal moment for India's historically protectionist trade strategy, as the Asian giant looks to strike similar deals with partners including the EU, U.S., and New Zealand. Under the pact, India notably agreed to cut tariffs on imported British vehicles, opening up competition for a domestic industry that makes up nearly 7% of the Indian economy. "This is a policy shift, especially as India has long used high tariffs to protect domestic manufacturers," Ajay Srivastava, founder of Global Trade Research Initiative and a former Indian trade negotiator, told Reuters. The easing of its protectionist stance also applies to government procurement and pharmaceuticals and will likely be replicated in deals with Brussels and Washington, he added. But it remains a cautious shift. Under the UK deal, auto imports will be capped under a quota system to shield local manufacturers, and tariff reductions will be gradual. India has committed to reducing auto tariffs from over 100% to 10% over 15 years, within an annual import quota starting at 10,000 units and rising to 19,000 in year five. Tariff reductions on whisky and other goods will also be phased over several years to allow domestic industries to adjust. RED LINES India has stuck to its red lines in the deal, making no concessions on agricultural items such as apples and walnuts or dairy products including cheese and whey. "There is no question of opening up the agriculture or dairy sector in any trade negotiation — be it with the EU, Australia, or even the U.S.," a senior Indian official said. The calibrated strategy aims to leverage trade for economic growth, the official said, but the government will continue to shield millions of Indians dependent upon subsistence farming and low-margin work. Indian farmers are eyeing broadened access to the UK's $37.5 billion agriculture market under the deal. And Indian exporters will benefit from zero tariffs on goods including textiles, footwear, gems, furniture, auto parts, machinery, and chemicals. "With zero tariffs, India's garment exports to the UK could double in three years," said N. Thirukkumaran, general secretary of the Tiruppur Exporters Association. "This also paves the way for the EU agreement, which could bring even bigger gains," he added. But the strategy could face a major test in negotiations with U.S. President Donald Trump's administration, which has used the threat of steep tariffs to pressure trading partners into making concessions. Trade Minister Piyush Goyal told Reuters on Thursday that India is also hopeful of reaching a trade agreement with Washington that includes "special and preferred treatment". But the U.S. is pushing for greater access to India's agricultural and dairy markets. (Additional reporting by Dhwani Pandya; Editing by Joe Bavier)
