@RShivshankar 1. Indian Americans as a class comfortable with Republican economic model.2. Mandani is Hinduphobic.3.Mandani is socialist which will not suit to Indian American's interests
@sardesairajdeep These official figures are not correct. Christian population in the country is much much higher for reasons of reservation, it was concealed. If that is taken into consideration, the decline of Hindu population is more than 10%. Then, all your arguments fell flat
THE MAN WHO SAW TOMORROW
Tamil Nadu is the toughest puzzle to solve for any national party in India. Ask the Congress party. It was in power for 20 years since independence. And then one fine day the state was lost to Dravidian parties. It’s been 57 years since, and the Congress is nowhere among the frontrunners. The Communists have tasted success in Kerala. But they’ve always been a sidekick in TN; never the lead player. Which brings us to the BJP.
The BJP took almost 50 years to conquer the Hindi belt. The top leadership knows that the South will take a few more decades. And Tamil Nadu being the hardest nut to crack, the Sangh parivaar is willing to wait. And wait. And wait.
The preparation for the harvest was started in the late sixties. Some green shoots were realised in the nineties. But the real confidence to breach Fort St. George was realised in 2019 after BJP became the largest political party in the world.
The original plan was to create a nationalist front by riding a horse called Rajinikant. But the superstar developed cold feet possibly due to ill-health. So, the BJP had no other choice to create its own hero. BL Santhosh, the national general secretary of BJP, played the biggest ace of his career by punting on a man called Kuppuswamy Annamalai.
K. Annamalai is the very antithesis of Tamil politicians. He’s super well educated, for starters. An IIM-L grad and ex-IPS to boot, he’s more prepared than Chat GPT to answer any question dart thrown at him by anyone.
Having been mandated to disrupt state politics, Annamalai decided to do a deep dive of all things Dravidian. The learnings came thick and fast:
A) Tamil Nadu is more about larger-than-life leaders than parties. It’s important for BJP to project one leader than a group of leaders.
B) What keeps Dravidian parties going is the ecosystem of Movies, Media, and Literature. A parallel ecosystem needs to be created to take the Dravidians on.
C) Tamils aren’t too hung up about Dravidianism. All they want is the Tamil culture to take the pride of place.
D) Hindi the language is not resented. But Hindi-domination is.
E) Modi was a hate figure largely due to the Dravidian campaign. This perception can be reversed as it’s merely a perception
F) Tamils love bold leaders. Jayalalitha was always preferred over Karunanidhi for this reason. There’s no space for a Mr. Nice in state politics.
G) While the lead parties might profess atheism, the state is by and large teeming with believers. Maybe a play can be made to tap into the spiritual side of the state.
H) AIADMK minus Jayalalitha can never come to power by themselves. And AIADMK + DMK vote share is only 70%. The other 30% is available for BJP if they make an aggressive pitch.
I) The opposition parties in Tamil Nadu have a cosy arrangement with the ruling party. They have a ‘Zero attacks for 4.5 years’ policy. The average opposition leader will stir out of his home only 6 months before elections
J) Politicians across the board have skeletons in their closet. No one is seen as ‘clean and honest’ by the public.
The thing that sets Annamalai apart from others was the fact that he weaponised his learnings. The first thing he did was to unabashedly project himself. A war room was set up to make him the most talked about BJP politician on social media. This obviously got the goat of many of his colleagues. But he managed the national leadership’s backing and thus was born the Cult of Annamalai.
Having overcome competition from within, Annamalai set his sights on the larger prize. Can BJP become the No.2 party by 2024? And the No.1 party by 2026? For Mission 1 to succeed he had to turn AIADMK into an adversary. Hence his aggression vis-à-vis the party of two leaves. Once he got AIADMK out of the way, he unfolded his Brahmastra – the En Mann En Makkal - a 1770 Km padayatra that traverses every constituency in the state.
No one in Tamil Nadu had attempted anything on this scale. By exercising this walkathon option, Annamalai was striving to make history. Fortunately, he got the backing of the BIG 2 when he repackaged the yatra as a platform to promote the Modi story. Amit Shah came for the inauguration. Modi, for the grand finale which attracted over 5 lakh people.
BJP watchers in all Television channels have acknowledged a significant blip in the vote share after the yatra. From all estimates, right now the party might clock anywhere between 8% and 18%. That’s the magic of Annamalai.
For a party that in the best of times got around 5%, this is the great leap forward. To best the AIADMK in the Lok Sabha polls will be the stuff that dreams are made of. To beat the DMK will be even sweeter.
Annamalai knows Mission 1 is a realisable dream.
Mission 2 should happen by 2026. In his mind, there’s no doubt about that.
And that’s why, everyone loves Annamalai.
Watch this video to understand about the cartel of NewsClick, Abhishar Sharma, Teesta Setalvad, and many others who were raided by Delhi Police this morning.
This video is based on my investigative thread and presented by Nikita Thakur.
If you are wondering why there is deafening silence on the embezzlement of funds under the Scholarship Schemes for Minorities, it is because there were fake beneficiaries and fake institutions getting scholarships in connivance with Schools, Institute Nodal Officers (INO) and Banking Correspondents (BC). The Ministry of Minority Affairs has accordingly referred the matter to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) for investigation. Read more…
Scholarship schemes namely Pre-Matric Scholarships, Post-Matric Scholarships and Merit-cum-Means were introduced by the erstwhile UPA in the year 2007-08. Prior to 2014-15, funds were released directly to the state government/UTs without any mechanism to verify the applications and map the rightful use of funds.
• In 2014-15, a fundamental change was introduced in disbursal of funds and scheme was implemented on DBT through an existing technological software based out of Hyderabad.
• It was only in 2016-17 that the schemes were shifted to the National Scholarship Portal (NSP) and implemented on DBT developed in Delhi. Thus, began the process of digitisation of scholarship schemes.
• As part of the NSP portal, verification of applications is done at 2 levels - first by INO appointed by the District/State Nodal Officer (DNO/SNO) and at second level it is verified by DNO/SNO appointed by the State Government.
• Once the application is verified by these 2 authorities, it is submitted to the portal/Ministry for disbursement of funds.
• As the digitisation process progressed, it was observed that INO, DNO and SNO ecosystem carried forward from the UPA era misused their authority and continued to compromise on veracity mechanism established through NSP.
• In 2020, as instances of siphoning of funds came to fore, Ministry alerted the states namely Assam, Jharkhand, Bihar, Punjab and Chhattisgarh about the fraudulent practices in place.
• After taking charge in July 2022, Minister Smriti Irani ordered discontinuation of scholarships for minority students from Std 1 to 8, as education in all government institutes is mandated to be free of cost for every child upto Std 8. This was first strike on fraudulent funding.
• Further, in order to assess and evaluate the impact of these schemes, she instructed the Ministry to undertake a detailed study of the 3 aforementioned scholarship schemes through an external agency.
• National Council of Applied Economics Research (NCAER) was engaged to do the assessment across 34 states/UTs.
Findings of NCAER:
- NCAER evaluated 1,572 institutes from 21 states. Out of which, 830 (53%) institutions were found non-operational or fake. More than 1.8 lakh institutes receive scholarships.
- Chhattisgarh has 62 registered institutes, all were found to be fake. Similarly, in Rajasthan 99 institutes out of total 128 institutes were found to be fake.
- 229 INOs, which are to be appointed by the District officer were found to be fake. These fake nodal officers used AISHE/DISE code of either non operational institutes or operational institutes without their knowledge.
- DISE code of reputed institutions like Mayo College Ajmer were misused in this fraud.
- Between 2017-18 to 2021-22, more than 144 crore was granted to these institutes on account of scholarships.
- In one instance, it was found that minority applicants of one state claimed scholarships from an institute of Schedule Tribe Girls of other state.
Findings of the NCAER study clearly indicated a deep rooted institutionalised nexus between nodal officers of the institutes/madarsas and states, BCs and various other people on ground. These are the same people who indulged in fraudulent practices since 2007-08, when there was no accountability and mechanism to ensure proper implementation of schemes.
Taking note of these findings, Ministry has referred the matter to CBI for thorough investigation and bring every person responsible for siphoning off public money to justice.
Explains the secular silence?