Rumi Nations

The Office of the President of India is not a reward bestowed upon an eminent person for a lifetime of services rendered to the nation or for any other factors. It’s a serious constitutional office, the highest office of the land. I wish to submit that by withdrawing himself as a candidate in the elections to this office in this turbulent climate, Dr. Kalam has done a disservice to the nation. He would have been a serious challenger to the canny politician Pranab Mukherjee and by his action, he becomes an accomplice to the smooth and dangerous ascendancy of Mr. Mukherjee to this key office. The country is surely bigger than Dr. Kalam. Not a Routine Matter No serious observer of politics in India will look upon the choice of Pranab Mukherjee as its candidate by the Congress Party as anything but a cynical and calculated as well as canny move by the party to position its man in the key role of President in advance of the likely fractured mandate of 2014. Never before in...

Or, rather why that is an unlikely event. Dreaming of revolutions might appear quite romantic for middle class Indians but when you dig deep, you’ll see that the situation is both better and worse than Egypt of 2011 or America of 1776. The American War of Independence was driven mostly by economic factors and Britain enacting a host of draconian laws to augment His Majesty’s revenue not to mention to offset the losses suffered in misadventures against the French. All of which sound suspiciously familiar to an Indian … the British apparently learnt nothing and went on to repeat the same things in India in the early part of the 20th century. The Egyptian Revolution of 2011 is too recent and the discontents that may have fuelled it are yet to be distilled by historians. The per capita GDP of Egypt however is way higher than India’s. It would appear that people in different nations have different thresholds of tolerance towards what is broadly known as ‘poverty.’ Indians seem to have an ex...