By Sidharth Mishra

The AAP leadership decided to hand out Parliamentary Secretary positions to MLAs to stop them from following Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav out of the party.The recommendation made by the Election Commission of India to the President to disqualify 20 Delhi MLAs of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is not suspect. Rather, it’s the delay by the Election Commission in giving the opinion which raises eyebrows.The matter was referred to the poll panel by former president Pranab Mukherjee more than two years ago and the opinion has come now, only after Delhi Congress chief Ajay Maken met the Election Commission chief and registered protest over the delay for no palpable reason.It’s important to understand the context of the appointment of 21 Parliamentary Secretaries to various ministers by Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal way back in 2015. Soon after the AAP registered a resounding victory in the 2015 Assembly elections with 67 of the 70 Assembly seats, the party was visited by major dissension by founders Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav.

By Sidharth Mishra

Despite Finance Minister Arun Jaitley claiming during his one hour and fifty minutes long Budget speech on Thursday that its contents were bereft of any political considerations, the annual financial document 2018-19 is all about politics.

The present BJP leadership, symbolised largely by the triumvirate of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, party president Amit Shah and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, cannot do a thing without considering its political fallout. The annual financial statement 2018-19 can be best described as the political statement of the Narendra Modi government on its performance of the past four years.

The first forty-five minutes of the long Budget speech was devoted to the pro-poor measures which the government has initiated in the last four years and in saying its ‘budget of consolidation’, Jaitley meant that the government was now looking for electoral returns on the investments in the public policies made by it.

By Sidharth Mishra

One of the main driving forces behind the promulgation of the Anti-Defection Law by the Rajiv Gandhi government in the 1980s was the brute majority enjoyed by the Congress party in the LokSabha. It had won more than 400 seats in the 1985 General Elections thanks to the sympathy wave which followed assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.The Congress strategists loyal to Rajiv Gandhi at that point of time had advised for bringing such law which would keep the folk together lest the old school veterans carry out a coup against the reformist agenda of the ‘young’ Prime Minister. The law has withstood the trial of time and survived to end the politics of “Aya Rams, Gaya Ram”, which had come to make mockery of people’s mandate.

By Sidharth Mishra

At the media briefing last week to announce the party candidates for the three RajyaSabha seats from Delhi, Aam Aadmi Party’s number 2 and Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia made two very important observations. First that the party contacted 18 politically neutral persons for nomination, and that all refused to bite the bait. Second about ND Gupta, the chartered accountant who is helping AAP to handle its income tax matters, getting the party’s boarding pass for passage to Rajya Sabha.

Political parties have a tradition of paying the fee of their saviours before law by way of a nomination to the Rajya Sabha. If one needed evidence, there are cases of advocates Kapil Sibal and RK Anand being sent to Rajya Sabha from Bihar and Jharkhand respectively. In the former’s case Lalu Prasad Yadav was the sponsor, whereas in the case of Anand it was veteran tribal leaderShibuSoren.

By Sidharth Mishra

In August 2012, three reports submitted by then Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG)VinodRaion the allocation of coal blocks, functioning of the Delhi airport and allocation of additional coal blocks to Reliance Power had drawnimmediate and sharp criticism from then government. The counter was coordinated from the Prime Minister’s Office. The Minister of State in the PMO, V Narayanswamy, was quick to state that the CAG was not following its constitutional mandate, rather over-stepping it by questioning government policy.

By Sidharth Mishra

There is no way that the BJP could have afforded to lose the assembly polls in Gujarat. Nobody understood this better than Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Despite the party ruling the roost in the state for the past three decades, the opposition Congress has maintained a fair share of votes all the while. Therefore when he bequeathed the office of the chief minister for job at South Block in the national Capital, Prime Minister Narendra Modi appointed his most trusted lieutenant as head of the party.

By Sidharth Mishra

We are in the midst of a very crucial battle of ballot being fought in political significant western state of Gujarat. The protagonist of the battle, Prime Minister NarendraModi cannot afford to lose here for that would impair his image of remaining unbeatable in his home turf. The first round of polling is over. Another round remains.

By Sidharth Mishra

A few weeks back in these very columns, at the height of debate on Vikas (development) agenda, your reporter had penned that it was only matter of time when the “Hindu issues” could come to take the centrestage. The tone and tenor of the election campaign in the past week has shown that characters like Aurangzeb and themes like sacred thread are dominating the script. While the attempt from the Congress is to stop polarisation of votes on communal lines, the BJP is finding the new avatar of the rival quite amusing.Development is something on which Prime Minister NarendraModirode to power at the Centre in 2014. Development is something about which he talked about at the beginning of both the 2007 and 2012 assembly poll campaigns in Gujarat. But subsequently, the narrative on both the occasions turned towards communal polarisation.