Tag: Narendra Modi

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Reuters/Babu
Photo: A supporter of India’s main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, wears a mask depicting party leader Narendra Modi before a campaign rally in Chennai, April 13, 2014. Reuters/Babu

To win an Indian election, a political party must win a majority of seats in the lower house of parliament, or Lok Sabha. Since there are 543 seats in the Lok Sabha, this majority would amount to at least 272 seats.

Narendra Modi, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s candidate for prime minister, is the current frontrunner in the Indian elections and is widely believed to be the country’s next leader. The ultimate success of the “Modi wave” rippling through India, however, depends on this arithmetic equation within the Lok Sabha. “Most polls have shown Modi’s BJP winning the largest number of seats while falling short of the 272 needed for a majority when election results are announced May 16,” Bibhudatta Pradhan writes in Bloomberg.

To actually become the country’s next prime minister, Modi must band together with other political parties willing to offer him support so he can control the number of seats he needs to succeed. Continue reading…

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Narendra Modi (@narendramodi)
Narendra Modi, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s candidate for prime minister, caused a stir on Wednesday when he delivered a political speech and snapped a selfie of himself holding up a cutout of a lotus flower with his ink-stained finger after voting in his home state of Gujarat. The lotus flower is the party symbol of the BJP.

The problem is that what he did is against the rules of India’s Election Commission, the federal authority that monitors electoral processes in the country. Continue reading…

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India’s nationalist opposition party taking leaf from Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s book to attract minority Muslim voters.

BJP AJE
A group of locals gather at a hall in a Shia area of Lucknow to show support for the BJP [Sonia Paul/ Al Jazeera]
Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh – “If you have to change the fortunes of India, it must begin in Lucknow,” Narendra Modi, the opposition prime ministerial candidate, said at an election rally early in March.

His statement reaffirmed a popular saying in Indian politics: The road to New Delhi passes via Lucknow, the capital of India’s most populous and politically most important state – Uttar Pradesh.

As the city goes to polls on April 30, the attention is on the constituency’s Muslims, who comprise about 22 percent of the 1.9 million voting population here.

The right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has remained a force here for decades, is making every symbolic gesture to attract the minority voters.

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British comedian and former Daily Show regular John Oliver has come out with a hilarious analysis of the Indian elections that’s currently gaining traction on social media. Among the topics he covers on his new HBO show Last Week Tonight: the “Americanization” of Indian media, the US’s apathy toward the elections, and Hindu nationalist prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi’s emulation of famed rapper Tupac at Coachella.

You can watch the embed below, or see it on the official Last Week Tonight YouTube channel here.

This piece was originally published on April 28, 2014, on Link TV’s World News website.

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The surging Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has had a lively social media presence during this year’s elections in India. Anyone who has ever combined a hashtag with “Modi,” “BJP,” “NaMo,” (a nickname of Narendra Modi here in India) or anything else related to Modi or the BJP has surely encountered Modi supporters either praising or defending their views. These “Moditards,” as some journalists have dubbed them, are generally passionate professionals who want nothing more than for Modi to lead the country, though some accounts are also suspected of being social media robots.

But an enterprising Indian who obviously has some programming skills did some investigating and found that most of these accounts are, in fact, fake Modi supporters.

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Reuters/Babu
A vendor wears a mask of Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi, prime ministerial candidate for main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Gujarat’s chief minister, to attract customers at his stall selling masks of Indian political leaders ahead of general election in the southern Indian city of Chennai April 3, 2014. Reuters/Babu

The cat’s out of the bag, officially: After years of speculation, Narendra Modi, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s candidate for prime minister of India, has admitted he has a wife. The revelation came when he filled out his nomination form in an election registry on Wednesday. Where it stated “married to,” he wrote, “Jashodaben.” It’s the first time Modi has ever publicly recognized his spouse’s existence.

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Abhinandan Pathak, a physical education teacher from Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh, has taken three months off to travel around India and campaign in support of Narendra Modi. (Sonia Paul for The Caravan)
Abhinandan Pathak, a physical education teacher from Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh, has taken three months off to travel around India and campaign in support of Narendra Modi. (Sonia Paul for The Caravan)

On the morning of 3 April, Abhinandan Pathak stepped off his sleeper compartment at Lucknow’s Charbagh Station. A posse of five men, including his 14-year-old son, Shivam, accompanied him. He wore white trousers and a white kurta, a gold Nehru vest, and a turban and neck sash coloured saffron and green—the colours of the Bharatiya Janata Party.

His silver hair and beard, and a pair of rimless spectacles, rounded off Pathak’s imitation of the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi.

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REUTERS/Adnan Abidi
A security personnel stands next to the symbol of India’s ruling Congress party, during a rally addressed by Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi ahead of the 2014 general elections, in New Delhi.  Photo: REUTERS/Adnan Abidi

One-sixth of the world’s entire population will head to the polls this spring to cast their vote in India’s 16th parliamentary exercises. The hype surrounding the elections has been simmering for some time — India’s economy is in a huge slump, and ongoing domestic issues like unemployment, corruption and safety are plaguing the population from Kashmir in the north to Kanyakumari in the south.

Then last fall, Narendra Modi, the chief minister of the Indian state of Gujurat, announced his candidacy for prime minister. A new political party that grew out of an anticorruption movement, the Aam Aadmi Party, emerged from seemingly nowhere as a potential game changer in determining the outcome of the elections. And Rahul Gandhi, the scion of the Nehru-Gandhi family that has been at the helm of Indian politics since independence from the British in 1947, is also running for prime minister — without a whole lot of experience behind him.

What this all means is that the elections this year are some of the most important and highly contested in India’s history. Below, a crash course on the fundamentals you need to know to understand what’s at stake.

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Men cheering for Narendra Modi, the prime ministerial candidate of Bharatiya Janata Party, at his rally in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, on March 2.
Men cheering for Narendra Modi, the prime ministerial candidate of Bharatiya Janata Party, at his rally in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, on March 2. Credit: Sonia Paul

LUCKNOW, India — As Narendra Modi gains momentum as the Bharatiya Janata Party’s candidate for prime minister, attention is turning to Muslim voters in the politically important state of Uttar Pradesh, who have been regarding him warily because of ties to right-wing Hindu groups that have attacked Muslims.

Uttar Pradesh has 80 seats in the lower house of the Indian Parliament at stake in the national elections, the most of any state in India. Muslims make up around 18 percent of the nearly 200 million people in the state and have historically provided support for the governing party in New Delhi, the Indian National Congress, and the regional Samajwadi Party, which is currently running the government in Uttar Pradesh.

Regional parties dominate Uttar Pradesh and could siphon off votes from either the Bharatiya Janata Party or the Indian National Congress so that neither gets an outright majority in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament. The Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., has won the parliamentary seat of the Lucknow district for the past several terms. Other districts in Uttar Pradesh are less settled.

Winning over Muslim voters in Uttar Pradesh requires a more complex strategy than just fielding a Muslim candidate, because they don’t vote as a bloc and they don’t base their vote solely on religion.

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