meanwhile in India, or lies, more lies and damn lies:
The Supreme Court refuses to defer the hearings on the Babri Masjid land dispute until after the election in May 2019, prompting fears that the court will be used to “legally” seize control of the land to build a temple, fulfilling one of the BJP’s electoral promises in 2014: They have also refused to have all members of the bench at the hearing, claiming that the case is nothing more than a “property dispute”.
The senior counsel said the question of whether a mosque was an essential part of Islam had to be decided. The senior counsel referred to the 1994 three-judge Bench judgment of the Supreme Court in the Dr. M. Ismail Faruqui case, which had held that “the right to practise, profess and propagate religion guaranteed under Article 25 of the Constitution does not necessarily include the right to acquire or own or possess property. Similarly this right does not extend to the right of worship at any and every place of worship”.
Meanwhile the judgement on who has the rights to the site of the Babri Masjid will happen before the perpetrators of its destruction can be prosecuted for criminal conspiracy (among other charges) by the CBI court:
Speaking to The Indian Express, Liberhan, who submitted his report in June 2009 indicting Atal Bihari Vajpayee along with L K Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi, said: “The Supreme Court’s decision to hear the appeal in the matter of the Ayodhya title suit (the decision of the Allahabad High Court in 2010) on a day-to-day basis from December 5 will adversely affect the demolition suit. What is the point of doing this? If it is decided that it is Wakf property, then one side is established as guilty of demolition. And if the Hindu sides get it, then the act of demolition becomes seen as ‘justified’ — to reclaim own property. This demolition is known to people alive and must be decided first. They can take a few weeks or months to do it.”
And Modi wonders what the hearing has to do with the elections:
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday said he did not object to Congress leader Kapil Sibal representing the “Muslim community” in the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi case, but criticised the senior advocate for asking the Supreme Court to defer the hearing till July 2019, when the next general elections will be over.
“How is the case connected to the Lok Sabha elections?” Modi asked at a rally in the city of Dhandhuka in Gujarat’s Ahmedabad district.
The election comission postpones the dates of the Gujarat elections, despite them usually being twinned to Himachal Pradesh ever since 1998, to prevent undue influence from one state crossing over to the other leaving a 39 day gap between voting and vote counting in Himachal Pradesh:
And, why is there a gap of 39 days between voting and counting in HP? Actually, both these questions are interlinked. The EC itself made it clear that the Gujarat poll would be held before the counting in HP on December 19, so that the result in the hill state does not influence voting in Gujarat, a common reason for clubbing all polls falling within a period of six months. As the Gujarat poll has to be announced within a few days, as the CEC mentioned, there seems no apparent justification to partially delink the two. This curious gap of a “few days” has justifiably raised the eyebrows.
What is absolutely clear is that the HP election announcement could not have waited even for a single more day. In fact, the announcement was overdue. On November 15 every year, the Rohtang Pass is closed for winter, which alienates parts of HP from the rest of the state, making elections there impossible. In 2007, the HP High Court had ordered that polls in the entire state must be held simultaneously instead of holding it in two phases, February and June, as had become the norm because elections in three constituencies were invariably deferred till June on account of the snow.
If the EC had not scheduled the HP poll on November 9, it would have jeopardised the poll in the three snowbound constituencies and violated the high court order for simultaneous polls, attracting contempt of court. The polling parties that would go to the snowy region have to complete the process and return to lower heights before the closure of Rohtang Pass. The HP date was, therefore, a foregone conclusion and any prudent person could have guessed it. Why, then, was the Gujarat election not announced? Both mainstream and social media are abuzz with speculation and spiteful comments, castigating the EC.
Pundits offer opinions on the issue; there is a public consensus that the delay in the Gujarat elections allows for the BJP to rush through a number of sops & concessions to keep the state in their hands:
Three developments signal that political equations in the country may well be in a state of flux. First, the rejection of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) in recent university elections indicates a strong sense of discomfort with the BJP’s politics among the youth who gave the party solid support in the 2014 Lok Sabha election. Second, the Election Commission’s decision to de-hyphenate the Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat Assembly election notification which allowed the Central and State governments more time to frantically announce sops, including slashing rates of the goods and services tax (GST) on select items, loan waivers for farmers, and benefits for government employees. Third, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attempt to pass the blame for the disruptive introduction of the GST and its shambolic implementation on the Congress implies that something is really changing on the ground.
The winter session of parliament is postponed even further from Nov 16 to Dec 15, which means that instead of an average of 74 sittings in a year (since 1999), the number of sittings will be either 48 or 57, depending on whether or not a winter session is held at all.
In 2000, Lok Sabha was in session for as many as 85 days. In fact, in the last 10 years, the lower House has met for an average of 70 days a year. This number was much higher during the 1950s and 1960s, as the house used to meet for an average of 120 days a year.
The National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution had recommended that Lok Sabha must meet for a minimum of 120 days a year. Former Vice President Hamid Ansari had suggested at the Whips Conference in 2008 that the number of sittings must increase to 130 days.
In the last two decades, Parliamentarians have generally accepted that they must strive to enable the Parliament to sit for at least 100 days a year. However, the third full-fledged year of the Narendra Modi government’s five-year tenure has proved itself to be a landmark, slashing that number by half.
The vice-president insists that there is nothing wrong with this at all.
The Cabinet Committee on Parliamentary Affairs (CCPA) headed by Home Minister Rajnath Singh met in New Delhi on November 24 to decide the dates of the Winter Session. The CCPA recommended that the session be held from December 15 to January 5.
Speaking at a literary festival [Vice-President] Mr. Naidu said that the debate on the freedom of speech and expression should go on.
“How many days the Parliament sat doesn’t matter, what matters is how many days it functioned,” he said.
(i’m still not entirely sure what that means)
UP goes to the polls for local body elections; electronic voting machines are discovered to have been tampered with, delivering votes to the BJP regardless of which party is selected - or else recording a result where more than one party is selected, thus nullifying the vote. The impact is significant:
In a tweet today, Yadav has also pressed for ballot papers for the 2019 parliament elections.
“There is something wrong in EVMs otherwise why it has happened in UP Nagar Nigam election that BJP won 15% seats in ballot paper areas and 46% in EVM areas. It has become necessary now that 2019 Parliament election may be conducted through ballot papers,” Yadav tweeted.
Opposition parties Congress, SP, BSP and AAP had alleged that BJP’v victory in UP was due to the EVM tampering.
This is not the first instance of recorded evm fraud. earlier cases include Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Delhi (alleged not proven). The ec mandates the use of a paper trail in Gujarat.
Yet inspite of election fraud, the BJP actually loses seats in Uttar Pradesh - and then goes on to crow about its significant wins in UP.
In UP urban local body polls, BJP vote share fell by 10%, lost 87% of Nagar Panchayat member seats and 82% of Nagar Palika Parishad seats.
Contrary to media hype in the last two days over a “BJP sweep” in the Uttar Pradesh (UP) urban local bodies elections, the results demonstrate considerable waning of the pro-BJP mood that helped it win Uttar Pradesh assembly elections barely eight months ago.
The only major victory the BJP and its drum beaters are gloating about is the Mayor elections where it succeeded in getting its mayors in 14 out of 16 towns, with the surprising exception of the communally surcharged Aligarh and Meerut towns, where Mayawati’s BSP nominees won. These were the only elections where the electronic voting machines (EVM) were deployed and the media could not help report at least a couple of instances of the machines malfunctioning. It’s also a mystery why the Election Commission chose to introduce EVMs for mayoral polls when all the other categories were held through ballot paper.
The fact that chief minister Yogi Adityanath led his entire contingent of 48 ministers plus the 100-strong UP BJP state office bearers that spread out to every nook and corner of the vast Uttar Pradesh to campaign for these polls show the urgency of the party to project a victory in these elections. Some of them openly threatened Muslims to vote for the BJP or face the consequences.
Yet the results of the nagar panchayat members, nagar palika members, nagar palika parishads and their chairpersons clearly show a growing disenchantment with the BJP even in this new saffron fortress, to the extent that 71.31% nagar panchayat members are independents and still the BJP could get only 100 of the 438 chairpersons elected. With one result yet to be declared, 337 chairpersons are non-BJP, for in this election there were no alliances and each party independently fought against the main adversary BJP.
The state has a strength of 5,434 Nagar Panchayat members of which the BJP won only 662 and lost 4,728 to others, including an overwhelming majority of independents as also SP, BSP, Congress and RLD.
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AAP, Akali dal demands CRPF deployment inside polling booths for Punjab zila parishad elections, fears 'poll rigging' Punjab's main Opposition party, AAP, akali dal and bjp on Friday demanded deployment of CRPF personnel inside polling stations and the video recording inside them during the voting for the upcoming zila parishad and panchayat samiti elections, fearing "booth capturing and poll rigging."  Representational image. AP The Shromani Akali Dal too sought extension of date for filing the nomination for these polls, alleging that many of its candidates were prevented by the Congress workers from filing it on Friday, the last date for doing it. In a letter to the state Election Commission, Aam Aadmi Party's Punjab unit co-president Balbir Singh sought "video recording of all the polling booths and deployment of the CRPF inside them" during voting. Singh made the demand, fearing "election rigging, booth capturing and bogus voting" allegedly by the ruling Congress. He alleged that the ruling party has unleashed vendetta politics against the Opposition and "was trying its best to stop AAP from taking part in these elections." "The video recording of all the polling stations and polling booths must be undertaken on the polling day so that if any unscrupulous person tries to intimidate voters or indulge in booth capturing or rigging the poll, his acts are caught on the camera," he wrote in the letter. Balbir Singh said the police is directly under the control of the ruling Congress and "they will be misused by the ruling dispensation" during the elections. Meanwhile, SAD asked the state Election Commission on Friday to extend the date for filing nomination papers for the zila parishad and panchayat samiti polls. Friday was the last day for filing the nomination papers. Opposition SAD has alleged that Akali workers were "forcibly" stopped from filing their papers for the zila parishad and panchayat polls by the Congress. Former minister Daljit Singh Cheema said he had informed state Election Commissioner Jagpal Sandhu that no Akali candidate was allowed to file nomination papers in Zira, Makhu, Guruharsahai, Dera Baba Nanak and Patti for either the zila parishad or panchayat samiti elections. "Strict disciplinary action including suspension, should be taken against all the officers who are acting as stooge of the Congress legislators," he added. He alleged the nomination papers of Akali candidates were torn at many places. He also said the SAD workers were not being given no-dues certificates at various places in the state. Cheema said voter lists too had not reached some places and that too hindered the filing of nominations. Elections to zila parishads and panchayat samitis in Punjab is slated to take place on 19 September and 7 September was the last day for the filing of nominations. The nomination papers will be scrutinised on 10 September, while the date for withdrawal is 11 September. The counting is to take place on 22 September. Tags : Aam Aadmi Party, AAP, Balbir Singh,Congress, CRPF, Election Commission, NewsTracker, Opposition, Pamchayat Samiti, Punjab, SAD,Zila Parishad
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