India

[Dave from down under]

Canadian assassination
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-24/ ... /103611320

Concerns in Australia
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-21/ ... /103604354

[RTH10260]

Modi loses parliamentary majority in Indian election
Latest results reveal unexpected blow to PM, forcing negotiation with coalition partners to regain power

Hannah Ellis-Petersen in Delhi
Wed 5 Jun 2024 02.59 CEST

Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata party has lost its parliamentary majority, dealing an unexpected blow to the prime minister and forcing him to negotiate with coalition partners in order to return to power.

With all votes counted early on Wednesday morning, it was clear that the landslide for the BJP predicted in polls had not materialised and instead there had been a pushback against the strongman prime minister and his Hindu nationalist politics in swathes of the country.

The party lost 62 seats, bringing its total down to 240, below the 272 required for a parliamentary majority.

It is the first time since Modi was elected in 2014 that the BJP has not won a clear majority on its own. Nonetheless, together with its political allies, known as the national democratic alliance (NDA), its win amounts to about 292 seats, which is enough to form a majority government to rule for the next five years and return Modi to office for a third term.



https://www.theguardian.com/world/artic ... a-modi-bjp

[RTH10260]

book review / interview

‘Nobody knows what I know’: how a loyal RSS member abandoned Hindu nationalism
As a young man, Partha Banerjee was on course to become a senior member of the RSS, the organisation that has pushed Indian politics towards extreme religious nationalism. Then, after decades within its ranks, he quit. Why?

By Rahul Bhatia
Thu 1 Aug 2024 06.00 CEST

Running a finger over a row of books in a Delhi library one afternoon, I stopped at a title that promised danger. The stacks were abundant in books like RSS Misunderstood and Is RSS the Enemy?, which often turned out to be self-published polemics that were too long, however short they were. This one was different. On its front was the full title, In the Belly of the Beast: The Hindu Supremacist RSS and the BJP of India, An Insider’s View. I read the first page, and then the next, slowly, with rising giddiness. Not long after, I was beside a Sikh gentleman at his photocopying machine. What pages, he asked. Everything, I said.

In the long hour that followed, I wondered if the book’s presence on these shelves was an oversight. This was the closest that any writer had come to describing the organisation from within. That night I swallowed its contents whole, scanned a copy for myself to store in several places for safekeeping, and wrote to its author. We mailed, and then scheduled a video call, and then arranged to meet two months later, when he travelled to India from the US to alert people to the dangers of the RSS before the 2024 elections began.


https://www.theguardian.com/world/artic ... ationalism