Pramod Mahajan

High and low points of the recent past that mark India’s present

Politicians need their money, but friendships with corporates is not always healthy

I liked Pramod Mahajan. And I'm sure all journalists who dealt with him will miss one of the most suave political players in the Delhi circuit. Updates

The loud and very public spat over VSNL does little to inculcate investor confidence in PSUs

Pramod Mahajan speaks to Outlook on the mood in the BJP post-Goa and the party's equations with NDA allies.

The text of the controversial article in BJP Today where the party general secretary expressed three regrets -- that the party could not "expedite the construction of Shriram Temple at Ayodhya", "Gujarat riot" and "the internal situation in the part

The BJP general secretary on Congress allegations of misuse of CBI and the coming assembly elections out of which he optimistically predicts victory for his party in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chattisgarh and Delhi.

While the BJP rightly guns for the DMK's A. Raja for his role in the spectrum scam, R Jagannathan in the DNA reminds us why the telecommunications ministry has been a mother lode for corruption for decades (remember Sukh Ram in the Narasimha Rao cabinet?) because it has always dealt in scarcity and big money is always made whenever there is policy confusion and scope for the use of discretionary power. He goes on to enumerate the role played by Pramod Mahajan in the Vajpayee government in making corruption hit the big time:

A close friend of the Ambanis, Mahajan allowed Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Infocomm (now Anil Ambani's Reliance Communications) to enter mobile telephony through the back door. At that point, basic fixed-line services were charged lower licence fees than mobile services, but Mahajan made a policy change that classified wireless in local loop (WLL) as a fixed-line technology when it was no different from mobile technology. This essentially put Ambani on a better wicket than the rest: he paid lower licence fees for so-called basic fixed-line telephony that was really mobile telephony in another garb.

Read the full piece at DNA
 

So asked Atal Behari Vajpayee. Or so says the man described as Advani's problem about the man they called BJP's mukhota, or mask. We are not sure whether Sri Rajnath Singh's description of it as  "a geo-cultural concept" would have satisfied him.

As Prime Minister, Atalji rarely used the term Hindutva. The one time he did so on a public platform was to sharply rebuke its narrow, dogmatic and exclusivist projection. The occasion was the launch of a book, India First, authored by the late K.R. Malkani, at 7 Race Course Road in March 2002. Here is how PTI reported his speech on that day. “In a clear disapproval of the recent actions of the so-called practitioners of Hindutva, the Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, tonight said it would be better to ‘keep a distance’ from the kind of Hindutva being practised by some now. Speaking at a book release function here, he said when Swami Vivekananda spoke of Hinduism, nobody called him communal. ‘But now, some people have defined Hindutva in such a manner that it is better to keep a distance from it.’ He said Hindutva should not be equated with religion as it was ‘a way of life’. We should keep away from such Hindutva which is stagnant.”

More here

 

Interesting also that while many have commented on ABV's absence that proved expensive for the BJP this time around, another man, Pramod Mahajan, instrumental for their coming to power, had gone largely unremembered, until today, when Maneka Gandhi felt the need to compare his style of functioning with Arun Jaitley's.