After a landslide victory in the just concluded elections, Narendra Modi set to sworn oath for the position of Prime Minister on 30th May.

The ceremony is expected to be attended by several members of the NDA, including senior leaders of the BJP and also members of the opposition parties.

“The President will administer the Oath of Office and Secrecy to the Prime Minister and other members of Union Council of Ministers on 30 May at Rashtrapati Bhavan,” said an official statement from President House on Sunday.

The selection of council of ministers is expected to be interesting after Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) continued with its move for generation shift during the general elections.

Although there are speculations about the fate of some of the senior ministers who were part of the council of ministers earlier, it is possible that some of the ministers may not be repeated this time.

During the parliamentary party meeting of NDA on Saturday, Modi had categorically said that he would decide on the council of ministers and the newly elected NDA parliamentarians should not hope for a designation but prepare themselves to work as a law maker.

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Finally, the D-day has come and the Modi-led BJP is again coming to power with sheer majority of 300+ seats (projected). The meme creators in India are celebrating the victory in their unique creative fashion. Some of the popular memes across the internet are:

The anticipation of the Nation for the results can be measured in the following images from Andheri and Churchgate in Mumbai.

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On one side, the government is spending crores on the campaigns to draw public towards the polling booth and on one side, the goons hired by the BJP are trashing those efforts. The residents of Tara Jivapur village in Uttar Pradesh’s Chandauli district witnessed this weird attack on democracy happened. They alleged that three men who claimed to be from the BJP had “forcefully” applied ink to their fingers and gave them Rs 500 on Saturday in a bid to prevent them from voting in Sunday’s seventh and final phase of Lok Sabha elections.

One of the villagers told news agency ANI: “They were from BJP and asked us if we’ll vote for the party. They told us now you can’t vote. Don’t tell anyone.”

Taking note of the allegations, Chandauli SDM K R Harsh said villagers are eligible to vote and action will be taken against the accused based on the complaint.

“Complainants are present at the police station. We will take action as per the complaint they file. They are still eligible to cast votes as elections hadn’t begun then. They will have to mention in the FIR that ink was forcefully applied,” he told ANI.

Chandauli is among the 13 Lok Sabha seats in which polling began on Sunday morning. Uttar Pradesh BJP chief Mahendra Nath Pandey is seeking reelection from Chandauli.

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The most awaited event of the year is getting delayed. But, not much, just 4 hours or a day at max. The delay is all because of the Apex Court order to increase voter-verified paper audit trail or VVPAT count to five – instead of one – in every assembly segment for general election 2019. The VVPAT system, which is being used for the first time in a general election, enables Electronic Voting Machines or EVMs to record each vote by generating a slip.

Sudeep Jain, Deputy Election Commissioner, who is in charge of the VVPATs, told NDTV, “On an average, counting of votes using one VVPAT takes about an hour. Earlier we were counting one VVPAT, now we are adding four more, which would mean an additional four hours. So the results will be out by the evening or latest by May 24 morning.”

“EVMs and VVPATs are perfect and we have no doubt they are tamper-proof,” he added.

Twenty-one opposition parties had asked for counting of at least 25 percent EVM paper trail machines, but during a hearing on April 8, the Election Commission had rejected the petition saying the results of the Lok Sabha election could be delayed by five days if 50 percent of voter-verifiable paper trail or VVPAT machines in every assembly segment were counted.

The Election Commission at present matches VVPAT slips of 4,125 EVMs under the “one EVM per assembly segment” guideline. Following the court order, the Election Commission will have to count the VVPAT slips of five times as many machines in each constituency, or that of 20,625 EVMs.

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Another phase of elections completed. This phase sealed the fates of candidates fighting for 95 seats across 11 states. A former prime minister and four union ministers are in the fray in this phase of Lok Sabha polls. The high turnout of 66% was quite strange as this phase, just like the first phase, was marred with violence, and inaccuracies in voting mechanism.

Voting was also held in 35 Assembly constituencies in Odisha and in 18 Assembly bypolls in Tamil Nadu. In TN, polling was held in 38 of the 39 Lok Sabha seats. The election in Vellore seat was cancelled on Tuesday by the EC following recovery of cash allegedly from an associate of a DMK leader recently. Besides Tamil Nadu, polling was held in 14 seats in Karnataka, 10 in Maharashtra, eight in UP, five each in Assam, Bihar and Odisha, three each in Chhattisgarh and West Bengal, two in Jammu and Kashmir and one seat each in Manipur and Puducherry.

Polling in Chhattisgarh witnessed violence with an ITBP jawan suffering minor injuries after Naxals triggered an IED blast in Rajnandgaon district.
Sporadic incidents of violence were reported in some areas of Bengal.

Voters in Uttar Dinajpur district’s Chopra under the Raiganj constituency reportedly put up a road blockade, complaining about the absence of central forces at the polling stations, the sources said. Police fired in the air and lobbed tear gas shells to control a mob, after stones were pelted at them and bombs were hurled by unknown persons in Chopra, a senior EC official in the district said. At least three persons were detained by police in this connection, he said.

Meanwhile, CPI(M) candidate from Raiganj Md Salim claimed that his car was attacked by unknown persons when he went to a polling booth at Islampur in Uttar Dinajpur.

Bihar recorded 25.6 per cent voting in five Lok Sabha seats till noon amid reports of EVM malfunctioning and poll boycott delaying start of polling in some booths. Voting was delayed due to EVM malfunctioning at a polling station at Masuria in Banka town, two polling booths under Kahalgaon assembly segment in Bhagalpur, and another two booths in Purnea.

Lok Sabha polls are being held in seven-phases for 543 seats on April 11, April 18, April 23, April 29, May 6, May 12 and May 19, and counting will be on May 23.

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Election Commission has been rejuvenated. Yesterday, they put a temporary ban on Yogi Adityanath and Mayawati. Today, they are planning to cancel polls in Vellore, Tamil Nadu. The reason is simple – abuse of money power. Seizures of cash from DMK leaders over the last two weeks inspired them to recommend this extreme solution to the President of India.

Vellore is scheduled to go to polls with the rest of Tamil Nadu on April 18. It is unclear whether the two Assembly seats, Ambur and Gudiyattam, under the Vellore LS seat, facing bypolls will also be countermanded or go as planned on Thursday. Once notified by the President. If it happens, Vellore would be the first Lok Sabha seat to have had its elections countermanded over abuse of money power.

Tamil Nadu is quite notorious for the money power-play. In 2017, EC had countermanded elections to the Dr. Radhakrishnan Nagar Assembly seat in Tamil Nadu twice. In April 2016, during the TN Assembly elections, the EC postponed polls in Aravakurichi and Thanjavur, after cash running into crores was recovered from sites belonging to persons close to the AIADMK.

The EC’s recommendation was sent in wake of cash seizures from the premises of DMK veteran leader and party treasurer Duraimurugan’s son Kathir Anand’s house in Vellore on March 29. Subsequently, on April 1, based on information that illegal cash was being moved from a college owned by the Duraimurugan family to a cement warehouse in Vellore, a second I-T search was launched and Rs 11.53 crore was seized.

Parties are raining the cash in election despite the Election Commission’s guidelines on expenditure on a constituency. If such things persist, then the elections would again become the power play of money. Election Commission was dormant in the past but now active and ferocious like a tiger. Let’s see if the elections in India improve and become fair.

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The election commission is quite slow in acting but whenever it does, it gives the essence of the presence of democracy in the country. The Election Commission on Monday placed a temporary ban on election campaigning by Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath and BSP supremo Mayawati for violating the model code of conduct.

While Yogi Adityanath has been barred from campaigning, in the form of public meetings, road shows or media interviews, for the next three days from April 16 (6am), Mayawati has been barred for 48 hours. Yogi Adityanath received the slap on the wrists for his ‘Ali-Bajrangbali’ remarks made in Meerut while Mayawati was issued the notice for her speech in Deoband. Her speech appealed Muslims to not vote for a particular party.

The Election Commission action came after the Supreme Court pulled the poll body for failing to act against political leaders making heat speeches. Taking note of the speeches made by BSP supremo Mayawati and UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath during the poll campaign, the Supreme Court on Monday sought to know from the Election Commission the action initiated against them so far.

While hearing a PIL, seeking strict action against the political parties for religion and caste-based remarks, Supreme Court even said that the Election Commission is becoming toothless and it is EC’s duty to punish the politicians making hateful remarks.

The regular intervention by the Supreme Court in election related matters depict the ineffectiveness of the Election Commission. The Commission’s working has already come under sharp criticism and some people even termed it a BJP’s puppet. India needs another T.N. Seshan to control the growing influence of the political parties.

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Politics is the only field where fake degrees can lead you to the post of Human Resource Development minister, ironically. In other fields, fake degree can lead to banishment and jail-time as well.

Former HRD minister Smriti Irani revealed in her poll affidavit that she was not a graduate. However, in her affidavit for 2014 polls, Irani had reportedly said that she had graduated from Delhi University’s School of Open Learning with a Bachelor of Commerce degree in 1994. Opposition found a weak spot and they kept attacking BJP over her fake degree.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley came to her defence and said the academic credentials of Congress president Rahul Gandhi, too, were the subject of debate. He said that Rahul Gandhi completed his MPhil without completing his post-graduation.

“One day the focus (of Congress campaign) would be on the BJP candidate’s educational qualification, fully forgetting that a public audit of Rahul Gandhi’s academic credentials may leave a lot to be answered. After all, he got an MPhil without a Master’s degree,” Jaitley said in a Facebook blog titled ‘India’s Opposition is on a Rent a Cause Campaign’.

In 2009, amid a row over Gandhi’s foreign degrees, the University of Cambridge had said the Congress leader was a student of Trinity College and was awarded an M.Phil in Development Studies in 1995.

Fake degree for politicians controversy is not new. Smriti Irani and Rahul Gandhi are not the only high profile politicians surrounded by this controversy. Our own PM Modi was allegedly having a fake degree in ‘Entire Political Science’ from Delhi University. There are numerous discrepancies in the records.

The point is that the politicians are setting a very notorious image in the youth of our nation. This fake degree scandal would definitely bring international shame to our country. What can one expect in that country where the law-makers are not following their own laws? Think about it.

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Finally, election commission gave indication of its presence. Election Commission banned the biopic on Narendra Modi just before it’s scheduled release on 11th April. Election Commission also banned NaMo TV as it found (finally!) that it ‘subserves the purpose of a political party’. Thus, it cannot be displayed on electronic media.

The first phase of Lok Sabha elections starts Thursday, 11 April.

The Vivek Oberoi-starrer biopic, which was scheduled to be released on 11 April. It had received a ‘Universal’ certificate by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) merely hours before the EC ban.

Earlier, the Supreme Court on Tuesday, 9 April, had dismissed a petition filed by a Congress activist. It aimed at seeking stay on the release of the biopic, and said the Election Commission would be an “appropriate” place to seek the redressal.

The film, titled “PM Narendra Modi” and directed by Omung Kumar, had been facing criticism from the Opposition parties, who claimed that the biopic could give undue advantage to the BJP in the polls.

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Prime Minister Modi was in full form in the Meerut rally. He related the increased security of the nation with surgical strikes and the recently conducted anti-satellite weapon test. He also took a jibe on the alliance of regional UP parties – SP, RLD, and BSP and made the word SaRaB from the initials of their names.

Modi kick-started his campaign by referring the surgical strikes. “Zameen ho, aasmaan ho ya phir antariskh, surgical strike ka saahas aapke is chowkidar ne dikhaya hai (This chowkidar has shown the courage to carry out surgical strike, be it on land, in the sky or space),” said PM Modi. He later targeted previous regimes at the Centre. He said that the governments in the past believed in slogans instead of “taking right decisions” to ensure safety and security of the nation. “Nation has seen many governments that gave slogans but it has for the first time seen a government that takes prompt decisions,” he said.

On Opposition’s demand for evidence of Air-Strike, he turned to the public for their opinion. “Do we need sapoot (obedient son) or saboot (evidence),” said PM Modi responding to the Opposition.

On the report card of the government, he assured the public that he would present his government’s report card in the coming days while fixing accountability of the rival parties. He said, “I will give an account of my work but at the same time seek an account from my opponents. Sabka hisab hoga, baari baari se hoga, tabhi to hisab barabar hoga (Everyone will be accounted for, one by one, only then justice will be served).”

On Grand Alliance of the Samajwadi Party, the Rashtriya Lok Dal and the Bahujan Samaj Party, PM formulated an acronym “SaRaB” (picking the initial letters of the three parties) and translating it as liquor. Modi said, “Stay away from ‘SaRaB’ in the election for the good health of Uttar Pradesh.”

The rally was aimed at galvanizing the BJP’s support base in the entire western Uttar Pradesh. As usual, he took all the credit of the hard work done by the armed forces and DRDO. The Western UP will vote in the first phase of the Lok Sabha Polls. The constituencies of Meerut, Baghpat, Muzaffarnagar and Bijnor will vote in the first phase of Lok Sabha elections on April 11. Uttar Pradesh will vote in all seven phases of the national election that ends on May 19. Counting of votes will take place on May 23.

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