India’s leading anti-corruption crusader on Saturday “stole” the campaign slogan used by the ruling Indian National Congress party as the name for his new political movement as he readied to do electoral battle.
Arvind Kejriwal, a diminutive and bespectacled former government tax official, announced his group would be called the Aam Admi Party, which means the “Common Man’s Party.”
Aam admi is a catchphrase long used by the Congress party, which has dominated India for most of its post-independence history, to connect with the hundreds of millions of poor that it views as its biggest constituency.
Kejriwal, whose string of corruption accusations against the graft-tainted Congress government and some of India’s most powerful people have unsettled the elite, said “common men, women and children” formed the new party.
“They are not politicians. They are fed up of politicians. They are the people who are fed up of corruption,” he told a televised news conference.
“This is why the common man has decided to challenge them. Now the common man will sit in parliament,” he said, declaring his party will contest the next general election due in early 2014.
“This party will change the way politics and political parties function,” he said.
Kejriwal, whose hero is Indian independence icon Mahatma Gandhi, first came to prominence last year, serving as the chief lieutenant to veteran anti-corruption campaigner Anna Hazare during the latter’s 12-day hunger strike.
The protest against graft galvanized huge support among India’s middle class dismayed by the nation’s deep-rooted corruption.
However, while Hazare has since backed away from the headlines, his protege has carried on the fight.
Kejriwal has won national attention with his almost weekly salvoes against high-profile targets, ignoring critics who have have accused him of acting irresponsibly with his “name and shame” tactics.
He has accused Indian Minister of Foreign Affairs Salman Khurshid, a Congress party member, of siphoning off funds from a family-run non-profit help group — charges he has strongly denied.
Nitin Gadkari, president of the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, is facing an inquiry over claims about his business financing.
Kejriwal has also taken on Robert Vadra, son-in-law of Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi — seen as India’s most powerful politician — accusing him of unfairly benefiting from property deals.
Information Minister Manish Tewari dismissed Kejriwal’s appropriation of the Congress party’s favorite phrase.
“Aam admi has been synonymous with the Congress party since 1885. Nobody can hijack the intrinsic relation between Congress and the aam admi,” he told reporters.
Kejriwal said the formal launch of his party will be today, coinciding with the day India’s Constitution was adopted in 1949.
Analysts say while public disquiet about corruption is high, Kejriwal’s party will face tough competition in the political arena with scores of parties contesting elections in India, the world’s largest democracy.
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
EYEING A SOLUTION: In unusually critical remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump said he was ‘destroying Russia by not making a deal’ US President Donald Trump on Wednesday stepped up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to make a peace deal with Ukraine, threatening tougher economic measures if Moscow does not agree to end the war. Trump’s warning in a social media post came as the Republican seeks a quick solution to a grinding conflict that he had promised to end before even starting his second term. “If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other
In Earth’s upper atmosphere, a fast-moving band of air called the jet stream blows with winds of more than 442kph, but they are not the strongest in our solar system. The comparable high-altitude winds on Neptune reach about 2,000kph. However, those are a mere breeze compared with the jet stream on a planet called WASP-127b. Astronomers have detected winds howling at about 33,000kph on the large gaseous planet in our Milky Way galaxy approximately 520 light-years from Earth in a tight orbit around a star similar to our sun. The supersonic jet-stream winds circling WASP-127b at its equator are the fastest of their kind
RSS