Word: bjp
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...year term, he's expending political capital to try to make peace with neighboring Pakistan. At home, Vajpayee's star has never been higher. The opposition Congress Party is asleep on its benches. Last month Vajpayee quashed a leadership challenge from within his own Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) by supporters of hard-line Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani. Even more bold, Vajpayee has drafted a moderate Hindu leader to come up with a compromise to one of the longest-running flash points in Indian politics?the decades-old dispute over whether a Hindu temple should be built...
India's ruling party, the BJP, reveres Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul and his writings on India's growing self-confidence, in part because the esteemed author appears to sanction the party's Hindu-nationalistic agenda. So it must have stung last week when Naipaul expressed "profound disappointment" with the government's crackdown on news website Tehelka. The muckraking site made a splash nearly two years ago with a sting operation that exposed Defense Ministry officials accepting bribes. After promising to investigate the matter, a government commission has done little since but investigate Tehelka and freeze the assets of its financier...
...young Hindu. But the people of Vadnagar remember two things about their most famous son. His startling abilities as an actor, taking lead roles in school plays and once writing and performing a one-man show. And his almost fanatical devotion, from the age of five, to the BJP's parent organization, the secretive Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteers Party, or RSS). Modi's 86-year-old mother Hiraben recalls that her son couldn't wait for the moment each day when he could change into his RSS cadet uniform of khaki shorts, white shirt and black cap and snap...
...university, Modi quickly joined the RSS's student wing. At the time, the RSS and its fledgling political wing the BJP were on the fringe of India's political scene. By 1984, the BJP had only two seats in Parliament. All that changed in the late 1980s with the advent of Indian TV's first big hit show, Ramayana. The serialization of the legend of the god-king Rama set new lows for wooden acting and dismal special effects?and surprised everyone when it became a smash. Modi, by then a BJP press officer, wasn't the only...
...event the BJP loses in Gujarat, many observers reckon that the national government will suffer a heavy and perhaps fatal blow. ("I give them only three months," says a prominent Gujarati industrialist.) Advani in particular, as Modi's champion, is expected to stand or fall with his protEgE. And for Vajpayee, a loss, for which he would be blamed by hard-liners irked by his moderating restraints, would be as bad as a win, for which these same hard-liners would take the credit. But for the country, the consequences of an upset could be little short of disastrous. With...