Syed Firdaus Ashraf covers national politics, and sometimes movies too -- a truly wide arc! You can e-mail the author at firdausa@rediff.co.in
Less than half the ministers in Team Yogi are not long-term BJP members. Many old-timers have been dropped.
'There is no point in just saying, 'hum wapas bhej denge (we will send Kashmiri Pandits back)'.'
'Use of the word 'genocide' for Kashmiri Pandits is absolutely wrong.'
'There was a revolt. They were fighting for their rights.' 'They lost their rights after colonial forest policies came into place.' 'These freedom fighters were trying to reassert those rights.'
'Priyanka did draw huge crowds and eventually all of those ended up voting for the Samajwadi Party.' 'The voters today are smart enough to vote for the party which they know is going to win or they know this party will come second, but no way will they vote for a party which will come third or fourth.'
'You need a leader whom India can identify with and I cannot think of any other leader except Sachin Pilot in the Congress party.'
'If Mayawati had performed better, then the BJP would have had a much tougher time to win UP.' 'The present gap in number of seats between the BJP and SP would have got reduced.'
'I am not sure of the numbers killed, but they were not as high as the use of the word 'genocide' suggests.' 'There is another meaning you could take, 'cultural genocide', in that the Pandit community is extremely small and their forced departure led to a wiping out of their culture.'
'Every Congress leader in UP and the rest of India is calling me and thanking me that finally someone spoke about this JNU gang ruling the Congress party in UP.'
'The Congress can exist without (someone from) the Nehru-Gandhi family being its president.'
'Yogi was there, but ultimately the BJP got extremely worried and therefore Modi pitched in.'
'That would be very bad for them and suicidal for both the Gandhis and the Congress party.'
'Had the Congress made Sidhu its CM face, they would have won 80 out of 117 seats.'
'Akhilesh did politics like Rabi and Kharif crop which come once a year. Politics is not seasonal, you have to harvest your field all through the year and only then you get a good crop' Political analyst lists 12 reasons why Akhilesh Yadav lost the UP elections.
''I had no idea that my life would turn into a horror show.' 'I was stuck as the Russians kept bombing Kyiv non-stop.'
'In many cases, I didn't take money because the Indian students had run out of cash.' 'The biggest high was the blessings that these students's parents used to give me on the phone or send messages thanking me on WhatsApp.'
'There has been no help that has come from the Indian embassy till date. We have no idea when we all will be evacuated.'
'We request the Indian government that they send some buses urgently so that we can travel in groups and reach safety.'
'We are trying to trace them.' 'We feel their phone batteries must have died because they are travelling by road.'
'With over 50 per cent of medical seats reserved for those who have the ability to pay a fee ranging from Rs 50 lakh to Rs 1.5 crore for a five-year MBBS course and quotas in accordance with affirmative policies in government colleges, the band of seats available for the not-so-rich and non-OBCs is very narrow.'
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