OPINION

A vehicle on a downhill drive has a peculiar feature. It moves at high-speed and takes several sharp U-turns. AamAadmi Party (AAP) leadership in the past six-months has gone on a U-turn drive, apologising to one and all, and trying to make-up with their rivals including country’s Finance Minister ArunJaitley.

Now the latest is the reported ‘offer’ made by AAP leadership to the Congress to enter into some kind of an alliance in Delhi to take on the BJP in the 2019 LokSabha polls. This ‘offer’ comes close on the heels of former Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit giving an interview to a Hindi daily saying politics was all about possibilities and Delhi Chief Minister ArvindKejriwal complementing Delhi Congress president Ajay Maken for his son’s performance in school board examination.

Dikshit’sinterview, much to the chagrin of Delhi Congress chief Ajay Maken, came on the day he was launching a weeklong agitation against the AAP government’s alleged scam in the purchase of close circuit television cameras. Delhi is, thus, being presented with ascenario where on the one hand Maken-led Delhi Congress has upped ante against the AAP government andon the other Chief Minister ArvindKejriwal is going out of his way to build bridges.

My residential school had both formal and informal rules of engagement that were spelt out upfront (within hours and not just days of being admitted) by the school authorities and the senior boys respectively. The latter usually had the blessings of the establishment even though some of it may have been covert. I still vividly recall one of the several missives that my school mentor (who was all of thirteen even as I was within touching distance of twelve) held out very sternly for me, “ Don’t ever try to take a lift from Bengali boys senior to you and don’t dare speak in your mother tongue while on school campus.” In short, there was going to be no patronage racket on identity lines at the Rashtriya Indian Military College (RIMC). Its unsurprising that some of the dearest friends that I ended up making in those life defining five years are not Bengalis. At every juncture, our masters and prefects reminded us to rise above our origins and identities. There was simply no room for pettiness in school.

Elections to the Karnataka Legislative Assembly are over and it has come out with a fractured verdict where in no political party was able to get absolute majority. The BJP emerged as the largest single party with 104 seats followed by the Congress with 78 seats, 44 seats less than its 2013 tally and the party at the third place was JDS with 37 seats, three seats less than what it got in 2013.

But what is the electors’ message coming out of this election? The first and the foremost message is that Karnataka disapproves the politics of manipulation, machination, and division and of negative rhetoric. The second message is that the electorate wanted a change of government. This is evident from the fact that the incumbent chief Minister himself lost in one constituency and managed somehow to win in the other with a margin of just 1600 and odd votes and the seats of the Congress were tremendously reduced.

This may be rightfully interpreted as the rejection of the Congress by the voter. The third message is that BJP was favoured by them as an alternative government in broad terms as that party fell short of majority by a marginal number.

From bad loans to loan defaulters to financial frauds and embezzlement, the Indian banking system seems to be in a crisis mode. And, needless to say, it will have a cascading effect on most sectors - including real estate.

To build a project, developers largely rely on banks for their capital needs. Alternately, they seek customer advances to proceed with construction. If they are not adequately funded, their projects either go belly-up or are delayed extensively, causing disruption in the entire property-cycle. Much to the dismay of developers, the recent events in the banking industry have caused commercial banks as well as Non-Banking Financial Companies (NBFCs) to become more cautious about disbursing heavy loans to real estate developers.

Numbers suggest that bank lending to the real estate sector came down from 68% in 2013 to a mere 17% in 2016 due to mounting NPAs. Despite the continuous efforts by the Central Government to strengthen public sector banks by infusing bonds and launching regulatory reforms (recapitalization), the piling up of bad loans and NPAs is hurting public sectors banks. In June 2017, the share of bad loans was around 10% of the total loans disbursed by the banking system.

With the coming of the Monsoon in 2011, dawned in Delhi along with the rains the ‘India Against Corruption’ movement led by Anna Hazare. The anti-corruption crusader from Ralegaon Siddhi in Maharashtra sat on a fast at the Ramlila Ground and held the centrestage in the national politics for the next fortnight. During the protest, the activists’ creativity was at its best and one clearly recalls a poster which had pictures of Anna, ArvindKejriwal and KiranBedi anointed as Gandhi, Bhagat Singh and Jhansi’s queen Lakshmi Bai; all in the same frame.

Ideologically the three historical figures do not make to one frame. But such mass movements are like that when people with different ideological leanings come together for a common cause. Some months later on a television debate, when the movement converted into a political outfit – the AamAdmi Party (AAP), its then main ideologue YogendraYadav was asked about the ideological moorings of the organization.

He had said that they believed in extracting the best from every ideology. It did not happen that way and soon Yadav along with several similar thinking leaders of the party were shown the door. The party, nevertheless, from day one showed the unfailing tendencies of adapting to the time-testing tactics of Indian politics, thus an Ashutosh became Ashutosh Gupta while contesting from the ChandniChowkLokSabhaseat in 2014 and now Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia sees himself in the shoes of MaharanaPratap taking on the mighty Mughals.