Heena Sharma Blog

Business tycoons like Ratan Tata, N Chandrasekaran, the Ambani brothers, and Sajjan Jindal were conspicuous by their absence at the polling booths for Assembly elections that recorded 63 per cent turnout on Monday. Their spokespersons said these leaders had unavoidable prior commitments, forcing them to stay out of the city on the important day. The island city alone sends as many as 38 legislators to the 288-member House. Those who did cast their votes included Mahindra group chairman Anand Mahindra, HDFC Chief Executive Keki Mistry, Marico Chairman Harsh Mariwala, and M&M Managing Director Pawan Goenka who also appealed to citizens to cast exercise their domestic right. The polls saw a voter turnout of around 63 percent, almost matching the 63.38 percent polling recorded in the last elections held in 2014. According to official sources, Tata and Chandrasekaran and Jindal were not in town. Jindal, however, took to Twitter to appeal to voters to exercise their rights...

The Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) is split but not fully out because Prafulla Kumar Mahanta, its founder and leader (until recently), stands isolated as the party is back with the Bharatiya Janata Party in Assam after a brief ‘estrangement’ to Mahanta’s surprise and disapproval. He turned to small regional outfits on the political periphery to support him but interestingly, even the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU), of which he was once the spearhead, was indifferent to his appeal. The trigger for Mahanta’s dissent was the AGP’s decision last week to return to the National Democratic Alliance and contest the Lok Sabha polls together after “walking out” of the coalition last January to protest the BJP’s doggedness to pass the contentious Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2019, in Parliament. Eventually, the Centre put it aside, after the entire north-east rose up in arms because the proposed law would have legalised the citizenship rights of foreigners of every religious denomination liv...

With the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) mobilising itself on social media and on the ground by invoking the chowkidar (watchman) tag, the move has both political and business underpinnings. For one, private security companies -– a booming sector in India -- have donated varying amounts of money to the BJP. A look at the contribution reports of political parties shows that while real estate companies donated both to BJP and Congress, private security sector donations were unique to the BJP. In 2017-18 at least seven private security companies donated to a sum of almost Rs 61 lakh to the party. The biggest donor among these was Security & Intelligence Service (SIS) – one India’s biggest private security companies. It donated Rs 50 lakh to BJP in 2017-18. There were other small security companies which donated as little as Rs 21,000 to the saffron party. Although donations by private security companies are unique to BJP, they are a drop in the ocean of Rs 438 crore donations re...