Month: June 2016

AAP leader Kejriwal is abused all day long on social media by supposedly educated folks. An army of journalists are out there gunning for him and his party 24×7. The central Home Ministry is sitting on over 15 laws passed by the Delhi government. While no one finds fault with the PM or his government for it, when Kejriwal dares to speak up about it, he is berated by all and sundry for pointing fingers at the PM.

It’s clearly an uphill battle for AAP. Yet what started in Delhi is now spreading to Punjab, as even the most biased surveys are forced to admit. AAP’s recent foray into Goa has everyone in the BJP nervous beyond belief. Reportedly, Gujarat is on the radar next!

With no money, no corporate backers, and little media support, how do you explain AAP’s growing pan-India influence and appeal? The answer lies in the platform vs. pipe business model, popularized by Sangeet Paul Choudary, startup advisor and expert on Internet business models. In the traditional pipe model, firms create stuff, push them out and sell them to customers. Value is produced upstream and consumed downstream. There is a linear flow, much like water flowing through a pipe. Platforms, on the other hand, allow users to create and consume value. (While a lot of Sangeet’s theories apply to software applications, I am going to disregard tech as I adapt the concept to AAP’s politics).

To read the rest of this post please visit the Economic Times website where it was first published.

If media reports over the last two years and the words of BJP veterans like Arun Shourie are to be culled together, it has become apparent that Prime Minister Modi prefers a corporate style of functioning with the PM exercising complete control like the CEO of a corporation. After decades of slow growth, policy paralysis, institutionalised corruption and administrative inefficiencies, many, especially from the corporate world, believed that this was precisely what India needed.

While someday we might thank Modi for infusing this thinking into Indian politics, two years into this exercise it has become apparent this is simply not working. This could mean one of two things. Modi is not the right man to pilot this exercise because he is simply incapable. Alternately, it might be a case of him presently being ill-equipped for the job but that his time will come. It also means that if you want to live by the sword, you should be willing to Die By The Sword as well.

To read the rest of this post, please visit the Economic Times website where it was first published.

The government of Kerala is now in the hands of the CPI(M)-led Left Democratic Front (LDF). After years of scandal and corruption, the people of Kerala have decided to summarily show the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) the door – much like the Congress’ experience at the centre and various states. The Kerala electorate has an unbroken habit of voting out the ruling party. As a result, no coalition had been able to win two successive elections. Seen from this perspective, 2016 was another routine election.

But what makes this election different is that the CPI(M) is now lead by Pinarayi Vijayan, a simple, down-to-earth party worker turned mass leader who has diligently worked his way up the ranks starting out as a student leader, before being handpicked by former party veterans EMS and EK Nayanar to take on more responsibility and leadership within the party. Today, as he takes his role as Chief Minister of Kerala, he brings with him a team of relatively young, firebrand leaders groomed and nurtured under his watchful eyes while simultaneously drawing on senior talent within the Marxist party. Most importantly, he appears to be free of the constant bickering of his archrival Comrade Achuthanandan. Pinarayi Vijayan has a number of challenges ahead of him and a few of his own. For instance, he has, over the years, been a victim of some needless and somewhat negative propaganda. While he faces multiple challenges in his role as CM, he will need to set right the negative perceptions about him that have been perpetrated by the media.

To read the rest of this post, please visit the Economic Times website where it was first published.