Politics of India Benedict (Viktor) Gombocz

Geography of India • Location: Southern Asia, bordering the

Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, between Myanmar and Pakistan

• Area:▫ Total: 3,287,263 sq km▫ Country comparison to the world: 7▫ Land: 2,973,193 sq km▫ Water: 314,070 sq km

• Area – comparative: Slightly more than one-third the size of the U.S.

• Land boundaries:▫ Total: 14,103 km▫ Border countries: Bangladesh 4,053 km,

Bhutan 605 km, Burma 1,463 km, China 3,380 km, Nepal 1,690 km, Pakistan 2,912 km

• Coastline: 7,000 km

Physical Map of India

Government of India • Capital: New Delhi

▫ Largest city: Mumbai (in both population and area)

• Official languages: Hindi, English (Hindi in the Devanagari script is the Union’s official language. English is an extra co-official language for Government work.)

• Demonym: Indian• Government: Federal parliamentary

constitutional republic• President: Pranab Mukherjee• Vice President: Mohammad Hamid Ansari• Prime Minister: Manmohan Singh (INC)• Speaker of the House: Meira Kumar (INC)• Chief Justice: Altamas Kabir (INC)• Legislature: Parliament of India • Upper house: Rajya Sabha• Lower house: Lok Sabha

Pranab Mukherjee • Born in Mirati, Bengal Presidency (now West

Bengal, India) on 11 December 1935.• 13th and current President of India, in office since

25 July 2012.• Was a senior leader of the Indian National

Congress and held numerous ministerial portfolios in the Government of India, in a political career extending over six decades.

• Was Union Finance Minister from 2009-2012, and the Congress party’s top troubleshooter, before his election as President.

• Got his break in political life in 1969 when PM Indira Gandhi helped secure his election to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of Parliament, on a Congress ticket.

• After a meteoric rise, he became one of Indira Gandhi’s most trusted lieutenants, and as a minister in 1973.

• Was charged with (like numerous other Congress leaders) with committing gross excess es during the controversial Internal Emergency of 1975-1977.

• His service in various ministerial capacities led to his first stint as finance minister in 1982-1984.

• Additionally served as Leader of the House in the Rajya Sabha from 1980-1985.

Mohammad Hamid Ansari • Born in Calcutta, Bengal Presidency (now

Kolkata, West Bengal) on 1 April 1937.• 14th and current VP of India, in office since

11 August 2007.• Is, after Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the

only individual to be elected for the position of VP of India for two consecutive terms.

• Also the current President of the Indian Institute of Public Administration and Chancellor of Panjab University, Chandigarh.

• Worked as a diplomat and served as Vice-Chancellor of the Aligarh Muslim University from 2000-2002; was later Chairman of the National Commission for Minorities from 2006-2007.

• Was elected as VP of India on 10 August 2007; was sworn in the following day.

• Was re-elected on 7 August 2012 and was sworn in by Pranab Mukherjee, the President of India; the oath taking ceremony took place at Rashtrapati Bhavan on 11 August 2012.

Manmohan Singh • Born in Gah, Punjab, on 26 September 1932.

• 13th and current PM of India; assumed office on 22 May 2004.

• Celebrated economist; only PM since Jawaharlal Nehru to return to power after finishing a full five-year term, and also the first Sikh to occupy the post.

• His family migrated to India during its partition and subsequent independence in 1947.

• Worked for the United Nations from 1966-1969 after earning his doctorate in economics from Oxford.

• Later started his ceremonial career when Lalit Narayan Mishra employed him as an assistant in the Ministry of Trade.

• Held numerous important positions in the Government of India, during the 70s and 80s.

• In 1991, when India underwent a harsh economic crisis, recently elected PM P.V. Narasimha Rao unexpectedly brought the apolitical Singh into his cabinet as Finance Minister; throughout the next few years, in spite of strong opposition, he as Finance Minister conducted numerous structural changes that liberalised the Indian economy.

• Whereas these standards were successful in stopping the crisis, and increased his standing internationally as a leading reform-minded economist, the incumbent Indian National Congress did poorly in the 1996 general election.

• Later served as Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha (the upper house of the Indian parliament) during Atal Bihari’s government, 1998-2004.

Meira Kumar• Born in Sasaram (now Bihar) on 31 March

1945.• Five-time MP. • Was elected unopposed as the first woman

Speaker of Lok Sabha on 3 June 2009. • Lawyer and ex-diplomat.• Was elected to the 8th, 11th, 12th, and 14th Lok

Sabha, in which she remained Cabinet Minister of Social Justice and Empowerment (2004-2009), before being a member of the 15th Lok Sabha.

• Was born in the Patna district in Bihar to the ex-Deputy PM and important leader Babu Jagjivan Ram and a freedom fighter, Indrani Devi.

• Attended Welham Girls School, Dehradun and Maharani Gayatri Devi Girls’ Public School, Jaipur.

• Did her MA and LLB at Indraprastha College and Miranda House, Delhi University.

Altamas Kabir • Born in Kolkata on 19 July 1948.• 39th and current Chief Justice of India; assumed

office on 29 September 2012.• Was born in a Bengali Muslim family. • Studied law at the University of Calcutta,

Kolkata.• His father, Jehangir Kabir, was a leading

Congress politican and trade union leader from West Bengal who was a Minister in the B.C. Roy and P.C. Sen ministries, and also went on to be a minister in the first non-Congress government in West Bengal in 1967, with Ajoy Kumar Mukherjee as the Chief Justice of West Bengal.

• Studied in the renowned Mount Hermon School, Darjeeling, and Calcutta Boys’ School of Calcutta.

• Amazed by one of his argumentative articles on social matters and their answers, an instructor at Calcutta Boys’ School recommended that he follow a career in law.

• Studied law after graduating in history from Presidency College, then affiliated with the University of Calcutta.

Indian National Congress • One of India’s two main political parties; the other is

the Bharatiya Janata Party.• Biggest and one of the oldest democratically-

functioning political parties in the world. • Its modern liberal platform is mainly seen as left-wing

in India’s political spectrum, in contrast to the right-wing socio-religious ultra-nationalist-based Bharatiya Janata Party.

• Founded in 1885 by members of the occultist movement Theosophical Society (Allan Octavian Hume, Dadabhai Naoroji, Dinshaw Wacha, Womesh Chandra Bonnerjee, Surendranath Banerjee, Monomohun Ghose, Mahadev Govind Ranade, and William Wedderburn); became a central member in the Indian Independence Movement, with more than 15 million members and more than 70 million participants in the fight against British colonial rule in India.

• Became the country’s governing party after India gained independence in 1947, and was led chiefly by the Nehru-Gandi family; only recently have any significant competitions for party leadership come around.

• Emerged as the single biggest party in the Lok Sabha in the 2009 general election; 206 of its nominees were subsequently elected to the 543-member house.

• Accordingly, as a participant in a coalition of political organisations called the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), it achieved a majority, forming the government.

Bharatiya Janata Party • One of India’s two main political parties; the

other is the Indian National Congress.• Founded in 1980; second biggest political party

in India, in relation to parliament representation and in the numerous state assemblies.

• Designates “integral humanism”, based upon a 1965 book by Deendayal Upadhyaya, to be its formal ideology and key philosophy.

• Labelled as “Hindu nationalist”, and supports social conservatism, self-reliance as outlined by the Swadeshi movement, and a foreign policy focused on key nationalist beliefs.

• Its party platform is normally believed to be right-wing of the Indian political spectrum.

• Led the national government together with a coalition of parties of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) from 1998-2004, with Atal Bihari Vajpayee as PM, accordingly making it the first non-Congress government to spend a full term in office.

• Has been instrumental in the opposition in parliament since its election defeat in the 2004 general elections.

New Delhi

Mumbai

The End (समा�प्ति��)