Narendra Modi has been voted as the best ever Prime Minister of India in the India Today Mood of the Nation (MOTN) poll. The poll reflects the sentiments of people as of July 2018. The popularity of Narendra Modi as the prime minister has declined a little over the last MOTN survey conducted in January this year but he remains the best among all the prime ministers the country has had.

OPINION : 19/06/2019 : 1830.

Sub : Narendra Modi has been voted as the best ever Prime Minister of India in the India Today Mood of the Nation (MOTN) poll. The poll reflects the sentiments of people as of July 2018. The popularity of Narendra Modi as the prime minister has declined a little over the last MOTN survey conducted in January this year but he remains the best among all the prime ministers the country has had.

Ref : Narendra Modi beats Vajpayee, Nehru, Indira to emerge best ever PM in India Today survey : January 24, 2019 : India Today

Narendra Modi received 26 per cent vote in the July MOTN ( Mood of the Nation ) survey followed by Indira Gandhi, who got 20 per cent vote of 12,100 participants.

Narendra Modi beats Vajpayee, Nehru, Indira to emerge best ever PM in India Today survey

*Of the four broad regions of the country, Narendra Modi is the most favoured choice as a prime minister in North India and East India. (Photo: Reuters)

HIGHLIGHTS :

*PM Narendra Modi emerges as best ever prime minister of India as per ( Mood of the Nation ) MOTN poll

*Modi received 26 per cent vote in July survey followed by Indira Gandhi, who got 20 per cent votes

*According to the survey, Atal Bihari Vajpayee was voted as the third best PM

Narendra Modi has been voted as the best ever Prime Minister of India in the India Today Mood of the Nation (MOTN) poll. The poll reflects the sentiments of people as of July 2018. The popularity of Narendra Modi as the prime minister has declined a little over the last MOTN survey conducted in January this year but he remains the best among all the prime ministers the country has had.

Narendra Modi received 26 per cent vote in the July MOTN survey followed by Indira Gandhi, who got 20 per cent vote of 12,100 participants. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who died on August 16 after a prolonged illness in New Delhi, was voted as the third best prime minister ahead of Jawaharlal Nehru, who got 10 per cent votes. Vajpayee got 12 per cent votes in the MOTN survey.

*Among Hindu voters, Narendra Modi remains the first choice as the best prime minister followed by Indira Gandhi and Atal Bihari Vajpayee. (Graphic: India Today)

HD Deve Gowda and PV Narsimha Rao are the ones occupying the bottom of the table. Deve Gowda and Rao along with Chandrashekhar and VP received one per cent vote each.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's popularity as the best ever person in the chair has consistently declined since July 2017, when he got 33 per cent votes. He got 28 per cent votes in January 2018 MOTN poll. His popularity chart saw an upward trend between February 2016 and July 2017 over four MOTN polls.

In February 2016, Modi received 14 per cent votes followed by 17 per cent in August 2016, 30 per cent in January 2017 and 33 per cent in July 2017. Indira Gandhi's popularity as the best ever prime minister declined correspondingly over the same period.

Indira Gandhi had received 26 per cent vote in February 2016 followed by 23 per cent in August 2016, 18 per cent in January 2017 and 17 per cent July 2017 before picking up to 20 per cent in both January 2018 and July 2018 MOTN polls.

*Among Hindu voters, Narendra Modi remains the first choice as the best prime minister followed by Indira Gandhi and Atal Bihari Vajpayee. (Graphic: India Today)

Among Hindu voters, Narendra Modi remains the first choice as the best prime minister followed by Indira Gandhi and Atal Bihari Vajpayee. A total of 28 per cent Hindu voters favoured Narendra Modi. However, only 11 per cent Muslims voted Narendra Modi as the best ever prime minister while 26 per cent supported Indira Gandhi.

Of the four broad regions of the country, Narendra Modi is the most favoured choice as a prime minister in North India and East India, remains joint-first choice with Indira Gandhi in West India and trails by three per cent in South India. Atal Bihari Vajpayee is the third choice in all the four regions.

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NOTE : 1. BLUNDERS AND BAD GOVERNANCE EARLY PM-S OF INDIA

1.
*Jawaharlal Nehru: India suffered heavily because of his misplaced sense of idealism over Kashmir, resulting in a problem that troubles us to this day, and his naivete over China.

*Jawaharlal Nehru established the Non aligned movement with the help of Abdul Gamel Nasser of Egypt, Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia and President Sukarno of Indonesia. It is another matter that all three of them were dictators of some sort and ruled with an iron hand  in their own country.

*Nehru was a democrat to a great extent with a streak of dictatorship. Nehru was a socialist (which was something like a fad those days) and depended too much on socialist countries like USSR and China. He paid the price for not looking beyond the wall when the Chinese aggression shocked him in 1962 from which he could never  recover.

*Nehru in a way started a dynastic rule, by making his daughter the President of the Congress party and also a Union Minister. But his dependence on people like Krishna Menon and obsession with socialism, non-alignment, panchsheel etc did not stand him in good stead. India lost those vital years of growth, just because the PM at that time was not interested in financial reforms.

2.
Lal Bahadur Shastri, a small frail looking man with a strong will, though there was an  interim Prime Minister, Gulzarilal Nanda (27 May - 9 June 1964). Shastri was Prime Minister from 9 June 1964 to 11 Jan 1966. He faced the Indo-Pak war of 1965 with great determination and true grit and took the morale of the Forces to a new height with a slogan "Jai Jawan Jai Kisan".  In a way Shastri truly represented Indian values, simple, no western education, practical, honest and a man of integrity. He was the man who accepted the mistakes by resigning from his post as Minister for Railways, a trend which started and ended with him. He started the Green Revolution, established the NDDB and wanted to do much more for the Indian farming but for his untimely death. He would be rated as one of the best Indian PM if opinion Poll is ever conducted in a fair and transparent mode.

3.
*Indira Gandhi: A poll conducted by a leading Indian magazine some years ago rated her as India’s all-time best Prime Minister. I’m afraid I don’t share that opinion. The Emergency was arguably the worst assault ever on Indian democracy. Much of the ills that plague our politics, including corruption, criminalisation and the degradation of institutions like the Presidency, first flourished in her tenure. She effectively killed inner-party democracy in the Congress, and set the stage for the kind of cliques that are today the bane of Indian political parties. And she encouraged cynical misuse of religion — the rise of Bhindranwale was originally encouraged by the Congress in a bid to embarrass the Akali Dal.

*Her operation Blue Star did not get the desired end, rather it started terrorism in India. Her theory of playing one Politician (Darbara Singh) against another (Giani Zail Singh) was responsible for the creation of Sant Bhindranwale who became a major threat to her survival.

*Rajiv Gandhi: The 1984 Sikh riots and the Bofors scam will always remain blots on his record. So will his clumsy efforts to woo Muslim fundamentalists through the Shah Bano case

*Narasimha Rao: Slumbered through the demolition of the Babri mosque and was plagued with charges of graft and buying support in Parliament.

*Vajpayee presided over one of the most humiliating moments in Indian history: the escorting of three terrorists to Kandahar by Jaswant Singh in exchange for hostages.

*Manmohan Singh: His critics deride him as India’s weakest PM ever. His biggest failure, perhaps, was that his government seemed to be a mute spectator as India reeled under a string of terror serial blasts, and it finally took a 26/11 to shake it out of its stupor.

*Morarji Desai, a Gandhian of the old mould, was PM from 24 March 1977 to 28 July 1979. He represented Janata Party, a conglomeration of various non-Congress parties and groups, barring leftists. He lifted the State of Emergency which was declared by Indira Gandhi in 1975 when she could not stand the unfavourable judgement unseating her by the Allahabad High Court. This was her biggest blemish which tarnished her image in the democratic world. Morarji Desai was a man of integrity, a true Gandhian but could not do much as he was surrounded by various personalities and groups who had their own vested interests. He tried to improve relations with USA, China and Pakistan and also brought about a distance from USSR but before he could think of doing more, he was defeated in the Parliament by people from his own Cabinet.

*Charan Singh (28 July 11 Jan 1980) fell to the designs of Indira Gandhi and Congress who supported her initially but brought him down by withdrawing the support in January 1980. It is surprising that a man like Charan Singh could not see the  political design of Congress and took its support just to fulfill his personal ambition of becoming a  PM.

As you might have noticed, I’ve only looked at the PMs who completed at least one, or more, full terms in office. The others hardly did anything of significance, though *Chandrasekhar’s decision to mortgage India’s gold was a much-needed wake-up call that we could no longer continue with our misguided economic policies. However, there was one man among this bunch who, I believe, did the most damage to India.

*V P Singh wrecked efforts made over decades to turn caste into an irrelevant relic of medieval times, and brought it to the front and centre of Indian politics. Call me naive, but I made it all the way to college without ever knowing — or caring — what my caste was. It was enough for me to be an Indian. I’d like to believe it was the same way for many other young Indians. Idealistically, we believed that caste was an evil that had been made redundant in major Indian cities, and would one day be banished from small towns and villages too.

*VP’s cynical use of the Mandal Report to try and counter the rise of the BJP shattered that hope forever. Worse, it led to the rise of many small parties based on identity politics, which have no vision for India beyond their narrow vested interests. Today, sub-castes actually agitate to be declared backward. India has, thankfully, managed to avoid full-blown caste conflict but that’s no thanks to VP. Rarely could a person who spent so little time in office have done so much damage to a country.

ALL MISERABLY  FAILED, SHORT TERM  EX PM-S

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NOTE : 2. ACTION ON CORRUPTION : 

Centre compulsorily retires 15 more senior tax officials accused of corruption : 18/06/2019 : IE

Sending across a stern message to bureaucrats taking kickbacks for facilitation tax evasion by companies, the Centre sacked 15 senior tax officials facing probes in corruption cases on Tuesday, reported Reuters.

Only last week on June 11, the government had dismissed 12 senior Indian Revenue Service (income tax) officers following charges of corruption, extortion and professional misconduct against them.

The officers who have been ousted include Ashok Agarwal (IRS 1985 batch), Joint Commissioner Income Tax, S K Srivastava (IRS 1989 batch), Commissioner (Appeal), Noida, Homi Rajvansh (IRS 1985 batch), B B Rajendra Prasad, Ajoy Kumar Singh (CIT) and B Arulappa (CIT). Other names in the list include Alok Kumar Mitra, Chander Saini Bharti, Andasu Ravinder, Vivek Batra, Swetabh Suman and Ram Kumar Bhargava.

India improved its ranking, among 180 countries, by three points to 78th on a global corruption index in 2018, according to the annual index of the Transparency International, an anti-graft watchdog.

(With inputs from Reuters)

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OPINION : Watch | ‘Vigilant opposition crucial,’ PM Modi ahead of Parliament inaugural session

https://youtu.be/VgQjjuhv6SU

LAST WORDS :

Your words matter, not numbers, PM tells Opposition :

1. "The presence of a strong and active Opposition is an inevitable condition of democracy. I hope that the opposition parties stop worrying about their number [of MPs]. People of the country have given them the number. But for us, their every word, their every idea will be important. And when we sit in the House as MPs, then the spirit of impartiality is more important than being in power or in Opposition,” Modi said outside the Parliament building shortly before the inaugural session.

2. The Prime Minister called for consensus to ensure that the session was productive and added that he hoped the Opposition “will speak actively and participate in House proceedings”. He said the government believed in the principle of ‘sabka sath, sabka vikas’. “…if there is strong logic in the criticism of the government, then it empowers the democracy,” he added.

JAY HIND
JAY BHARATHAM
VANDE MATARAM
BHARAT MATA KI JAY

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