'FIR against journalist for report on Modi’s adopted village an act of intimidation'

Shocking details have emerged from the probe into the murder of a man who allegedly made derogatory comments against the friend and co-star of leading Kannada actor Darshan Thoogudeepa.

According to police sources, Renukaswamy (33) drew the wrath of Darshan for making lewd comments against Pavithra Gowda on her social media posts.

"It was Pavithra who instigated Darshan to punish Renukaswamy. Accordingly, the plan was hatched," they said.

Renukaswamy hailed from Lakshmi Venkateshwara Layout in Chitradurga and worked with a pharmacy company.

"Darshan engaged the Chitradurga unit of Darshan Fan Club Convenor Raghavendra alias Raghu, who obtained all information about Renukaswamy." Renukaswamy's wife Sahana said Raghavendra picked up her husband on Friday night from near their house.

The victim was abducted and taken to a shed in Kamakshipalya area in Bengaluru, the sources said.

"Darshan beat up Renukaswamy with a belt. After he fell unconscious, his accomplices thrashed him with sticks. Further, they threw him against a wall, which proved fatal," they said adding there were multiple bone fractures all over his body.

After he died, his body was dumped in a stormwater drain.

A food delivery boy who noticed dogs eating a human body alerted the police.

When the police were working on the case, two accused approached Kamakshipalya police and "confessed" to having killed Renukaswamy over a financial dispute.

As the investigation progressed, police found out Darshan and Pavithra's involvement.

Darshan, his friend and film actress Pavithra Gowda, and 11 others were arrested in connection with Renukaswamy's murder on Tuesday.

The 47-year-old actor has been remanded to six days' police custody by a court. 

India is unpredictable. This is an incontrovertible fact that Indians themselves seem to have forgotten over the past decade.

Ever since Prime Minister Narendra Modi stormed into office with an unexpected and unprecedented outright legislative majority in 2014, many have assumed the country’s politics had changed forever.

The age of coalitions was over; India seemed to be heading inexorably toward one-party dominance.

To stock traders and pro-government pundits, the country’s trajectory seemed so clear: It was destined to see steady 8 per cent growth, happy voters, and a prime minister going from strength to strength at home and abroad.

Indian voters chose to disagree. With votes still being counted in the country’s massive general elections and several races still hanging in the balance, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party looks almost certain to have fallen short of a parliamentary majority. 
That means it will have to depend, for the first time, on fickle smaller parties to hold onto power.

This was what Indian politics looked like for decades prior to Modi’s emergence. Many thought we were living in a new normal. Instead, the old normal has reasserted itself.

In these surprising elections, Modi and the BJP appear to have discovered the limits of hype. An apparently unified public sphere, solidly pro-government media, and impressive growth numbers had left many assuming that Modi’s performance in power had few holes.

Observers should have paid more attention to contrary indicators. Employment growth under Modi has been marginal at best. Social inclusion has been patchy.

While much of the country looks very different from it did in 2014, even more of it looks largely unchanged.

Small-town India has not seen the sort of revolution in infrastructure that cities of equivalent size in China or Southeast Asia have enjoyed over recent decades.

Big metropolises were transformed during the boom years of the 2000s; they have mostly stagnated since then.

Whatever the GDP growth numbers are, whether they are believable or not, one thing is clear: Voters do not believe enough of that growth has reached their wallets.
It’s not surprising such facts have been overlooked. The Modi government and its allies have completely dominated messaging over the past decade.

They sought to maintain, week in and week out, the frenetic pace and outsize enthusiasm that marked the Prime Minister’s initial march to power.

The government thought that the lesson of its sweeping re-election in 2019 was that social conservatism and welfare delivery was enough to maintain control.

But Modi and the BJP have reached the limits of welfare-first politics and saturation advertising. Without real change on the ground, he or any successor may struggle to retain power over the next five years. They will have to pay more attention to governance than to marketing.

There’s a lot that needs attention. Modi came into power promising manufacturing jobs and private-sector-friendly reforms. In this campaign, he instead argued that loans to small-scale entrepreneurs had gone up, proving that jobs were being created — and that increases in share prices for public-sector companies validated his economic performance.

This is clearly a retreat from the ambitions of a decade ago. Any new government must recapture those ambitions; voters clearly expect it.

If India’s politics have indeed returned to normal, its government must, too. Repression of the opposition does not work, not in a country this large and variegated.

For 10 years, Modi has promised to wipe out his principal rivals in the Indian National Congress party. Yet, in this election, the Congress demonstrated that it is not going anywhere.

The government arguably misused investigative agencies to go after opposition leaders in two states in particular, Maharashtra and West Bengal; both have decisively voted against the BJP.

Modi’s personal popularity is such that he and his government can survive the sort of relatively mild rebuke the electorate has delivered. To retain power for a third term, even if dependent on allies, is an historic achievement.

This result is only startling because the Modi hype had completely detached itself from reality.

We do not live, it appears, in a post-truth world. Even the most adept populists must eventually reckon with reality. None of them are immune to the most fundamental rule of politics: If you don’t perform, you perish.

BJP heavyweights Smriti Irani, Arjun Munda and Ajay Mishra Teni, among others, were unseated in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. These losses, particularly in the Hindi heartland, have forced the BJP to lean on its NDA partners to form the government. 

This marks a deviation from the sweeping mandates of 2014 and 2019, when the BJP garnered 282 and 303 seats respectively, achieving a majority on its own.

The Election Commission of India has declared the results for 542 out of the 543 Lok Sabha constituencies so far. The BJP has secured 240 seats, while the Indian National Congress trails with 99.

The Ones Who Lost

Smriti Irani: One of the most high-profile defeats was that of Smriti Irani in Amethi. Ms Irani, who had famously defeated Rahul Gandhi in 2019, lost to Congress candidate Kishori Lal Sharma by a margin of 1,67,196 votes. This defeat marked the end of an era in Amethi, which had briefly been a BJP bastion under Ms Irani's stewardship.

Ajay Mishra Teni: The Union Minister of State for Home Affairs, embroiled in the controversial Lakhimpur Kheri incident, was defeated by the Samajwadi Party's Utkarsh Verma by over 34,329 votes.

Arjun Munda: The Union Tribal Affairs Minister faced a crushing defeat in Jharkhand's Khunti constituency, losing to Congress candidate Kalicharan Munda by 1,49,675 votes. 

Kailash Choudhary: In Rajasthan's Barmer, Minister of State for Agriculture and Farmers' Welfare, Kailash Choudhary, finished third, trailing by 4.48 lakh votes behind the victorious Ummeda Ram Beniwal of the Congress.

Rajeev Chandrasekhar: In Kerala's Thiruvananthapuram, the Union Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, lost to Congress stalwart Shashi Tharoor by over 16,077 votes. 

The BJP's setbacks weren't limited to these prominent figures. Ministers such as Mahendra Nath Pandey, Kaushal Kishore, Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti, Sanjeev Balyan, Rao Saheb Danve, RK Singh, V Muraleedharan, L Murugan, Subhas Sarkar and Nishith Pramanik also faced defeats in the polls.

Mahendra Nath Pandey, the Union Minister of Heavy Industries lost his Chandauli seat in Uttar Pradesh. Minister of State for Housing and Urban Affairs, Kaushal Kishore lost against Samajwadi Party's RK Chaudhary by 70,292 votes in Mohanlalganj.

Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti, the Union Minister of State for Consumer Affairs, Food, and Public Distribution, lost in UP's Fatehpur. Rao Saheb Danve, the Minister of State for Railways, lost the Jalna seat in Maharashtra to Congress' Kalyan Vaijnath Rao Kale. Cabinet Minister Rk Singh lost to CPI(ML)'s Sudama Prasad from Bihar's Arrah.

Union Minister Sanjeev Balyan was defeated in the Muzaffarnagar Lok Sabha seat by Samajwadi Party's Harendra Singh Malik by a margin of over 24,000 votes.

V Muraleedharan, the Union Minister of State for External Affairs and Parliamentary Affairs, was defeated in Kerala's Thiruvananthapuram. L Murugan, the Minister of State for Fisheries, Animal Husbandry, and Dairying, lost to DMK's A Raja in Tamil Nadu's Nilgiris by a substantial margin of 2,40,585 votes.

Nishith Pramanik, the Union Minister of State for Home Affairs, lost the Cooch Behar seat in West Bengal to TMC's Jagadish Chandra Basunia by over 39,000 votes.

Minister of State for Education Subhas Sarkar was defeated by Trinamool Congress candidate Arup Chakraborty in the Bankura Lok Sabha seat of West Bengal by a margin of 32,778 votes.