Before we headed out of Jodhpur to Delhi last week, NLU-Jodhpur Vice-Chancellor N.N. Mathur invited us to have dinner at his home. We enjoyed a superb multi-course meal while visiting with the now former Justice Mathur and his wife Anand, who is Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Education, and Social Sciences at Jai Narain Vyas University (JNVU, Jodhpur’s state university). JNVU’s enrollment is somewhere north of 25,000. Mrs. Mathur is also the author of one of leading texts on Indian-American relations during the 1990s.
Justice Mathur has also recently undertaken a politically charged task as one of the commissioners appointed by the new Government in Rajasthan to investigate allegations of corruption against members of the preceding Government.
While I’m on the topic of politics, Indian parliamentary elections will be held over the course of the next three weeks. If I read right, there are over 735 crore (that’s 735 million for my American readers) registered voters in India! Given the plethora of caste- and religion-based parties there is no way that either of the two leading parties will get a majority of the seats in the Lok Sabha (lower house). (The members of upper house, the Raj Sabha, are still elected by the State legislatures; what would it be like if we had never adopted the 17th Amendment?) Thus, one or the other will form a coalition government with all the political trading that involves. A broad coalition of Left parties might be able to form a government but must pundits here don’t think that will happen. The problem with coalition governments generally is that deal making supersedes principled legislating. This may not be a bad thing in countries where the central government exercises less control in the economy and society but it can produce a paralyzing state of affairs in places like India where its history and political as well as constitutional self-understandings are far more state-centralized.
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