2017 - Sagarika Ghose

March 12, 2017
Rajdeep Sardesai
Columns

Modi 24 X 7, 365 days

In the final leg of the 2014 general elections, Narendra Modi dramatically announced in a rally, “Yeh dil maange more”. It was a quintessential Modi soundbite: the BJP’s internal...

March 2, 2017
Rajdeep Sardesai
Columns

Lotus could bloom in UP

Predicting the outcome of an Uttar Pradesh election can be injurious to health. In 1993, extensively covering a UP election for the first time, when my editor asked me...

February 28, 2017
Rajdeep Sardesai
Blog

Oh, to be 21 again

A young woman spoke out against the politics of hate, on friendship with Pakistan, on seeking peace not war. Within minutes she was attacked by the soldiers of nationalism....

February 24, 2017
Rajdeep Sardesai
Blog

Today Narendra, tomorrow Devendra?

One of the first press conferences I covered as a rookie reporter was of Bal Thackeray and Pramod Mahajan in the late 1980s announcing their decision to contest elections...

February 19, 2017
Rajdeep Sardesai
Blog

UP: ten takeaways

It’s the half way mark in the crucial election battle in UP. It is impossible to accurately predict a 20 crore state’s voting preferences after a few visits, but...

February 17, 2017
Team RS
Video

Elections On My Plate | Exclusive Report From Lucknow

To understand vox populi on the Uttar Pradesh assembly election, India Today’s Rajdeep Sardesai takes you through the ‘Land of Awadh’. We meet voters to understand will the alliance...

February 17, 2017
Rajdeep Sardesai
Columns

The UP Muslim ‘vote bank’ predicament

The complicated and controversial notion of a Muslim vote bank stretches back to the first general elections in 1952. The post-Partition face of the Indian Muslims, Maulana Azad, was...

February 3, 2017
Rajdeep Sardesai
Columns

Congress will remain a C team player

Five years is an eternity in Indian politics. As Rahul Gandhi and Akhilesh Yadav beamed beatifically into the cameras last weekend, the mind was thrown back to 2012 when...

January 20, 2017
Rajdeep Sardesai
Columns

It’s now ‘Modi vs All’

The BJP and the Shiv Sena were once seen as ‘natural allies’ but life for the original saffron alliance is not quite the same in the age of Narendra...

January 6, 2017
Rajdeep Sardesai
Columns

Will politics shrink in 2017?

We live, to put it mildly, in “interesting times”. This is an age where TV family serials have given way to political soap operas: Are Akhilesh and Mulayam at...