What unites Indira, Rajiv, Manmohan, Modi, and now KCR: ‘Foreign hand’ at their fingertips | Political Pulse News,The Indian Express
Among the first leaders to spot the 'hand' was then prime minister Indira Gandhi – and her suspicions sound not too dissimilar from the current government's.
FOR nearly half-a-century, the ‘foreign hand’ has been that nebulous threat which political parties float to fit any crisis, across ideological shapes. Few let their imagination run to the nebula though, till Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao did so Sunday, blaming the recent cloudburst and consequent floods in the state to a conspiracy brewed across the shore.
Among the first leaders to spot the ‘hand’ was then prime minister Indira Gandhi – and her suspicions sound not too dissimilar from the current government’s.
- Higher Learning
In the early 1970s, while inaugurating a conference of vice-chancellors, Gandhi expressed concern about the “very considerable and subtle” foreign influences working in the country’s institutions of higher learning. “When we talk of foreign influences, there is immediately a feeling that people are coming in to disrupt the government or disrupt the country. And that may be one part of it. But I feel that the more dangerous part is when there is a subtle attempt against our nationalism.”
The PM’s statement was in furtherance of staunch-Leftist Education Minister Nurul Hasan’s remarks that an important precondition for successful development of higher education was “freedom from external, undesirable and unacademic interference”. Gandhi said some of the interference was due to troubled waters and some due to “deliberate troubling of waters”.
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