2015

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is keeping up his hectic schedule of undertaking official visits to foreign countries in pursuit of India’s interests in its bilateral relationship with these countries. This time, he is embarking upon a journey to Bangladesh from June 5 to 7, 2015. Going by the stakes involved in our relations with this country, Bangladesh should have been his first port of call. Among the South Asian countries we have had very close relations with Bangladesh even in the midst (…)

MUSINGS
Couldn’t be a better managed stage-show. The BJP’s Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi collects a dozen so-called ‘Muslim leaders’, makes them sit around Prime Minister Modi, and then starts off the highlight of this show—these men coming up with supposedly well-rehearsed lines and the Prime Minister giving those politically apt assurances!
Even the naïve will find it impossible to believe these assurances. Meaningless they sound in the heap of the backgrounders. No, not just in the backdrop of (…)

Part-I
Bogey of Religious Persecution
drove Voters of British Hindus to Conservative Fold
An English daily, published from many world capitals, broke the news with an unbelievable headline: “UK Election: Hindu Group Urges Support For Tories Over Caste Legislation, Sparks Controversy”.1 It said: “The Hindu caste system has emerged as a political issue in the final days leading up to the UK election Thursday, after a British Hindu group published a letter urging its supporters to vote (…)

It is a privilege for me to get this opportunity for meeting and interacting with the first elected representatives of the Telangana State. After its creation as a separate State, Telangana is better placed in several respects. It has the usual advantages of viability of a smaller State in terms of area and population as well as relative homogeneity of its history and culture. There is a predominance of weaker sections in the State—BCs, SCs, STs, and minorities together constituting nearly (…)

Information Minister Arun Jaitley is inviting editors from different parts of India to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi to underline the achievements of his of first-year rule. This public relations exercise is nothing new because all his predecessors have done so.
India’s icon, Jawaharlal Nehru, did not have to do so. Still, when India was licked at the hands of China in 1962, Nehru met editors to explain the debacle. Lal Bahadur Shastri had so much goodwill that he did not have to (…)

Last year, when the BJP with Modi as the Prime Minister romped home with an overwhelming majority of its own, people thought that for the next few years this government was untouchable and any mass discontent would be just wished away. Any such self-conceit amongst the BJP loyalists now lies shattered on the roads of towns and the fields of villages.
The reasons are not far to seek. An old adage—that you can fool all the people for some time and some people for all the time but you cannot (…)

A high-level visit is always best assessed the morning after. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Mongolia offers a keyhole to take a peep at his visit to China (from where he headed for Ulanbator). Modi said immediately after arrival in Ulanbator (from Shanghai) that he could experience “true friendship”. We now have a fair idea what he’d missed from May 14-16 in China—“true friendship”.
The highlights of Modi’s visit to Mongolia are three: a) decision that the two countries would (…)

by Raj Kumar Sharma
President of Afghanistan Ashraf Ghani had to delay his recent visit to India by a few hours as the Taliban intensified its spring offensive against the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) in the northern province of Kunduz. In the wake of the US-NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2014, there are question-marks over the ability of the ANSF to hold their fort against the Taliban. At the same time, there are expectations of an increased role of the Shanghai Cooperation (…)

IMPRESSIONS
This is a real-life story that should worry us all because it shows how qualified Indians are defeated by our astonishingly inefficient system, in this case a university. This young man (YM) completed his Bachelor of Business Adminis-tration (BBA) course. On the strength of his provisional certificate, he got a job in Bahrain, but he was told to produce the original quickly. That didn’t worry him because he had already applied for the original certificate. However, the (…)

On May 30 we celebrate the Goa Statehood Day. On this day, in 1987, Goa ceased to be an Union Territory and became the 25th State of the Union of India.
Goa was liberated from the colonial rule in December 1961. After liberation a major contro-versy arose as to whether Goa should remain a separate territory or should merge into a neighbouring State, Maharashtra or Mysore. In 1967, an opinion poll was held, the only such referendum in independent India. It decided that Goa, Daman and Diu (…)