2023

CHHATTISGARH, ALONG WITH Mizoram, goes to the husting on November 7 to vote in a new State government. Even at this late hour, Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party has announced it will context the assembly polls in Mizoram. Ambitious after its Punjab victory, AAP believes that as Mizoram has the least number of seats among all the five States going to polls this November, it will be able to enter Mizoram easily. However, Mizoram is at the moment a politically ambivalent Christian State, not (…)

(12th October, 2023)
Interestingly, considerable discussion is taking place in Karnataka at the governmental and academic levels about the need for reinventing higher education. The same is evident from the constitution of the State Education Commission with Prof. Sukhdev Thorat , former Chairman of the UGC as the Chairman and well known national level academicians like Prof. Yogendra Yadav, Prof. Janaki Nair, Prof. Furquan Qamar and others as members to recommend afresh an education (…)

Way back in 1981, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN gave Late Dr Y.K Alagh and me a consultancy assignment. We were required to develop an accounting framework for public resource flows into agriculture in developing countries. Since different countries adopted different budgetary systems, we were to visit some eight representative countries from different parts of the world to collect relevant budgetary data. It fell on me to visit the selected countries and examine their (…)

The Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 shocked the world as much by its volume, suddenness and brutality, as by its completely overcoming the much-feted Israeli intelligence. Predictably, Israel is responding with equal if not more brutality, with support from USA.
While brutality and attack on civilians is condemnable and universally condemned, and the predominant condemnation is heaped upon Hamas, Israel is seen as the victim with the right to reciprocate with vastly superior (…)

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in a final sense a theft from those who are hungry and not fed.—Dwight Eisenhower.
War may be the only thing that humans keep with them from the very beginning of ’civilization’. Humans have always warred, wars have always resulted in horrible sufferings, and yet the warring urge still remains intact in the humans. Humans claim they are the only civilised animals, but no other animal species wages wars against (…)

Israel Palestine conflict is perhaps the most intractable conflict in the world from the time Israel as a state was created in 1948 and projected as the homeland of the Jewish people from all over the world. The creation of this state was accompanied by the displacement of 750,000 Palestinians, the original inhabitants of the place. This double act of possession and dispossession performed at the same time created the material and cultural conditions for an enduring conflict. The (…)

By Sonia Gandhi
On October 7, 2023, on the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, Hamas launched a brutal attack on Israel, killing more than a thousand people, mostly civilians, and kidnapping over 200 more.
The unprecedented attack was devastating for Israel. The Indian National Congress strongly believes that violence has no place in a decent world, and the very next day unequivocally condemned Hamas’s attacks.
This tragedy is, however, being compounded by the Israeli military’s (…)

Does it really matter who started this
and who said what to whom;
that endless circle of violence
has spiralled into a cloud that
looks much like a mushroom.
It’s looming over two people;
does it matter if one is brown
the other white;
does it really count
if each thinks he’s right.
All I can think of every night
is of that child under the rubble
and the hostages screaming too,
you can sue me if you like
but there is no morality
behind this war,
so let the world’s machismo (…)

The Diplomatic stand of India towards Canada may change again in near future. At present, it is marked by probably a shift from what was being displayed earlier. The apparent shift was first suggested by External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar hinting at the resumption of Indian visa operations in Canada “very soon.” India had halted these around a month ago and was currently reviewing the “security situation” around India’s missions in Canada. In his words, “Some weeks ago, we stopped (…)

All eyes are on the visit of Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi to the US from 26 October.
Wang Yi’s visit, ostensibly to reciprocate the visit of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Beijing in June, takes place in the run-up to the Asia-Pacific Summit in San Francisco which kicks off on 11 November.
There are expectations that US President Joe Biden will meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping there.
China has not yet confirmed Xi’s visit to the annual APEC Summit.
However, both (…)