July 12, 2008

What was inevitable has happened. With the PM conveying to the media on board the aircraft enroute to the G-8 summit meeting in Toyako that his government would be proceeding to the IAEA “very soon”, the Left parties were left with no option but to withdraw their support to the UPA dispensation. In effect it was not the Left but the PM who was responsible for the Left’s pullout (especially when the External Affairs Minister had called the next meeting of the UPA-Left committee on the nuclear (…)

At the height of the public debate over the nuclear agreement with the US, with the voicing from many quarters of concern that India was at risk of losing its independence in foreign policy, the government’s reply was that India was a big country that could not be pressurised by outside powers. But the size of a country is not a decisive factor—the strength and stature of the leadership is. In recent years the world has seen such a “big” country as Russia ruled by two very different kinds of (…)

Obama is an altogether new phenomenon in America, even traumatic to some. The phenomenon looks even bigger from a distance in Europe. Coming so soon just 40 years after the grant of civil rights it seems an earth-shaking event to his people in Kenya and Egypt from which we have a feed-back. Such is the global importance of the US that who becomes the President is a matter of global interest and concern.
Is Obama’s nomination as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate a (…)

It cuts both ways when an unelected politician heads the government in a democratic country. On the one hand, he may not be adept at the politicking that becomes essential, especially when he leads a coalition government. But on the other hand, unlike a grassroots politician, he can act with decisiveness and foresight insofar as he can be impervious to public opinion.
Seventysix-year-old Manmohan Singh, who heads India’s coalition government, has never won a direct election in his (…)

India is back to the days of looking at the sky. Inflation was stated first to moderate from September 2008 provided the monsoon was normal. Now, hopes are being raised that nine per cent rate of growth of the GDP may still be realised, despite the high oil prices, on the back of good agricultural production as in the last three years. How reliable are these assurances insofar as food is concerned? There is surely a greater emphasis on the immediate prospects. This is needed, too, as any (…)

Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw, India’s iconic Army Chief who led India to victory in the 1971 war that resulted in the creation of Bangladesh, died at the Military Hospital in Wellington, Tamil Nadu, half-an-hour after midnight on June 26, 2008 at the age of 94. He was the first of the only two Indian military officers to hold the rank of Field Marshal of the Indian Army, the other being Field Marshal K.M. Cariappa.
Born in Amritsar on April 3, 1914 Manekshaw was commissioned into the Army (…)

Recently the PM was in Bhutan, a unique country. It is one country that wholeheartedly believes in a Happiness Index and not the much touted Per Capita Income as a measure of the well- being of its people. The PM must have observed an unhurried life, progressing at a slow pace and learnt the value of patience. Conse-quently, he advised fellow Indians to patiently wait for the rising tide of inflation to ebb in due course.
The idea prevalent in modern society that time is money is alien to (…)

In the last two years, there has been non-stop coverage in the media and in the diplomatic circles about Bosnia, but very little about the happenings in Afghanistan. From the angle of ethnic conflict, both represent a dimension which needs to be fully grasped while from the strategic point of view, Afghanistan’s historical importance is unmatched.
For a century-and-a-half, Afghanistan has been the battleground of rival Great Powers, so much so that the moves and the counter-moves between (…)

[(DISCUSSION
CPI leader and former Union Agriculture Minister Chaturanan Mishra, in his article “Need to Redefine Socialism after the Collapse of the Soviet Union” (Mainstream, Annual 2007), called for a discussion on the subject. D.G. Bokare, D.P. Sen and K.G. Somasekharan Nair participated in the discussion with contributions in March 22, 2008 and May 10, 2008 issues of this journal. The following is another contribution.)]
This note is in response to the self-critical analysis of the (…)

India started a process of economic liberalisation in the 1990s. One of the main features of this process has been to simplify rules and regulations to attract foreign investment. As a result of this, India is becoming easier to enter from a regulatory and commercial point of view but there are still issues to overcome, one of them being Indian privacy standards for the outsourcing company.
Much of the early outsourcing to India was from the United States, which had no comprehensive data (…)