View Articles

BERLIN: Remembrance Days are rewarding for journalists, especially since Google made research digging so easy. And how the German media love such days!

The Narendra Modi Government has been aggressively following anti-public sector policy in its second term. The premier public sector enterprise like ONGC, BPCL, NTPC and HAL are getting step-motherly treatment from the Government and all focus of the Modi Government advisers is on bringing about dilution of shareholdings in the blue chip PSEs and privatising the units ailing due to government policies.

In the foreground of the annual Fund-Bank brainstorming sessions in Washington, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been the latest to decipher India’s slow down. It has cut down growth forecast by close to one percentage point. But is predicting a rebuking in 2020 to 7% growth.

In a recent op-ed that appeared in The Guardian, Samuel Moyn argues that the “coalition of long-governing elites, from liberal technocrats to ‘never-Trump’ conservatives” is declaring war on the president simply for their own interests—as part of an attempt to re-install centrist neoliberalism in power. That might be largely true, as far as it goes, but is that all that’s at work? Moyn, who is a Yale professor and a contributor to Jacobin magazine, also says that “the pathologies of the country that led to Trump” have to be the main focus for the left—things like the imperial presidency and rising economic inequality.

Weekly Round-Up of Major Decisions of the Courts in India as also Legal Policy Developments

No week passes by when the Supreme Court is devoid of a controversial decision, whether on the judicial or on the administrative side, especially that of the Chief Justice of India, Ranjan Gogoi. On 12th October, 2019, the CJI set up a Constitution Bench of 5 judges to hear a bunch of petitions on the interpretation of Section 24 of the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation, and Resettlement Act, 2013 (‘Act’) comprising of Justice Arun Mishra, Justice Indira Banerjee, Justice Vineet Saran, Justice M.R. Shah, and Justice Ravindra Bhat.

How would the late Sena Pramukh Balasaheb Thackeray have reacted to the idea of his grandson Aaditya entering electoral politics, when the Thackeray clan had so far scrupulously kept out of it? He would have chuckled. So far, the family has run a powerful political party in Maharashtra without contesting elections themselves. The youngest Thackeray Aaditya breaks that trend in upcoming Maharashtra assembly election by contesting from Worli seat in Mumbai.

LONDON: The European Union which is already engaged in a bitter tug of war with the United Kingdom on the issue of Brexit is faced with yet another major challenge and this time from the Turkey president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan issuing a warning to the EU states of “opening the gates and sending 3.6 million refugees your way” during a combative speech at a meeting of lawmakers from his Justice and Development (AK) party.

LONDON: The British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been desperate to salvage the situation and have his final say on the Brexit, but the prevailing political situation makes it explicitly clear that he ultimately may not succeed in his design as support for a new Brexit poll has been growing amid fears over Johnson’s plan.

Pakistan and sedition are the two brahmastras (ultimate weapons) in the BJP’s political armoury. The party almost always uses these two missiles in its battles with the opposition and, not surprisingly, comes out on top.