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General elections in Bangladesh will be held by the end of this year. The constitutional requirement is that the elections be held between October 31, 2018 and January 28, 2019. This time the elections will be held in conditions that are different from those that obtained in 2014. Then the biggest opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party of Begum Khaleda Zia, boycotted the polls because Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her Awami League refused to have the elections conducted by a caretaker government. The boycott helped the League immensely. It entered Parliament with a huge majority.

Of the two spies who came in from the cold to write a book not penned by them, one could be back in the icebox. Lt. General Asad Durrani, once chief of Pakistan’s notorious Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), is in trouble. He danced a tango with ex-RAW head Amarjit Singh Dulat – who is in the habit of chronicling his years as a spy – and spilled 'ISI-Beans' that Indian journalist Aditya Sinha strung together with 'Dulat Brand Chickpeas' to write the highly revealing ‘Spy Chronicles: RAW, ISI and the Illusion of Peace’, a book that has become must-read for ISI agents and wannabe spooks.

Regional parties are often seen from the political perspective of the national parties and their leaders projected as villains operating in a narrow space with their vested interests. Undoubtedly they need to be criticized for their wrong doings, but if they raise local issues and walk in and out of alliances for the sake of those causes, they don’t deserve condemnation.

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

Last week witnessed the violent face of the State machinery that is often reserved for the disturbed or conflict-ridden areas like Chattisgarh, Assam, North-Eastern States or even Jammu and Kashmir. On 22nd May, 2018, thirteen protestors were gunned down in cold blood by the Tamil Nadu police, when they were protesting against the Sterlite Copper plant, a unit of Vedanta Limited, at Thoothikudi, Tamil Nadu, and demanding its closure, owing to the plant polluting the entire area. It was on the occasion of 100th day of peaceful protests that the grostesque police firing happened on the peaceful protestors, which left 13 persons dead and more than 65 persons injured.

It is rather unusual for the BJP president, Amit Shah, to concede that his party is not as favourably placed as he normally suggests because his is an uncompromising “win at all costs and take no prisoners” approach.

Karnataka chief minister HD Kumaraswamy is a square block of a man. And HDK is head honcho of Karnataka because of ‘combination’ rather than ‘permutation’. By definition, ‘order’ matters in permutation. But ‘order’ doesn’t matter for combination. Rahul Gandhi’s party has double the seats of HDK’s Janata Dal (S) but HDK heads the government. Permutation says the Congress should be heading the combination. The square bloke that he’s been reduced to, HDK acknowledged this Sunday, admitting that he is at the “mercy of the Congress” and not the 6.5 crore people of Karnataka because of the permutation.

LUCKNOW: The euphoria following the grand unity show in Bengaluru, where BSP national president Mayawati was a star presence, has already been tempered by the compulsions of electoral politics. Mayawati had made it clear that she was willing to forge an anti-BJP alliance at the national level but would prefer to go it alone if her party was not given proper seats.

EXACTLY fifty years ago this month, France was aflame. In one of the world’s most developed capitalist economies, the ‘impossible’ – the prospect of revolution from below – struck suddenly with resounding force, fury and festivity. Students and workers in their millions spilled onto the streets, closing factories, occupying campuses and triggering the biggest general strike France has ever known. The government of the day, headed by President Charles de Gaulle, was plunged into panic.

Nothing could be more humiliating for Nitish Kumar than to be compared with the amateur young Tejashvi, the emerging RJD leader on the political horizon of Bihar. Till two year ago he was taking the first lessons in politics from his “uncle” Nitish, but now he is the biggest potential threat to the uncle’s political standing.