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The Finance Minister Mr Arun Jaitley has manifold challenges for his fifth and final budget for 2018-19, a politically-loaded exercise ahead of the Lok Sabha Poll 2019. The country’s fiscal system has taken a beating in the current year, mainly due to a half-baked GST, while the Modi Government singularly failed to coax domestic investments for four years at a stretch.

If there were no castes in 1818 and assuming there was an idea of India at the time, the 900 Mahars who joined the British to defeat the Peshwa’s 20,000-strong army would have been treated as traitors and anti-nationals. But there was a ‘British India’ and the Mahars had become celebrated symbols of lower caste resistance to upper caste oppression even if in the company of the foreign occupier.

Two steps backward and one step forward. This pretty much characterises the approach of Congress and other parties on the issue of reforming the Muslim society of its outdated practices, the one in contention currently being triple talaq. Most accept that it is unfair on women and therefore want it abolished. They have no doubt that an end to the practice would benefit millions of Muslim women who have been wronged against and left in the lurch by their men; so they don’t want to be seen opposing legislative measures to deal with the problem. At the same time, they don’t dare offend the mullahs who they believe, rightly or wrongly, control Muslim public opinion and, by implication, the votes. The BJP, true to its nature, might be deriving some sadistic pleasure by offending the mullahs and teasing Congress and others caught in the rut, but they have almost the entire Muslim women community with them in bringing the law that makes triple talaq a punishable offence.

Mohammed Arif Khan, a minister in the Rajiv Gandhi government, was seen vehemently pleading for retention of punishable clause as the Rajya Sabha took up triple talaq Bill for discussing. It was his rare visit to the Central Hall of Parliament and he was trying to convince some senior Congress members that the clause envisaging, “imprisonment for a term which may extent to three years”, was necessary to discourage the practice of talaq-e-biddat (three pronouncement of talaq, at one and same time). His point was that unless there is fear of stringent punishment, no law can be enforced. Same was the case with triple talaq Bill now.

It aims to highlight a new stage in the evolution of global capitalism: Mafia capitalism. We are, though, not talking here of a few family Cosa Nostras controlling the underworld, but well-organised crime syndicates, with links to governments and security services, gnawing their way to the core of capitalism.

On December 21, the Autonomous Region of Catalonia in Northeastern Spain held new parliamentary elections to replace the legislature which had been deposed earlier by decree of the right-wing government in Madrid. However, the elections resolved nothing, with the electorate still split on the issue of independence from Spain.

Despite ongoing tensions in various parts of the world, the year 2017 ended with a positive note. The Treaty Prohibiting Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) passed by the UN General Assembly on July 7 would always be counted in red letters in history. It has raised many hopes for a better future of a world without nuclear weapons and impending humanitarian catastrophe. Good health is a basic urge of every individual.

Victimhood comes naturally to the Dalit. Jignesh Mevani understands this better than most. The Gujarat MLA has pitted himself willy-nilly against Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Maybe he thinks that is the sure shot way to not only become the headline but also to make it big time.

BJP’s Hindutva politics has brought Assam on the brink of a massive social unrest. The reason is the party’s decision to grant citizenship to all Bengali Hindu immigrants from Bangladesh after March 25, 1971, while holding all Bengali Muslim immigrants as ‘illegal infiltrators’ to be deported to Bangladesh. Whether this will be at all physically possible (that is, whether Bangladesh will accept them) is quite another matter. Bangladesh has said repeatedly that not a single citizen of theirs is staying in Assam.

The new tax law the passed by the Republicans-run Congress and signed by President Donald Trump “stakes out America’s bid to become the most extreme society in the world” in unequal distribution of wealth, a new United Nations report says.