View Articles

Insulating the leader from failures of the party is standard operating procedure for any political outfit. In the Congress it is the procedure period. So Rahul Gandhi may have claimed “moral victory” and everybody is hard at work to insulate him. He should discourage such a trend. At the same time he should remind every Congressman that the Congress Party is a 132 year old political organization with a history to envy. A formidable history, it is the party which led India to Independence. Some of the biggest stalwarts of modern India found their feet in the Congress and stayed through the thick and thin of Freedom Struggle.

If Narendra Modi is invincible, then the EVM is his Achilles heel. Opposition parties have got on to that little secret and the EVM bogey has become the standard operating procedure for them to deny him electoral legitimacy. If the Election Commission gets trashed and maligned in the process, then it is collateral damage. So what?

African National Congress’s five day national conference, currently underway, will end on December 20 with the nomination of the next head of ANC replacing Zuma. The conference attains much importance for the simple reason that whoever gets elected will be the nominee in the 2019 presidential elections, the most important general elections in post-apartheid South Africa.

On Saturday, the Congress Party had a regime change with 47-year-old Rahul Gandhi taking over the reins of the party amidst speculations that his mother and predecessor Sonia Gandhi might retire. Sonia also has been expressing publicly that her role now was to retire. But will Sonia Gandhi really retire even though she has yielded her place as the Congress chief to her son?

That the BJP is not ready to play second fiddle to Nitish Kumar was clear yet again last week when deputy chief minister Sushil Modi took quite the opposite stand on reservation on the basis of social and educational backwardness and not economic backwardness.

If ever an election was fought and decided on the undertones of economic issues, Gujarat one was.

The Gujarat election results are likely to leave both the two main contenders unhappy. While the BJP has found it difficult to cross the psychologically important 100-seat mark, the Congress may have improved its tally but has still fallen well short of its rival’s figure.

It is good to know that the government is now getting ready with a direct tax reform process, after a radical reform of the country’s indirect tax system with the rolling out of GST. With all probabilities, the country will have a new direct tax code by the middle of next year. A panel set up to formulate the direct tax code is believed to have prepared a draft for consideration of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley. The focus is on easing the current direct tax system. It is aimed at substantially widening the direct tax payers’ base.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Janata Dal (United) in Kerala is impaled on the horns of a dilemma. The deepening crisis is due mainly to the sharp division on whether to remain in the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) or to cross over to the CPI(M)-led Left Democratic front(LDF).

In a first of its kind initiative, an Abu Dhabi-based fund company is launching a $2 billion feeder fund for building a semiconductors and electronics fab ecosystem in India. This is for the first time that an India-based fund, regulated by the Abu Dhabi Global Market jurisdiction, is being raised from GCC-based investors.