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BHOPAL: Unless handled tactfully, the agitation launched by Narmada Bacho Andolan is threatening to take a violent turn. Hundreds of Andolan followers have begun an indefinite fast to protest against the forcible removal of 18,000 families from the area likely to be submerged in the Narmada water. These families are being removed without making satisfactory arrangement for their rehabilitation.

Nitish Kumar’s decision to resign as chief minister has dealt a severe blow to the Congress and the opposition parties that have been trying to cobble up a “Bihar type” mahagath bandhan (Grand Alliance) ahead of 2019 generation election. With Nitish Kumar’s exit, the idea of Grand Alliance at the national level is in complete disarray. Developments in Bihar indicate that individual political ambitions are difficult to contain in a front based on ideology, and that “anti-BJP-ism”, a phenomenon that marked the politics of 1990s, has now lost appeal.

PATNA: The advise by Aurangabad’s district magistrate to a villager (of Jamhor Tola) that he should sell his wife to raise money to build a toilet is a disgrace to the very institution of bureaucracy and to India as a whole. The district magistrate, Kanwal Tanuj, gave the most derogatory advise when Saukina Dom, belonging to a dalit community, expressed inability to build a toilet at home unless the government provided the money in advance. Saukina Domn had lost his wife due to a sudden illness nearly 20 years ago; so the district magistrate’s abhorrent remark was all the more insulting.

The Indian market made a historical day on Tuesday this week when Nifty touched the magic level of 10,000, driven by better earnings from blue-chips and strong liquidity. However, profit booking at higher levels pulled the market down to a mild correction, attributed to a psychological effect, muted Q1 results for midcaps and the forthcoming Fed monetary policy meet.

It was astonishing when the union health minister Shri J P Nadda said in an interview on a TV channel that the government will institute inquiry in to the exorbitant prices of drugs. It would be naive to believe that till date the government was ignorant about this. Knowing well the machinations by the private pharma companies the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) was established in 1995 to fix/revise the prices of controlled bulk drugs and formulations and to enforce prices and availability of medicines in the country, under the Drugs(Price Control) Order 1995.

Speculations are rife over the impending new era of Sino-India economic relations. Political and economic relations, which were intertwined hitherto, moved diagonally opposite to each other. Despite border standoff intensified at Sikkim, Bhutan and Tibet tri-junction, Chinese investment initiatives are unlikely to be debilitated. Border tension is not new. Before, whenever the border tension erupted, it had a drag on Chinese trade and investment in India. India used to restrict Chinese investment with a plea on security concern. This time, no such move was made by India.

PATNA: Now there is no more ambiguity. What a coincidence the closely guarded secret was out on Wednesday in the public domain with Nitish announcing his decision to break the mahagathbandhan and going to the BJP fold. It was not only the charges of corruption against the deputy chief minister Tejaswi that in fact made Nitish to crash the mahagathbandhan of secular forces, instead it was the nasty political scheming by the BJP that made him part the company of Lalu Yadav.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Kerala has sunk deeper into the mire with more skeletons tumbling out of the party’s corruption cupboard.

Nitish Kumar’s return to the BJP after a brief spell in the “secular” camp will hurt the opposition at the national level more than be of any help to his latest allies.

The Communist Party of India (Marxist) leadership is in the habit of committing major political blunders in the month of July. The earlier historic blunders took place at the central committee meetings in July 1996 by rejecting the proposal to make Jyoti Basu the Prime Minister and in 2008, the CC decided to withdraw from the UPA Government of Dr. Manmohan Singh on the issue of the India-US nuclear deal.