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BHOPAL: It is rather unfortunate that the first session of the newly elected Madhya Pradesh Vidhan Sabha began on a bitter note. It is still more unfortunate that the election of the speaker was also marked by tension and sharp exchanges between the treasury benches and the opposition BJP.

With every passing year India evolves to a new collective consciousness of its people and it moves from strength to strength. It’s a process of evolution where the collective consciousness of people abandons the bad and gradually adopts the good with focus for better future. In last seven decades after independence, India has experienced this movement of betterment. It has moved from riots to peaceful co-existence, from license raj to free economy, from all pervasive poor country to economic power, from corrupt to non-corrupt practices and many others. So it is not prudent enough to think that people choose its Government in casual manner and intellectuals can only bell the cat.

The Indian economy is forecast to grow by 7.3 per cent in the medium term during 2019-23, says the OECD Economic Outlook for Southeast Asia, China and India 2019. Labour market conditions point to solid growth in private consumption, although rising inflation and interest rates can be drags. The push for consolidation will most likely limit the government’s spending flexibility as well. How infrastructure projects are carried out will be the key. Maintaining banking sector health is another challenge.

Bandh is closure of village, town, city and state – country. Nothing should be moving. But that’s not how it happens. Rail roko, buses attacked and vandalized, markets forcibly closed, strikers marching through the streets, protesting against this or that issue and the top court quashes the midnight removal of CBI Director Alok Verma. All in a bandh’s day!

Twenty-seven year-old Sonia Riasat is the lone Christian employee in any government office along with a dozen sanitation workers in municipalities in the whole of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, which in India is known as Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. She has a postgraduate degree in English literature and has been working there since 2009. But a substantive status or confirmation of permanent appointment remains a distant dream. She has to be “busy receiving and transferring telephone calls to prime minister and other officials working there” at a dank and dark telephone exchange room of the Prime Minister’s House in Muzaffarabad.

Bihar is one of the most complicated states in the country, where caste is presumed to define the character of the politics. But in reality that is not the case. It is class that dictates state politics. The Lok Sabha elections for 2019 in Bihar promise to be a battle between the backward castes, dalits and upper castes for the control of the state’s economy.

It is often said ‘Uttar Pradesh is India and India is Uttar Pradesh’. A win in India’s most populous state, can be a game-changer in national elections for any party, as it accounts for 80 out of 545 parliamentary seats. Also UP has gifted many Prime Ministers to the country.

BJP president Amit Shah has been going through a very tough time right from the grassroots to the national level. There is every indication that the party is not only losing a large number of seats in the coming Lok Sabha elections, but also seeing depletion of the umber of NDA’s partners with political clout. NDA in Maharashtra has been cracking for a long time and has reached so close to a break that not less than the BJP president himself has told the party cadre to prepare for a solo battle in the state while a miffed Shivsena has called BJP arrogant.

Two decades of polling by the Levada Centre, a Russian NGO, show that the majority of people in Russia regret the downfall of the USSR. It is mainly economic and social reasons that fuel this regret. This year, positive sentiment towards the Soviet Union has hit a 14-year-high.

Which of the saffron brotherhood’s legacies can be the most damaging for the country – the anti-Muslim sentiments which it routinely fosters or its weird “pseudo-science”?