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Ninety days are left for Presidential election. On July 26, the next first citizen of India will step in Rashtrapati Bhavan to a 21-gun salute. Who wants the top job and who will get it?. Rumours are swirling. Experts are pumping numbers. Whispers from New Delhi’s corridors of powers are percolating from one social circle to another. The nation is waiting with baited breath.

BHOPAL: Two events which took place in the midst of prolonged Narmada Yatra will help refurbish the image of Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan. One such event took place in the Supreme Court where the CBI informed the Supreme Court on May 3 that Congress leader Digvijaya Singh and others would face action soon for running a high-pitched campaign in Vyapam scam against the chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan based on falsehood and forged documents.

WASHINGTON: Without waiting for a review by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to see how it will affect the health care of millions of Americans, the Republicans on Thursday rushed a bill through the House that, among other things, will allow insurance companies to jack up the cost of treatments for people with pre-existing medical conditions. It barely passed with a tiny margin of just 217 to 213 votes. And after a very short while, insurers will be able to refuse to cover such people altogether. A Kaiser analysis found that 27 percent of all Americans under the age of 65 have pre-existing medical conditions.

When finance minister Arun Jaitley announced to newspersons about a new ordinance to empower the Reserve Bank of India to directly intervene for resolving banks’ bad debts, it was felt as if this was the magic wand. Far from it.

India is set to tap the business opportunities in the expanding Eurasian market by formalizing a free trade agreement with the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) in the course of the coming India-Russia summit at St. Petersburg in the first week of June this year. All indications suggest that the joint statement on the FTA will be issued during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s meeting with the Russian President Vladimir Putin on June 1.

Ever since Rashtrya Muslim Mahila Manch, an outfit of RSS, approached the Supreme Court of India in 2016, the NDA Union Government has been indulging in aggressive campaign against Muslims over instant Triple Talaq and how it endeavours to get Muslim women justice with equity and fair-play. Such propaganda war is abated in the sold out wholesale media world willfully showing Muslims of India in bad light.

Turkey seen as a moderate and secular country among Islamic nations has embarked upon new strategies to take political and economic relations with India to a new high. The recent four day visit to India by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has cemented further the traditional friendship between two liberal countries from time immemorial. Combating terrorism, of which both the countries are victims, and deepening economic ties including the possibility of a bilateral free trade agreement, dominated the talks between Presiden Erdogal and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The BJP in West Bengal is fast replacing the Left and coming up as the main Opposition party to the ruling TMC. Surprisingly, this ominous trend does not worry a large segment of the West Bengal Left. Rather they derive a vicarious pleasure in this development. Their feeling is, to put it inelegantly, “This woman (Mamata Banerjee) ousted us from power which we enjoyed for 34 years. She has been steadily making us more and more irrelevant in West Bengal. We cannot put up any fight to her. But the BJP is doing it. This is something we should be happy about.”

The Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP) dawning of sense has come rather late in the day. Arvind Kejriwal’s admission that he, rather than the electronic voting machines, was responsible for the party’s defeat may point to a belated and grudging acknowledgement of reality, but it is not enough to reassure the voters.

BHOPAL: Madhya Pradesh is facing not one but several crises. Among them two are very serious. The first is the strike of ambulance drivers. The ambulance service in Madhya Pradesh is known as the 108 service. This means in difficulty you contact 108 and within minutes you will get an ambulance which will take you to the nearest hospital.