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India is perhaps the only large economy in the world which is growing at a 6.5 plus per cent, and yet this growth rate is not supported by some fundamental micro and macro-economic indicators. The million-dollar question these days is can India sustain its rapid economic growth. Importantly, in this phase of de-globalization, and disruption post-demonetisation, it will be a miracle if India can achieve a 7 per cent growth. President Trump has already signed an executive order to pull USA out of Trans-Pacific Partnership deal.

What a high-pitched drama was enacted in Lucknow! One day it appeared that the Congress-SP alliance has been reached. The second day what looked a certainty took an unexpected turn and talks of an alliance broke down. Those who wrote their columns on the assumption that the talk of alliance between the two parties is finally dead woke up to find next morning in newspapers that the poll pact between Congress and SP has been reached. Strange are the ways of politics.

A group of 40 school children (12 to 18 years) from Kashmir are currently on a “Bharat Darshan” tour (January 15- 29) being conducted by the Border Security Force on behalf of the union home ministry as part of what is obviously a national integration exercise. These children are being taken to Mysore, Bengaluru, Delhi, Agra, Kolkata, Sunderbans (West Bengal) and Amritsar, according to a Home Ministry release last week.

Assembly elections are scheduled to be held on March 4 and 8 in Manipur. The State has now turned into a virtual battleground of the Meiteis and Kukis on the one hand and the Nagas on the other. It has also become a battlefield for the ruling Congress and the Opposition BJP which has thrown the gauntlet to Chief Minister Okhram Ibobi Singh. As the Congress prospects do not seem encouraging, many Congressmen, in true Congress tradition, are deserting what they think is a sinking ship and joining the BJP.

We have been celebrating January 26 as the Republic Day. The Constitution of India, which has come into existence on January 26, 1950 abolished the dominion status of India, rejected the British crown and declared India as a full-pledged Democratic Republic.

With less than a week to go before the Narendra Modi government presents its penultimate budget to Parliament on February 1 for the fiscal year 2017-18, the Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley appears to be satisfied with the finer details he has dovetailed into the budget when he posed for the traditional halwa ceremony! Now that the budget is prepared and is under print with more than a hundred officials from the North bloc cooped up in the Raisina Hill, there is no point in speculation as to what would be the contours and colors of this budget, considering the fact that the feisty Finance Minister has not had any memorable one in the past couple of years when he donned the role and responsibility of the ace man in the Finance Ministry. No doubt, the Modi government spared itself any ignominy of getting bogged down in corruption or scams even as it experimented with a great gambit of demonetising high value notes that had accounted for 85 per cent of the country’s notes in circulation and in an economy which is more than 90 per cent cash-driven.

Since the Narendra Modi government wears patriotism on its sleeves and recently threatened to shut down a TV channel for a day for its coverage of the terrorist attack on the Pathankot airbase, it had to take the Sri Lankan minister for mass media to call upon the media houses to stop promoting nationalism by saying that such news becomes “part of the conflict”.

India awaits the fourth budget of the Modi Government on February 1, against the backdrop of the disastrous demonetisation, growth decline, and heightened global risks and uncertainties. Fiscal 2018 is set to go through another difficult year in growth recovery toward a probable official projection of 7.5 per cent, after a three-year low in the current year.

After many months of “will they - wont they” suspense, the 130-year-old Congress party and the 25-year-old Samajwadi Party have sealed an alliance deal for the ensuing Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls. This is the first time that the two have come together. Now the Congress will be a junior partner in the alliance. The party, which had N D Tiwari as its last chief minister in 1989, had been languishing since then, unable to come back to power in Uttar Pradesh.

Ukraine continues to be key element of discord between Russia and USA despite the Russian president Vladimir Putin being happy at the victory of Donald Trump in the presidential election. While Trump is in favour of taking the bilateral relations with Russia to a better level, he also nurses ambivalent approach towards the role of the anti-Russian ultra-nationalists in Ukraine.