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To say that politics is fragile is to bend with the wind. If anything, politics takes oxygen through democracy’s fault-lines. A particular party is rejected by the voter and politics peaks – EVM fraud! The machines are working for the ruling party and we don’t have the time-technology to dispatch The Terminator back in time to assassinate the EVM, so let’s character-assassinate the Election Commission.

In politics, situation changes very fast and one month is not a long period. For the ruling party BJP, only 11 days have passed since their victory in Tripura and successes in other two states on March 3 leading to the euphoria that the saffrons are invincible. And now after the declaration of the by election results in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the same BJP led by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Amit Shah lie shattered, the saffron fort of Gorakhpur is lost. The combination of Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party has done the miracle.

Union Government in the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has set in motion merger of the existing process of physical police verification for issue of passports with the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems (CCTNS), set up by the previous UPA Government in 2009, to eliminate physical police verification.

A message is making viral rounds on social media by young enthusiastic but narrow minds eager to demoralize the opponents of the ruling regime. They may have been induced to be overactive in distorting realities by their sense of anticipation of elections to the Lok Sabha earlier than the scheduled time of April May 2019. They got the encounter the Congress president Rahul Gandhi had with the undergraduate students of the Singapore University. But the message is not in response to a question by any student but from an Indian teaching economics to graduates in Singapore. Rahul Gandhi could not answer. It was enough for enthusiastic to go viral as it accorded them an opportunity to present the young leader in bad light.

Pleasing few people but himself, GOP President Donald Trump dumped Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in an early-morning tweet on March 13, replacing him with CIA Director Michael Pompeo, a former Kansas right-wing congressman, foe of the Iran nuclear deal and past advocate of torture of alleged “terrorists.”

For the Congress, the dinner was ‘last’ night, the realization was ‘this’ morning. That was because in the line-up of the UPA, assuming that it will be an alliance of the UPA including the BSP and the SP in 2019, where does Rahul Gandhi and his Congress Party stand in the leadership stakes? Who will lead the alliance come 2019 with such egos as Mayawati and Mamata Banerjee prone to play second to none? Especially, after the Congress has nothing to show for the Sonia dinner.

The signing of the controversial tariff hike on steel and aluminum by the U.S .President Donald Trump on March 8 in the White House in the presence of workers from the afflicted industries has generated not only a lively debate within the country but also globally. For a person who had successfully enacted a host of popular reality shows in television in the past, the optics and the theatrics that accompany his polemical decision as the first citizen of the world’s largest democracy count in terms of its wider ramifications. This is obviously to get a political message through and to reassure his voters that he is there to safeguard their livelihood interests.

The delight which Tripura’s saffron governor Tathagata Roy, the go-between between the RSS and the BJP Ram Madhav, the Hindutva gadfly Subramanian Swamy, and others in the Sangh Parivar expressed over the toppling of Lenin’s statue in a town in Tripura was short-lived because it did not take long for the act of vandalism to go viral, as they say about widely circulated social media items.

If the proverbial leopard cannot change its spots, can the BJP change its politics of domination? Just before last month’s assembly elections in Nagaland, the BJP took a calculated risk by breaking its ties with the Naga People’s Front (NPF) with which it was running a coalition government for years. It not only parted company with its old ally, but split the NPF by weaning away the party’s president and three-term chief minister Neiphiu Rio.

Lack of sincerity and appetite to defeat the BJP was a factor in Congress meeting its waterloo in Tripura. Congress must have been aware that the stakes for BJP were quite high in the state, which was why the BJP put its full might to defeat the CPI(M). Congress president Rahul Gandhi must not have overlooked the fact that the RSS had set up its camps in the state, at least two years ahead of the elections to accomplish this task.