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BHOPAL: The Madhya Pradesh bandh call which was given by the Congress Party on July 16, was a total failure. The life remained normal in almost all the major towns, including Bhopal, capital of Madhya Pradesh.

The Modi Government cannot merely rely on ruling BJP’s formidable presence in Lok Sabha to weather the political storms that have swept across the nation posing issues of propriety, nepotism and even corruption involving Ministers of a Government that came to power committed to ‘zero tolerance’ for corruption and ‘maximum governance’. The Monsoon session of Parliament beginning July 21 would thus be a crucial test for a Government just at the beginnings of its second year of office.

The political scene in Bihar is hotting up with the crucial assembly election barely a couple of months away. With Nitish and Lalu deciding to shelve their differences and contest the polls together, anti-BJP parties have their tails up. JDU, RJD, Congress and NCP, constituting a grand secular alliance, have stolen a march over NDA by projecting Nitish as their chief ministerial candidate.

Did the ‘Iftar diplomacy’ of the Congress President Sonia Gandhi this week succeed? It is too early to predict. While her supporters claim the glass was half full, her critics say it was half empty, going by the presence and absence of the top leaders at the party. But it is behind the scene developments that matter and it is a developing story.

If wishes were horses, the Trinamool Congress (TMC) has already won the 2016 state Assembly elections in Bengal.

KOLKATA: About a crore of Bengalis in Assam, Muslims as well as Hindus, are facing an uncertain future. They fear that they will be evicted and thrown out of the State. The reason is the fresh drawing up of a National Register of Citizens (NRC) with the sole aim of identifying and deporting the ‘millions of illegal Bangladeshi immigrants’ who are believed to be living and coming in an unending stream. Unless this is effectively checked and the infiltrators thrown out of Assam, the State will become a Muslim majority State and ultimately become part of Bangladesh. This is an obsessive fear. The NRC has to be completed by July 31. That is what has made the Bengalis panicky.

Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was the first and the last Indian Prime Minister to visit all the five central Asian republics –Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan – together over five decades ago when they were part of the erstwhile Soviet Union (USSR). Nehru’s visit of the region had nothing to do with growing India’s economic relations there. The rhapsodized mountains, scenic beauty and the culture attracted Nehru to the region. Nothing beyond. The independent country-hood of the five states after the Soviet Union’s disintegration in the early 1990s did little to change India’s diplomatic relations with these republics beyond cultural ties. The massive oil and mineral reserves in the region immediately drew Chinese attention to the countries sharing borders with Communist China. China has built a massive trade relations and made good investments in some of the states. The trade between India and the Central Asian region in 2014-15 stood at only around US$1.4 billion or less than two per cent of India’s global trade. The five countries together accounted for an import of $604 million worth goods and services from India and exported products valued at around $776 million.

NEW DELHI: The recent case of Indira Gandhi National Open University agreeing to issue bachelor’s certificates to soldiers under the Gyandeep programme came as a heartening effort to correct a social wrong. But IGNOU did not grant it on its own; it relented after pressured by the Ministry of Human Resource Development, thanks to media outcry.

The Make in India lion may not have roared yet but it is certainly on the prowl as the economy has started looking up. One may quarrel with the new method of calculating GDP growth but there is no denying of the fact that Prime Minister Narendra Modi government during the last one year has ensured that feel good factor returned to the economy, which is expected to better than growth projections. There is every likelihood that the economy clocks 8 per cent this year against the projections of around 7.5 per cent.

Any Chinese splurge of cooperation is viewed with one eye on suspicion and another on pondering. In May, Director General of Asian Affairs Department of Foreign Ministry of China, Mr Huang Xilian’s benevolence to contain wide trade deficit by combining Made in China 2025 with Make in India signaled an encouraging tone to mitigate the trade disputes with India.