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THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Kerala Government is on the horns of a dilemma over the awarding of the Vizhinjam port project to the Adani group.

Will there be political realignments in Punjab before the assembly polls due in early 2017? The question assumes importance as the form of realignments, if these take place, and the anti-incumbency factor will play a crucial role in deciding who will rule the sensitive border state for the next five years and also influence national politics, particularly the BJP’s relationships with its regional allies.

Narendra Modi’s political instincts have been shaped by two events – the Gujarat riots of 2002 and his success in winning three successive assembly elections in the state.

The symbol of good governance (shushan), the chief minister of Bihar, Nitish Kumar has lost the semi final of the electoral bout. No amount of explanation and excuse would alter the reality that while the BJP led NDA swept state Legislative Council election with the alliance winning 14 seats, the Nitish Kumar-led alliance managed to win just nine of the 24 seats. The BJP nevertheless won 12 seats on its own and Nitish had to be content with just five seats against ten it contested.

BHOPAL: Supreme Court's direction to the Madhya Pradesh government to hand over Vyapam scam enquiry to the Central Bureau of investigation will boost the prestige of the Congress in general and Digvijay Singh in particular. Digvijay Singh, AICC general secretary and former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister has been consistently demanding CBI enquiry. He filed petitions to this effect, both in the High Court and Supreme Court.

What is Vyapam? Many people do not know what its means, even those well-versed in Hindi. What they understand is that Vyapam is a form of corruption which has now assumed serious proportions and threatening to cost Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan his job. Vyapam is short form of Vyavsayik Pariksha Mandal; its English rendering is “Professional Examination Board”. The Vyapam scam is, in fact, an admission and recruitment scam involving politicians, senior officials and businessmen in Madhya Pradesh.

Whoever might have lost out in the weird saga of the rise and fall of the Chinese stock market, there is surely one sure loser – confidence in China as a reliable free market player. And with that, it appears, the prospect of renminbi becoming an accepted reserve currency by the International Monetary Fund has flown out of the window.

When Swami Vivekananda was touring North India, a group of young men came to see him. They represented the cause of protecting cows. Swamiji asked them why did they seek ban on cow slaughter. They responded that cow was their mother. “That I can see”, was all Swami Vivekananda muttered. The anecdote explains the gulf between an intellectually oriented Hindu and those who are the cadres. Kalyan Singh, the Governor of Rajasthan, belongs to the latter category.

Over the past nearly three decades, some of India’s Constitutional institutions have been turned into one of the major money-minting sources by those in power or their cronies. The latest case is of the BJP-ruled Madhya Pradesh’s Vyapam job scam in which influential people have misused the Constitutional body for getting admissions into technical institutions and for securing jobs for their favourites and for making huge money.

BJP chief Amit Shah’s “Mission Bihar” primarily focused on demolish Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's image of “Shushan Babu”. It was expected of Shah that he would take out some innovative idea from his magical hat to wrest the initiative from Nitish and project the BJP as the savior of Bihar.