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Political standards seem to have fallen to an all time low in West Bengal: the manipulative tactics adopted by the ruling Trinamool Congress(TMC) and the Bharatiya Janata Party(BJP) in announcing candidates for the Noapara Assembly seat by-election expose the rank political opportunism that prevails in the State.

LUCKNOW: Samajwadi Party national president Akhilesh Yadav has started preparations for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. During his first interaction with media in the New Year, Akhilesh announced that he would make SP a national party. Although Akhilesh is national president of the party, it has virtually no presence in other states. During the recent Gujarat assembly polls Akhilesh Yadav put up five candidates but none of them could make any mark.

It is no longer business as usual between United States and Pakistan as it has not been between India and Pakistan. With US President Donald Trump’s tweet and subsequent US actions, US-Pak ties went into a “tailspin”, as had Indo-Pak relationship after the Narendra Modi government took over in 2014.

The next election to the Lok Sabha are merely fifteen months away, or may be less if the Prime Minister opts for the polls along with three states due for polls in November this year. Yet the Prime Minister does not indicate his initiatives to revive his earlier drive for rapid expansion of industrial base to propel growth rate of Indian economy. He seems keen in moralizing the business and industrial sectors through tax terrorism. His sudden decision to go for harsh economic measure of demonetisation for extracting, equipping with more powers the executive wings infamous for rampant corruption, and imposing need for more dealings with bureaucracy for small trader through the new tax structure are indicative of his sudden switch to the conventional politics.

In the first year of the plan to double farmers’ income by 2022, the growth rate in ‘agriculture, forestry, and fishing’ is estimated to sharply fall to less than half. The first advanced estimate of the national income for the year 2017-18 puts the likely growth in this sector to be 2.1 per cent in its Gross Value Added (GVA), as against the previous year’s 4.9 per cent.

British Prime Minister Theresa May has shown through her cabinet reshuffle on Monday that she is not in control of the ruling Conservative Party and she can be cajoled by her MPs to change decisions. As a result, the much hyped cabinet changes have led to further factional battle within the Tories, giving a big handle to the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn in stepping up campaign for the ouster of a flip flop regime.

The BJP can claim credit for introducing a major change in Indian politics by ensuring that its slogan, “Garv se kaho hum Hindu hain” (Say with pride I am a Hindu), the leitmotiv of the saffron brotherhood’s Ramjanmabhoomi movement of the 1990s, which led to the party’s transition from the margins to centre-stage, has gained traction beyond its expectations.

A tie-up with the Kerala Congress(Mani) has once again become a bone of contention between the CPI(M) and the CPI.

To call an investigative reporter a scribe is downright insulting. A scribe is a person who copies out documents and that is not what Tribune reporter Rachna Khaira did when she exposed the ease with which anybody can steal Aadhaar data. Her report laid bare the inadequacies of the Aadhaar programme and the government’s use of it as a “tool of spying and surveillance” as the Congress Party put it following the FIR against Khaira by UIDAI.

The Finance Minister Mr Arun Jaitley has manifold challenges for his fifth and final budget for 2018-19, a politically-loaded exercise ahead of the Lok Sabha Poll 2019. The country’s fiscal system has taken a beating in the current year, mainly due to a half-baked GST, while the Modi Government singularly failed to coax domestic investments for four years at a stretch.