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On Saturday, the Congress Party had a regime change with 47-year-old Rahul Gandhi taking over the reins of the party amidst speculations that his mother and predecessor Sonia Gandhi might retire. Sonia also has been expressing publicly that her role now was to retire. But will Sonia Gandhi really retire even though she has yielded her place as the Congress chief to her son?

That the BJP is not ready to play second fiddle to Nitish Kumar was clear yet again last week when deputy chief minister Sushil Modi took quite the opposite stand on reservation on the basis of social and educational backwardness and not economic backwardness.

If ever an election was fought and decided on the undertones of economic issues, Gujarat one was.

The Gujarat election results are likely to leave both the two main contenders unhappy. While the BJP has found it difficult to cross the psychologically important 100-seat mark, the Congress may have improved its tally but has still fallen well short of its rival’s figure.

It is good to know that the government is now getting ready with a direct tax reform process, after a radical reform of the country’s indirect tax system with the rolling out of GST. With all probabilities, the country will have a new direct tax code by the middle of next year. A panel set up to formulate the direct tax code is believed to have prepared a draft for consideration of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley. The focus is on easing the current direct tax system. It is aimed at substantially widening the direct tax payers’ base.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Janata Dal (United) in Kerala is impaled on the horns of a dilemma. The deepening crisis is due mainly to the sharp division on whether to remain in the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) or to cross over to the CPI(M)-led Left Democratic front(LDF).

In a first of its kind initiative, an Abu Dhabi-based fund company is launching a $2 billion feeder fund for building a semiconductors and electronics fab ecosystem in India. This is for the first time that an India-based fund, regulated by the Abu Dhabi Global Market jurisdiction, is being raised from GCC-based investors.

What actually happened at the dinner hosted by suspended Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar at his residence that kicked up a political storm? Mani organized the dinner in honour of his old friend from Cambridge days, who was visiting India, who is also a former foreign minister of Pakistan, Khurshid Mohmud Kasuri. Besides former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, more than half a dozen invitees were former foreign service officers including last High Commissioner to Pakistan, TCA Raghavan and former Vice-President Hamid Ansari, also an IFS. Notably, the invitees included the Pakistan High Commissioner and other officers. Put differently, Mani inter alia, provided an occasion for interaction on India-Pakistan relations.

The Jama Masjid in Old Delhi had out of the usual sort of visitors in its premises on December 14 – one team from the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI); another from the disaster management unit of Delhi government and the third from the Delhi Waqf Board.

In the lingo of multilateral trade negotiations the words collapse, stalemate or lack of consensus are purported to convey the plain meaning that the system presiding over the dialogue among as many as 164 member nations of the World Trade Organization (WTO) is in disarray. It has been reduced to a mere talking shop sans action because a few influential members from both the developed and the emerging economies were obsessively interested in riding their own hobby-horses, refusing to budge on issues they deem basic to their national priority and development concerns, as the case may be.