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In West Bengal, the present situation in the Darjeeling hills could not be more confusing. The state government, despite its demonstrated inability to hold any official meeting at Darjeeling, claims that the 90-days plus long bandh is all but over and normalcy has ‘almost’ returned.

The Modi Government must perforce have to devote undivided attention to getting over the glitches and bottlenecks that stymie the country’s growth story that had been disrupted by the global financial tsunami which struck a lethal blow to the global economy way back in 2008 with contagious consequences to all globally-linked economies including India. Ever since it came to power in May 2014, the NDA government was busy wrestling with repairing the various legacy issues left over by the decade-long UPA dispensation particularly as the latter’s second tenure (2009-2014) was marred by malfeasance and shenanigans.

Just as the judiciary could not at first ascertain who shot dead a model, Jessica Lal, at a New Delhi bar in April, 1999, because of lack of evidence, the Rajasthan police has been unable to find out who were the killers of a Muslim dairy farmer, Pehlu Khan, near Alwar last April.

LUCKNOW: Samajwadi Party is heading for trouble in the coming days due to intense infighting in the family of its founder Mulayam Singh Yadav.

While pundits and news outlets the world over say the outcome of the Sept. 24 elections here has already been decided in favor of Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, the country’s Left Party (Die Linke) begs to differ.

The Reserve Bank of India governor recently referred to the issue of resolving the public sector banks mountain of non-performing debts which are threatening their functioning. A good deal of progress has been made in setting in place the institutional framework for resolving the problem of bad debts. However, even in the midst of the new processes, there is a lot of scope for fine tuning for taking advantage of the system which needs to be plugged.

Ten months after she lost the presidential bid, Hillary Clinton is back in the news with the release of her new memoir What Happened last week. The 494-page post-2016 presidential poll analysis offers an intimate account of her life after her losing the elections and an analysis of her defeat. Hillary continues to be a polarizing figure even after her defeat. The new book has evoked a fair amount of criticism as well as support.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Will the ‘consensus election’ move to decide the new Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee (KPCC) president end the current face-off between the two dominant groups in the State unit of the Congress, led by former chief minister Oommen Chandy and the present leader of the opposition Ramesh Chennithala?

Pushed to the wall by rebel tribals for his obscured design to dilute the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act 1908 and the Santhal Pargana Tenancy Act of 1876, BJP chief minister Raghubar Das of Jharkhand has been trying to polarise the adivasi population on communal lines; Sarana versus Christian tribals. In this bid he has also made a serious allegation of conversion of the Sarna and Hindu adivasis by the Christian missionaries.

BJP president and Rajya Sabha member Amit Shah may be absolutely right on his assessment that demonetisation has forced black money into formal economy even as RBI’s annual report said that 99 per cent of scrapped currency after the demonetisation were deposited with banks. Shah had recently told businessmen at a special FICCI session in Delhi that the formal economy would now grow and black money would be scrutinised and taxed. However, the BJP president’s predictions about both the economic growth and tracing and taxing black money depositors are yet to come true, even ten months after demonetisation. In fact, the economic growth is limping at around 5.7 per cent. Massive imports in the last five months, largely from China, are further choking the growth and swelling India’s current account deficit (CAD). At such a slow growth rate, the country would lose nearly $500 billion (Rs. 35 trillion) in terms of actual GDP, if compared to the earlier projected growth rate of over 7.6 per cent, this year.