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It is said that trouble never comes singly but comes in a row and the grand old party, the Indian National Congress, is presently experiencing this. Since 2014 when the party won just 44 seats in the Lok Sabha polls, (the lowest ever), the Congress has been sliding continuously except for a good showing in Bihar in 2015 and in Punjab in 2017. Now, after the blow by Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar by breaking the Bihar Mahagathbandhan last week and joining with the BJP, the Congress is facing trouble from its own stable in Gujarat as the party legislators are in a rebel mood. Six of them have already resigned and more are threatening to do so.

Nitish Kumar betrayed secularism, if not the secular forces, but in the process has gifted a young and dynamic secular face in the form of Tejashvi Yadav. The way he lambasted Nitish on the floor of the Bihar assembly, while speaking on the confidence motion put by the chief minister in favour of his government, made it abundantly clear that Nitish, Sushil Modi and Narendra Modi have erred in their political assessment of this young lad of 29 years.

The visit of National Security Adviser Ajit Doval to Beijing late last month and his interactions with the Chinese leaders including president Xi Jinping have brought out two facets of the reality. First, contrary to the extremely provocative and threatening language used by the official Chinese media against India about the stand-off at Doklam, the political leadership is not itching for a war with India. Secondly, a tacit, if nor a formal, understanding seems to have been reached that neither side will do anything to escalate the ground situation at Doklam.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will do a great service to the nation if he is able to put in place the National Financial Reporting Authority (NFRA) to rein in the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) for its perceived failure to enforce discipline. The prime minister is clearly upset with chartered accountants’ role in lack of corporate governance and financial misconduct of corrupt politicians, businessman and NGOs. While Companies Act 2013 provided for NFRA as a regulatory agency for audit, accounts and financial reporting, Section 132 of the law has remained on paper as the rules are yet to be notified. It seems some powerful, politically-connected ICAI members ICAI have been able to put the issue in cold storage for the last three years.

Despite a media frenzy of misrepresentation fuelled by the Tories, polling this week confirmed that only 17 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds interpreted Jeremy Corbyn’s comments to “deal with” historic student debt as promising a full write-off.

BHOPAL: Unless handled tactfully, the agitation launched by Narmada Bacho Andolan is threatening to take a violent turn. Hundreds of Andolan followers have begun an indefinite fast to protest against the forcible removal of 18,000 families from the area likely to be submerged in the Narmada water. These families are being removed without making satisfactory arrangement for their rehabilitation.

Nitish Kumar’s decision to resign as chief minister has dealt a severe blow to the Congress and the opposition parties that have been trying to cobble up a “Bihar type” mahagath bandhan (Grand Alliance) ahead of 2019 generation election. With Nitish Kumar’s exit, the idea of Grand Alliance at the national level is in complete disarray. Developments in Bihar indicate that individual political ambitions are difficult to contain in a front based on ideology, and that “anti-BJP-ism”, a phenomenon that marked the politics of 1990s, has now lost appeal.

PATNA: The advise by Aurangabad’s district magistrate to a villager (of Jamhor Tola) that he should sell his wife to raise money to build a toilet is a disgrace to the very institution of bureaucracy and to India as a whole. The district magistrate, Kanwal Tanuj, gave the most derogatory advise when Saukina Dom, belonging to a dalit community, expressed inability to build a toilet at home unless the government provided the money in advance. Saukina Domn had lost his wife due to a sudden illness nearly 20 years ago; so the district magistrate’s abhorrent remark was all the more insulting.

The Indian market made a historical day on Tuesday this week when Nifty touched the magic level of 10,000, driven by better earnings from blue-chips and strong liquidity. However, profit booking at higher levels pulled the market down to a mild correction, attributed to a psychological effect, muted Q1 results for midcaps and the forthcoming Fed monetary policy meet.

It was astonishing when the union health minister Shri J P Nadda said in an interview on a TV channel that the government will institute inquiry in to the exorbitant prices of drugs. It would be naive to believe that till date the government was ignorant about this. Knowing well the machinations by the private pharma companies the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) was established in 1995 to fix/revise the prices of controlled bulk drugs and formulations and to enforce prices and availability of medicines in the country, under the Drugs(Price Control) Order 1995.