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Having said before the elections that Narendra Modi was not the right person to be prime minister, Amartya Sen’s recent acceptance of the Gujarat strong man’s right to govern, “and govern well”, before an Asia House audience in London was more gracious than Sonia Gandhi’s initial reluctance to personally congratulate Modi.

KOLKATA: It is not often that one sympathises with local vigilante initiatives, even if the objective is to ensure the ends of justice, sometimes in a rough and ready manner.

A budget document is an economic expression of a government’s political will. Speculations about the theme and contents of the Narendra Modi government’s 2014-15 budget started even before BJP launched its nation-wide Lok Sabha poll campaign. The announcement of Narendra Modi’s name as the party’s prime ministerial candidate did the trick. The global investment banker, Goldman Sachs, was the first to speculate on the possibility of a Modi-led BJP government to unseat the non-performing, policy-paralysed and scam labeled Congress-led UPA.

While the rest of the country universally condemned Trinamool Congress (TMC) MP Tapas Pal’s brutally vulgar 'speeches', inciting people to rape women and kill all political opponents, a brief query appearing in the running scroll of a national English TV channel , encapsulated the agony of West Bengal : it went, 'Can West Bengal sink any lower?'

Congress is down but not out. In the past too, when people were saying the Congress has gone forever, the party revived. In 1977, following the Emergency, the Congress was completely routed in north India, even formidable Indira Gandhi was defeated on her home turf – Rae Bareili – by buffoon looking Raj Narain. Down South – Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka – stood by Mrs. Gandhi like a rock and she made an astonishing recover in 1980 mid - term poll.

New Delhi: The country has not learnt lessons in crisis management from the hijack of Indian airlines to Kandahar and intermittent attacks on Indian establishments in Afghanistan. The unpreparedness of Indian government to meet such emergency has made it difficult to bail out its nationals trapped in conflict-torn Iraq.

Mr. Narendra Modi’s hobnob with China is not sudden and new. His relation with China was established well before he became Prime Minister. As Chief Minister of Gujarat, he first visited China in November 2011. His attempt for special relationship with Japan churned after he visited China. His first visit to Japan was in November 2012. He visited China four times and Japan only once before he became the Prime Minster. If the number of visits is any indication for leg up in the relation, China is ahead of Japan. In both the cases, Modi’s priority was to attract foreign investment in Gujarat.

The Congress party is facing a crisis of leadership. While the murmurs after the humiliating defeat in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls began soon after, it has not died down as is seen from statements coming from senior leaders like A K Antony or Digvijaya Singh. There are others who express their dismay privately. The party simply cannot brush aside them, as there is weight in what they say.

The new Union government seems hell-bent on Hindi-fying the regime and its activities. The original party of the upper Gangetic plain bazaar class is back at doing what Hindiwallahs used to do regularly before Tamils showed them some serious spine. The Union government’s insistence of Hindi promotion by any means necessary and other unnecessary means. At this juncture, one must again question the relationship between people, power and language in a multi-national state like the Indian Union. And if that state wants to be humane and representative, what should its language policy look like?

The telecommunication explosion in India can make or break this country. It can make the country and set it to a double-digit growth path, which looks difficult though not impossible, if it can still build a strong globally competitive equipment manufacturing base within three to four years to support the demand explosion. It can break the national economy if the country fails to live up to the challenge and continues to depend on imports, a dangerous practice that the country has been following ever since the sector was liberalized in the mid-1990s and Modi-Telstra (now Vodafone after several changes of hands) chose Kolkata to launch the country’s first mobile telephone service on July 31, 1994, with West Bengal’s late Marxist chief minister Jyoti Basu having the privilege of making the first call.