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KOLKATA; In Bengal, the Trinamool Congress (TMC) signalled its intent to achieve national party status in September 2012, by quitting the UPA II Ministry over petrol price rise. Soon, it broke off its state alliance with the Congress. It fought the Panchayat, and Lok Sabha polls successfully on its own, amidst complaints of widespread rigging and intimidation by all opposition parties.

Uncomfortably, for the Modi Government, despite full command of power at the national level and BJP’s majoritarianism, the first 100 days have fallen short of expectations, at national or global levels, of an economic resurgence or of promise of 'change' of atmospherics towards greater transparency and accountability in governance.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: It is well and truly said that a week is a long time in politics. Hardly has a week passed since Chief Minister Oommen Chandy ‘cut KPCC president V. M. Sudheeran to size’, as his loyalists put it, in the excise policy issue, when a bolt from the blue has hit the Chief Minister in the form of a Vigilance court order in the Titanium corruption case.

With the exit of veterans, L K Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and ailing Atal Behari Vajpayee from the top policy making bodies of the BJP, hold of Narendra Modi and his protégé Amit Shah is complete over the organization. As Prime Minister Modi already holds sway over the government, there is no one to sound a note of dissent. Supporters of Modi and Shah call it a “generational shift”. The three leaders – Vajpayee, Advani and Joshi – were leading lights of the party for four decades as they built up the organization from a scratch to a ruling party at the centre with an absolute majority.

The Government of India in the Ministry of Home Affairs has set up eight specialized divisions of Ballistic, Chemistry, Explosives, Toxicology, Physics, Biology, Document and Speaker Identification/Tape Identification Unit, in its Central Forensic Science Laboratories. This is intended to promote the use of sophisticated technology in crime detection and investigation to meet the growing challenges of ever changing crime profile becoming subtle, swift, sophisticated and complicated by the day.

Some of us – either journalist Chandra Sekhar Bhattacharjee or lensman Bappaditya Bhattaharyya asked somewhat childishly, “Can you sing a few lines of one of your favourite songs Sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab hamaare dil mein”. She, at 90, sang out: and all three of us were dazed at the still-retaining melody and the rare grain of vocal throw That was Preeti Banerjee who was the first to have learnt the song, Sare Jahanse Achchha, after the lyric of the great Urdu poet Mohammad Iqbal was tuned into song by Pandit Ravi Sankar in 1946 at the Andheri commune of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), cultural front of the Communist Party of India. Pandit Ravi Shankar was then the music director of IPTA and was a recruit of the then general secretary of the CPI, P.C. Joshi.

In the beginning of the last decade, the Left front government of West Bengal felt the urge to do ‘industrialisation’ with an additional fervour and gusto. Sure, there was Chief Minister’s annual trip to London, sure there were those occasional government ceremonies with a gathering of a few local industrialists, sure the authority was going on putting up the show of being proactive and sincere about bringing investments, but the semblance was not up to the newly set standard of emerging middle-class. It did not take long for the wizened leadership of party to figure out that in spite of its lacklustre performance and its infamy, the urban middle-class scene of the state is rapidly changing thanks to the globalised economic model adapted by the centre. So in order to meet with the evolving urban populace and their aspiration, the party decided to be, or at least to seem, more dynamic in terms of embracing the new world order.

Just a week before the Modi government competes its 100 days, the by-election results have come as a jolt to the BJP. The saffron party, which witnessed a spectacular victory in the Lok Sabha polls, has faced a setback too soon. No doubt by- elections are fought and won mostly on local factors, but the results have certainly punctured the feel good factor of the BJP and given a ray of hope to the opposition.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The debate on the successor to Kerala CPI(M) secretary, Pinarayi Vijayan has gathered momentum now that it has become clear that Vijayan will step down.

Who is afraid of inflation? Not the country’s 350-million-strong urban middle class and upper income group. The fact that high prices are having little bearing on the urban demand or consumption patterns shows that inflation has little impact on the size and depth of their pockets. In fact, the pocket size seems to be deepening at a faster pace than the inflationary dig-in.