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After the completion of the Assembly elections to five states, the focus has already shifted to the next Lok Sabha polls, which are just a few months away. Not only are the fortunes of incumbent chief ministers and prime ministerial candidates of the two national parties are at stake, but also the results could influence the morale of the UPA and the NDA in the national scene before the big fight.

A very few global gathering attracts glitz and glamour as the ministerial conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO), normally scheduled every two years but which subsequently got off tangent after the Hong Kong Ministerial ended in fiasco in 2005 and its predecessor Cancun (Mexico) in 2003.

BHOPAL: 8 December, when the counting of votes for the assembly elections will take place and the fate of the state government decided, is less than a week away. Meanwhile, more skeletons have tumbled out from the closet of the BJP government in Madhya Pradesh.

It was billed as an exercise aimed at ridding the CPI(M) of ideological deviations and organizational infirmities. Post-plenum, the party would emerge stronger, cleansed of ‘neo-liberal vices’ of the cadres, trumpeted the party leaders. The plenum, held at Palakkad from November 27 to 29, had won grudging admiration from even political rivals.

New Delhi: India will assist Turkmenistan to build infrastructure for supply of pipeline gas in the Ashgabat city.

Pride of political and economic supremacy dominates the spirit of the developed or industrialized countries. Driven by this selfish interest for maintaining hegemony they have been successful in derailing multilateral development agendas, be it the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) or the Doha Development Agenda at WTO negotiations. The developing countries, on the other hand, have come forward to bail out the developed countries in their hour of crisis even though they were deeply impacted by their ill doings like the collapse of Lehman Brothers in US in August-September 2008 leading to global financial crisis which was aggravated by the Sovereign Debt Crisis in the Euro zone and Fukushima disaster in Japan.

New Delhi: Indian Navy hopes that the sunken submarine Sindhurakshak will once again be made operational.

India has higher stakes at the ongoing WTO Ministerial Conference at Bali (Dec 3-6) to safeguard its current system of support to farmers to be able to unroll the Food Security Act, whose implementation ahead of the 2014 elections has been mandated by the party’s supreme command. To fight a grim electoral battle ahead, food security with enlarged support to farmers and cheaper grain to a wider mass of people is a major plank in the Congress-led UPA’s poll strategy.

The Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress has emerged triumphant in the just-held municipal elections in West Bengal, and reduced the Left Front to insignificance. The TMC’s victory run, from the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, the 2011 Assembly elections and rural panchayat polls last July, has established it as Bengal’s pre-eminent party, ahead of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM).

Irrespective of whether Narendra Modi wins or loses, he must be given credit for having been able to emerge from the blind lane in which he found himself after the 2002 riots.