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Britain’s most reliable and important bilateral relationship has been with America. The US administration cannot think of an EU without the UK. Obviously close aides of US president, Barack Obama, and think-tanks of USA ruling establishment, have initiated a serious exercise to get the political establishment of UK to persuade the Britons to rescind Brexit. This task has assumed importance as Obama wants to burnish his legacy before his presidency ends in January 2017.

New tensions have emerged in relations between the ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) at the Centre and the Trinamool Congress (TMC) in West Bengal.

It is not the compulsion of the politics of the social justice that forced image conscious Bihar chief minister, Nitish Kumar, to announce capital punishment for those engaged in sale and manufacture of illicit liquor and stiff penalties in case of deaths of consumers or grievous injury. Nor was it about mustering courage to snub his senior partner, the RJD supremo Lalu Prasad, on his suggestion to climb down on the prohibition issue at a Grand Alliance meeting.

Never before passenger amenities on Indian Railways were so bad as presently. The NDA Government in its over enthusiasm to bring massive investments (loans) for bullet trains, semi high-speed trains and high speed corridors, has neglected passenger amenities in punctuality, cleanliness, bed rolls for air conditioned classes, catering services, serving unhygienic, substandard and under weight foods, dependence on private food mafia, provision of used bed rolls in repackaged and sealed cover to camouflage gullible rail users that such bed linens are freshly washed. Rampant sales of unhygienic and beautifully packaged spurious bottled water in total connivance and collusion of officials from top to bottom by not allowing sales of railways own produced hygienically packaged pure bottled drinking water.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The simmering crisis in the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) has deepened with prominent UDF constituent, Kerala Congress(Mani), deciding, in principle, to sit as a separate block in the State Assembly.

So Hillary is all poised to enter 1600, Pennsylvania Avenue after her presidential nomination from the Democrats this week. The million-dollar question is how close is she on winning the presidency? The Clinton supporters not only in the US but also elsewhere including India think that it is already in her bag.

The diversity of Indian civilisation is under attack. First, it was religious polarization which often sparked communal violence. Now the effort is to deepen the divide in the country’s already caste-ridden Hindu society. Under the cover of protecting “holy cow”, the Sangh Parivar’s self-proclaimed protagonists of India’s unity and integrity are trying to destroy the multi-faceted plurality of the Indian society.

Maybe at last, Prime Minister Modi himself and his senior colleagues realise that neither growth nor jobs could materialise, as was hoped to be conjured up while making wild promises on development to the electorate in 2014. And so, the “incremental” changes as at present will not do with so much of unfulfilled expectations.

Now that the Marxian prediction of a crisis of capitalism is unlikely in the foreseeable future, several comrades are trying to come to terms with the imperatives of the present.

After spending nearly 16 long years to construct and pass a constitution amendment bill facilitating goods and services tax (GST) since Atal Behari Vajpayee initiated the move in 2000 by setting up a committee under West Bengal’s then Finance Minister Asim Dasgupta, an economist, to design a model for GST and oversee its preparations, state governments are yet to be fully convinced about the way the centre would respond to their revenue claims once the bill is passed by Parliament and become a law in due course on successful completion of the remaining formalities, including required clearance by state legislatures, for the Constitution amendment. The subject has been deliberated upon by four national governments, both inside and outside Parliament. Leading the current concerns of the states on the tax disbursal mechanism is West Bengal’s present Finance Minister, Amit Mitra, an eminent economist who is also well versed in taxation laws and practices as a former director general of the Federation of Indian Commerce and Industry. Mitra is now the chairman of the Empowered Committee of State Finance Ministers.