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Militant-nationalist euphoria is invariably conjured up whenever India conducts a seemingly sophisticated scientific experiment or makes lethal bombs, missiles or submarines. India’s entry into a supposedly ‘select’ or ‘exclusive’ high-technology ‘club’ is uncritically celebrated, although the club’s members are willing to rain mass death upon innocent civilians—as are all nuclear weapons-states—or seek a fig leaf of legitimacy to cover up heinous crimes against their own citizens.

Had Congress been a normal political party in the sense that it wasn’t so dependent on the Nehru-Gandhi family, then it would have been expected to engage in an extensive search for the next possible prime minister before the general election.

New Delhi: Australia is sure about concluding an agreement for sale of uranium to India to meet the needs of its nuclear power project. It has decided to support for India’s membership of the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group (NSG).

New Delhi: India has assured Afghanistan that its help and assistance would continue. The $2 billion line of credit (LoC) for development projects was just the beginning of a process to reach out to the provinces and districts as the Afghan people move ahead in re-building their nation.

Finance Minister P. Chidambaram has stated that new bank licences will be given only after taking into consideration the innovative models that the promoters submit. That is, new banks should not be just exact copies of existing banks but they should be something different. That easier said than done. After all, basic banking is all-same and if some new banks crop up they would try to do the same basic banking activities which have proved to be profitable to the existing ones.

BHOPAL: Madhya Pradesh, which goes to polls on November 25, to elect its fifteenth Assembly, has an essentially bi-polar polity. Besides Congress and the BJP, there is no other party which has any significant role to play in the state. The Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party have been trying for quite some time now to make inroads into MP from the neighbouring Uttar Pradesh but their efforts have met with little success. Neither is the Left a force to reckon with in the state. MP, along with Rajasthan, is the only state in the Hindi belt and one of the few in the country, that does not have a regional political outfit of its own.

Laudable efforts are on by RBI Governor Dr. Raghuram Rajan and Finance Minister Mr P. Chidambaram, judging by their parallel utterances to shore up the rupee and “preserve the value of the currency” - the objective of the former for his monetary policy - and both of them doing more to bolster inflows to keep down current account deficit through 2013-14.

The Union Environment Ministry’s decision to ban development activities, including mining and quarrying in the 60,000-sq km ecologically sensitive areas of Western Ghats, has touched off a wave of anger in the State.

It is often argued that reform of political funding is key, perhaps, most significant part of fighting the menace of corruption. As long as parties do not disclose their sources of income and how that money is spent, political corruption will continue to breed corruption within the wider polity.

New Delhi: The US-based Forbes magazine has named three Overseas Indians among Africa’s 50 richest.