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Even as the poll scene in Tamil Nadu is picking up, there is an interesting filmy tinge in the poll campaign. There are clashes between two top matinee idols – film star turned politician Captain Vijayakant and Tamil superstar Rajnikant. Both have their fan clubs and huge fan followings. Affectionately called Captain by his fans after his blockbuster film Captain Prabhakaran, Vijayakant has the largest fan base in the state. He is also the most sought after politician by the opposition parties.

BHOPAL: On April 14, several political parties and social organisations were vying with each other in paying tributes to Dr. B.R. Ambedkar but nobody paid attention to the people for whose empowerment he spent his life. On the very day Prime Minister Narendra Modi was in Madhya Pradesh to bow his head before the statue of Ambedkar, Dalit women in a village were denied access to drinking water by the upper caste musclemen.

With the domestic authorities from the tax department to enforcement directorate girding up their loins to catch hold of tax evaders in their cocooned havens in the wake of the disclosure of celebrity Indians parking their funds in such opaque tax regimes, the outcome may not match the official missionary zeal. At the just concluded IMF-Fund bank meeting in Washington, the OECD Secretary General’s Report to G-20 Finance Ministers on update on tax transparency makes a dim and grim reading. The report concedes that the use of secrecy to evade taxes as well as to undertake other financial crimes continues to hurt global communities.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The return, after a decade, of veteran leader P.P. Mukundan, to the BJP, is set to sharpen the factional feud plaguing the party’s Kerala unit.

Politics usually turns volatile in pre-election times. With assembly elections less than a year away, this is also happening in Punjab with its politics having started witnessing diametrically opposite trends.

The next summit of Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) at Tashkent in Uzbekistan on June 23 and 24, will be the first one with the full membership of India and Pakistan. The summit is crucial in presenting a joint approach to the issue of regional security and to defeat any attempts by the rich nations led by the USA to divide the SCO members and impose roadblocks on the way of fostering energy security by the SCO member countries. The CIS members of the SCO as also China and Russia as the original founding members have the responsibility to steer the SCO to the right direction so that SCO can really emerge as a major grouping for ensuring security in the region and fostering economic collaboration at a faster pace so that the energy resources of the SCO members, especially in the Central Asian region, are developed taking into account te best interests of the members.

Narendra Modi once cautioned the judiciary against being influenced by “five-star activists”. Evidence of such perception-driven considerations beyond the ambit of law and logic can be discerned in the Bombay high court’s directive to keep out some of the IPL cricket matches from Maharashtra in view of the water scarcity in the state.

It must be unnerving for any country continuously coping up with a belligerent neighbour that makes military bonhomie with the world’s top three super military powers on its soil. It must be equally uncomfortable for a country, itself aspiring to be a global economic powerhouse, getting practically surrounded by the world’s third largest military superpower and second biggest economy to disturb its growth focus. India may be the lone example of such a country anywhere in the world. India, the world's ninth largest economy in dollar term, has lately broken the global slowdown trend to maintain a seven per cent plus GDP growth. But, it is faced with both external and internal challenges to growth and economic stability. Being a multi-party democracy with several regional power centres having constant political tug-of-war with the national government, the country’s administrative and intellectual energies are being spent more on managing internal political frictions than to pursue more effective external diplomacy to build some strong trusted friends among leaders in the international community.

A new dawn broke over Myanmar democracy after five decades of military rule. On March 30, for the first time in 50 years, Myanmar saw a civilian President and an elected civilian government together, when Mr U Htin Kyaw took over the Presidentship of Myanmar. In November 2015, NLD (National League of Democracy), led by Aung San Suu Kyi, the general election in Myanmar with massive victory, overthrowing the military government.

Renaming cities is nothing new in India; some were relevant and some irrelevant; some names were changed for political convenience. A number of places whose names were misspelled or mispronounced during the British Raj have been changed after Independence. For example Cawnpore, as Englishmen pronounced it, was changed to Kanpur. Regional and linguistics identity and people’s aspirations were some of the common reasons that governments have cited to justify to change the name of places.