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We have been celebrating January 26 as the Republic Day. The Constitution of India, which has come into existence on January 26, 1950 abolished the dominion status of India, rejected the British crown and declared India as a full-pledged Democratic Republic.

With less than a week to go before the Narendra Modi government presents its penultimate budget to Parliament on February 1 for the fiscal year 2017-18, the Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley appears to be satisfied with the finer details he has dovetailed into the budget when he posed for the traditional halwa ceremony! Now that the budget is prepared and is under print with more than a hundred officials from the North bloc cooped up in the Raisina Hill, there is no point in speculation as to what would be the contours and colors of this budget, considering the fact that the feisty Finance Minister has not had any memorable one in the past couple of years when he donned the role and responsibility of the ace man in the Finance Ministry. No doubt, the Modi government spared itself any ignominy of getting bogged down in corruption or scams even as it experimented with a great gambit of demonetising high value notes that had accounted for 85 per cent of the country’s notes in circulation and in an economy which is more than 90 per cent cash-driven.

Since the Narendra Modi government wears patriotism on its sleeves and recently threatened to shut down a TV channel for a day for its coverage of the terrorist attack on the Pathankot airbase, it had to take the Sri Lankan minister for mass media to call upon the media houses to stop promoting nationalism by saying that such news becomes “part of the conflict”.

India awaits the fourth budget of the Modi Government on February 1, against the backdrop of the disastrous demonetisation, growth decline, and heightened global risks and uncertainties. Fiscal 2018 is set to go through another difficult year in growth recovery toward a probable official projection of 7.5 per cent, after a three-year low in the current year.

After many months of “will they - wont they” suspense, the 130-year-old Congress party and the 25-year-old Samajwadi Party have sealed an alliance deal for the ensuing Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls. This is the first time that the two have come together. Now the Congress will be a junior partner in the alliance. The party, which had N D Tiwari as its last chief minister in 1989, had been languishing since then, unable to come back to power in Uttar Pradesh.

Ukraine continues to be key element of discord between Russia and USA despite the Russian president Vladimir Putin being happy at the victory of Donald Trump in the presidential election. While Trump is in favour of taking the bilateral relations with Russia to a better level, he also nurses ambivalent approach towards the role of the anti-Russian ultra-nationalists in Ukraine.

LUCKNOW: Samajwadi Party-Congress alliance has unnerved BSP supremo Mayawati who is banking on bulk of Muslim votes along with committed Dalit support base to get majority in the assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh.

The 2017-18 national budget to be presented in Parliament shortly before the process of assembly elections starts in five states, including heavyweight Uttar Pradesh, is most unlikely to be a soft or a populist one. The reasons are simple: the government can’t afford to be in a giving mode with its expenditure in the coming financial year set to go up by over Rs.2,50,000 crore to be close to the Rs. 23,00,000 crore mark. And, the government has to raise lots of additional resources to meet the income-expenditure gap. The sources of revenue are less elastic than one would wish. Things would have been much less difficult if the country’s GDP could show a 7.6 per cent growth — projected before demonetisation — for the current fiscal. The latest IMF estimates bring India’s GDP growth rate down harshly to 6.6 per cent. That would make the next financial year’s budget making hardly comfortable. Also, the latest centre-state compromise on somewhat truncated GST, which may come into effect earliest by July, 2017, will put a further pressure on the central government’s originally projected revenue aspiration on account of the new taxation system.

For a full week now, Tamil Nadu is in the grip of a mass upsurge in support of a call for revocation of the Supreme Court's 2014 ban on 'Jallikattu'- a traditional bull fight- a demand strongly backed by both Dravidian majors and smaller parties, including lately BJP, which is desperately seeking a strong foothold in the state.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Rashtiya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has firmed up its hold on the Kerala unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). That is the most significant outcome of the three-day conclave of the State BJP.