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LUCKNOW: Congress Party is facing a difficult task to find out a credible face who should not only help in revival of the party in Uttar Pradesh but also ensure good number of seats in 2017 assembly polls for the party to play active role in government formation.

Why the rest of the world sneezes when China catches cold is no longer a conundrum as events in the first few weeks of 2016 conclusively demonstrated that are manifest in the multiple woes of the world economy in general and crude oil price plunge in particular. Even as coal accounts for about 70 per cent of aggregate Chinese energy consumption, Prof. Stephen Roach of the Yale University believes that the Middle Kingdom’s “role in driving world oil demand is also crucial”. He estimated that in the decade ending 2014, growth in Chinese consumption accounted for 48 per cent of the total growth in global oil demand”. As such, it is small wonder that Chinese reduced consumption of oil, after such a headlong and hectic high economic growth spread over three decades, explains much of the recent collapse in crude prices.

The 51-year-old BJP chief Amit Shah is all set to get a second term. The party’s parent organisation RSS also seems to have given the nod and the announcement is expected very soon as Amit Shah completes his present term on January 23. His new term ends in January 2019, the year of the next Lok Sabha polls.

BHOPAL: Series of communal incidents in Madhya Pradesh have become a major cause of concern both for the government and society. Communal elements are planning to disturb peace and harmony at Dhar town, where Bhojshala is located.

KOLKATA: As broad sections of opinion within the CPI(M) and the Congress talk about a possible alignment in West Bengal against the ruling Trinamool Congress, the pre-poll situation in the state gets more confusing, if not murkier.

There is much enthusiasm in the country to see French troops march down Rajpath along with Indian contingent on the country’s 67th Republic Day when President Francois Hollande will be the chief guest on the occasion. This will be the first time that a contingent from a foreign country would be participating in the march past on the day the country adopted the Constitution in 1950.

A class of small traders rush from fair to fair, some connected with special pilgrims and others to special days in a year, often with trinkets for household utility wares to earn their living. Rahul Gandhi, the Congress vice president seems to have adopted the technique and keeps rushing from incident to incident, nature inflicted or manmade, with very little to give except empty words of sympathies to victims and mostly to lay the blame at door steps of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He is accompanied by a large posse of young in company, who depend largely on seeking use of their visiting card for politics than on real action. He has nothing to offer as his party is politically bankrupt and organizationally a boneless hulk. As a person with high ambitions to be a national politician, he does not display on his sleeves a national solution for anyone problem, cause of catastrophes.

Global markets turned volatile from the start of the New Year and world growth, which slowed down to 2.5 per cent (market-based exchange rate), in 2015 faces more challenges and uncertainty in 2016 which would make it a 'bumpy ride' for emerging and developing world. India market is already down to the pre-Modi levels.

It was December 30 2015 when I had started writing this piece. Then Pathankot incident involving an armed attack on an Indian Air Force base happened. I am not a brave man. I thought, should I write this, now, when tricolour steroids are the hottest media-item of the week? But it's also true that barely a week ago, on December 27 2015, two Indian Border Security Force (BSF) jawans allegedly gang-raped a child after a third Indian Army jawan forced her to drink alcohol on the Howrah-Amritsar Express inside their “specially reserved” Army compartment. In the same week, in brown people's social media, some American celebrity's sexual crimes evoked greater outrage. There was no whimper of protest in Delhi – the city where the BSF and the Indian Army are head-quartered. I guess the victim was just Bengal's daughter and not India's and she had the added misfortune of having Khaki-clad brave men allegedly committing the crime. Allegedly. It's a word that many drop when talking about other rapists but never about these guys, not now. What is it about the ideologies and holy cows that are fed to us that the we think that the ejaculate of the rapists have a tricolour hue and hence worthy of respect and a conspiracy of silence? Hence, it is precisely now that we must speak up. If not now, when?

Jharkhand has been in the grip of severe water crisis for more than ten years but the ruling elites and the political executives instead of finding out the real reason have been resorting to one common rhetoric: that the situation can be salvaged by resorting to the water conservation. May be on their own way they are politically correct but one thing is clearly manifest that these people utterly lack the vision and desire to overcome the crisis.