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It was a scheduled high profile visit to the United States that never happened for the late Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri soon after the Tashkent summit. Although it was planned twice within his brief tenure, it was not destined to be. The first was planned for June 1965 one year after Shastri took over as Prime Minister but the US President Lyndon Johnson postponed it to the disappointment of Shastri. The second time was planned for January 31 to February 5, 1966. Had Shastri lived, he would have made his first visit to the US as a triumphant leader after the Tashkent summit after signing the agreement on January 10, 1966 between him and Pakistan President Ayub Khan.

LONDON: European Union has been facing the worst refugee crisis since the Second World War. The situation has deteriorated to such an extent that while the German chancellor Angela Markel has cautioned that the European Union could be forced to bring back border controls, the demographic character of Britain will undergo a major change with the population likely to soar by 21 million due to rise in migrant influx.

LUCKNOW: In order to achieve mission 2017 to grab power in UP, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) has gone back to its basics by restarting the cadre-building programme.

BHOPAL: The Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan has taken several steps for the empowerment of girls and women. In the series of such steps, the government has decided to grant an add-on 730-day childcare leave to women employees in their entire service career.

In a recent interview to a news agency, the market regulator- the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) Chief Mr. U.K. Sinha said that stock market returns are three-times more than gold and that a greater share of household savings has begun coming into the equity market. His gratuitous comments on the benefits of equities betray a conflict of interest on the part of the regulator. As a neutral umpire, the SEBI chief is putatively presiding over the stock market players to ensure that rules of the games are not broken and that the odious instances of insider trading to benefit by stock prices rally are thwarted. But he is not in the game of promoting equity culture as his role is purely an arbiter of the conduct of market forces—deviant or errant.

With Ranil Vickremesinghe as prime minister, president Maithripala Sirisena has become much freer now to pursue his policy of reconciliation with the ethnic Tamils. He assured a US delegation led by the Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs that he would give priority to probe the alleged war crimes and human rights violations during the last stage of the civil war against the LTTE (against Tamil civilians) through an ‘independent domestic mechanism.’ Earlier, on the sixth anniversary of the Sri Lankan army’s victory over the LTTE, he reiterated his commitment to establish the truth of what had actually happened during those days because the facts needed to be established and justice delivered.

However laudable may be Union Minister Maneka Ghandi’s bid to restrict consumption of fast food and drinks by school children, it would be a futile exercise to achieve the objective by merely banning their sale in and around schools in India. If the United States, the world’s original and largest promoter of fast food and fizzy drinks, could do little to change the eating and drinking habits of its children despite voluntary measures by some institutions to ban their campus sale, there is no reason to believe that an official dictat in India to this effect will succeed. Instead, a strong and sustained campaign against the ill effects of such consumption by children to influence the mind of parents as well as children may help.

Keeping his majoritarian assertiveness intact, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has retreated on land acquisition law, under political compulsions, in order to ensure a 'farmer-friendly' image for himself. It is a confession of his government's botched moves to promote a law with inadequate farmer safeguards, by a series of ordinances, in the face of country-wide resistance.

Situations never remain static. Politics and governance are no exceptions. The latest example is Haryana. Although ten months are too short a period to pass any judgement on the functioning of Manohar Lal Khttar-led BJP government which assumed power in October 2014, yet signs of slippages in its functioning as also in the ruling party’s politics have started becoming discernible.

The Patel community in Gujarat is powerful—both economically and politically. It is also quite affluent. One wonders why it needs reservation and shares in jobs, meant for backward sections. The ongoing agitation has brought Gujarat to a grinding halt and took a toll of ten innocent lives. The command of the agitation is in the hands of 22-year-old Hardik Patel. He says “our people don’t get jobs despite scoring 80-90 per cent marks, so they are forced to do their own business because of this reservation system. Jobs are cornered by those from reserved category”. His objective is to work to change the politics and system in the country.