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If and when Rahul Gandhi becomes the de jure Congress president from his present de facto status, as Jairam Ramesh wants, it will undoubtedly be the first instance of a proven failure in politics to rise to the top of his party on the basis of nothing else but lineage.

It is discomforting to note that India, home of 1.3 billion people, is suddenly faced with a domestic coal glut situation with an annual production of only a little over 600 million tonnes. On the contrary, China, having a population close to India’s, produced 3.68 billion tonnes of coal in 2015 and was crying hoarse that the output was 3.5 per cent lower than the previous year’s production. Coal accounts for 73 per cent of China’s electricity generation, nearly the same as India’s in percentage term. In a way, India’s current domestic coal glut is mainly on account of uncontrolled coal imports mostly by private sector power companies. This year’s pre-budget economic survey put the previous year’s coal import figure at over 212 million tonnes which was over 20 per cent of the country's production that year. India’s coal imports may be down this year, but they need to be curbed drastically to maintain the tempo of domestic production.

China has been a long term challenge for India. Politically, China has been a persistent threat on India’s borders and dampener to India’s relation with its neighbours. Economically, India has become a dumping ground of Chinese goods after the recession in the west and rise of free trade power in South East Asian countries.

The ongoing Rajya Sabha elections are crucial not only for the Congress but for the BJP also. It may change the complexion of the Upper House and bring some of the stalwarts. They include Congress leaders like P. Chidambaram and Kapil Sibal. The BJP has turned the Rajya Sabha elections in Uttar Pradesh into a contest, as it counters the Congress attempt to bring Sibal to the upper house. The saffron party has fielded Priti Mahapatra, who runs an NGO and is wife of a businessman called Harihar Mahapatra as the 12th candidate.

AIADMK supremo J Jayalalithaa might have won a historic battle reversing the yo-yo pattern of win by DMK and AIADMK, the two Dravidian parties, in assembly elections in southern state of Tamil Nadu since 1989. But one cannot undermine the performance of rising sun, the symbol of DMK. For the first time the election campaign was single handedly managed by the DMK superemo M Karunanidhi's rising son M K Stalin, who ensured the party, which touched its nadir in popularity after the 2G spectrum scam, was revived to become a major regional political force again in the state which has 39 Lok Sabha seats and 234 assembly seats.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be having substantial discussions with the United States President Barack Obama during his visit to Washington on June 7 and 8. This first bilateral visit by the Indian PM to the USA, will be an opportunity for the Indian side to review the progress made by the two governments in the areas of economy, energy, defence, environment and security. President Obama is in the last leg of his tenure with only less than eight months left .But he is becoming more assertive in his last year in office taking a number of bold and innovative decisions. Indian side is also expecting from the outgoing President a pro-active approach in imparting a strategic dimension to the India-US political and bilateral relations.

Ever since the “news broke” that all references to Indian Union's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had been omitted from the Class VIII textbooks of the Rajasthan state board curriculum, there has been a huge hue and cry. Syllabus content, especially those of non-science subjects, has always been a bone of contention where various political forces have wanted to introduce changes based on their conception of what students should know more of and more crucially, what students should know less of.

The excitement after the five state Assembly polls is slowly dying down after the newly elected chief ministers have taken oath. Mamata Banerjee (West Bengal) and Jayalalithaa (Tamil Nadu) have retained their fiefdom. The other three have become chief ministers for the first time. It will be an acid test for the new Assam chief minister Sabrananda Sonowal to perform. Kerala chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has to keep the Left flag flying. Similarly the Puducherry chief minister V. Narayanaswamy brings cheers to the Congress, which is almost in ICU.

Curiously, Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave the nation neither a cogent account of his Government’s two-year record of ‘vikas’, by way of outcomes toward the ‘achhe din’ he had promised in 2014, nor did he hold out any early promise of meeting job and such aspirations of the people who had voted for him.

THIRUVANTHAPURAM: Hardly a week in office, the Left Democratic Front (LDF) Government, which got off to a good start, has kicked up a controversy.