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Who will be the new CPI(M) general secretary when Prakash Karat steps down on completing his term? Will his successor be elected unanimously? Or will there be a contest? These are the questions exercising the minds of CPI(M) cadres and leaders alike.

It is the story of the biggest tax ‘slap’ on a bunch of foreign companies who had been supposedly wooed by the UPA government to invest in India in the fields of high-tech, capital-intensive and employment-generating telecommunications, information technology, mobile phone handset manufacturing, hydrocarbon exploration, etc. The companies were lured by the seemingly liberalized foreign investment regime of the Congress-led UPA government, headed by its economist prime minister Manmohan Singh. UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi’s most trusted prime minister left the charge of the important finance portfolio by turn with Palaniappan Chidambaram, a corporate law practitioner by profession, and temporarily with Pranab Mukherjee, a Congress veteran and a very successful finance minister under Mrs Indira Gandhi’s prime ministership in the early 1980s.

With a strong and stable new Government at the Centre following General Elections 2014, India’s counter terrorism measures are being strengthened to deal effectively with communalism, terrorism, left wing extremism (Maoism), insurgency and subversion. Multi-pronged steps including a relook at the existing law are afoot to tighten the internal security further for an assured peace and progress of the nation. The Government’s resolve to strengthen internal security, as pronounced in the President’s address to the joint session of both Houses of Parliament on June 9, 2014, would be ‘zero tolerance’ towards violence against women, communal strife, terrorism, subversion, insurgence and left-wing extremism. This is a repeat of what the Union Governments in the past have said.

Private sector investment in important sectors such as infrastructure, food security and climate change mitigation has seldom been on a desirable scale and scope in developing and emerging economies as they are classified as public goods to be taken care of by the Government. This thinking needs to be altered in the context of the ascendancy and sway of market forces for more than two decades in most of the world, though whether any re-thinking has taken place on this score remains a moot point. With country after country failing to fund capital-intensive public works encompassing physical and social infrastructure for want of resources, the private sector has also not galvanized itself to fill the gap as it has been finding the going tough in a milieu of meager returns on massive investments so laboriously and meticulously marshaled against inadequate flow of credit from formal banking channels.

New Delhi railway station’s escalators continue to remain shut for over a few months now. The reasons may be anything, from shoddy manufacturing to callous maintenance, but definitely it is a glaring case of bad governance. The station managers seem to be ignorant about the word quality.

Like nature, politics abhors a vacuum. It will be unrealistic to believe, therefore, that a majority in parliament ensures trouble-free governance. Even after the opposition has been comprehensively routed, as in the present case, the party in power can still face critics from its own ranks.

KOLKATA: The disastrous defeat of the Congress in the Lok Sabha elections along with its very poor performance in Assam has considerably weakened the ‘High Command’s` hold on the party. So much so, that it is unable to find an answer to a simple question: should Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi continue or quit? Frequent air-dashes to Delhi by the Gogoi loyalists and dissidents and their attempts at winning over the High Command to their respective points of view have not been able to resolve the Shakespearean dilemma: Gogoi to be or not to be the CM ?

Agriculture in India is ceasing to be a profitable enterprise. The most unfortunate part is the growing distress among the farmers, the giver of country's food security. The incidences of farmers' suicides remain high and previous governments had done little to wipe out farmers' woos.

A countrywide protest against the steep fare hike for passengers announced by the railways is a foretaste for the Modi Government of a rough ride ahead in bringing public finance under control, linked inevitably to more burdens that the forthcoming Union Budget is expected to unfold.

NDA Government appeared to be in a fix as to whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi should visit Japan before the BRICS summit and budget session. Never before the visit of any Indian Prime Minister to Japan was hyped as the visit of Mr Modi did. Mr Modi is known for his special preference for Japan for development. Media was hogged with the reports that Japan would be the first bilateral visit of Mr Modi and he would visit in the first week of July. The euphoria was buried when it was decided that he would visit after budget session.