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Lok Sabha election is meant to choose a Government for the centre, but in Bihar its result is also going to decide the future of the present Nitish Kumar government. JD(U) has suffered humiliating defeat and his moral authority to rule the government has significantly eroded. His party has succeeded in the last Assembly election in company of BJP and now it has emerged that he was not instrumental in helping BJP candidates win the poll, but BJP had helped his Dal win 115 seats in Bihar. Nitish had left NDA protesting the projection of Modi as its PM candidate alleging that under his leadership NDA will lose the election. Nitish as NDA leader always opposed an election campaign of Modi in Bihar saying that it might weaken the alliance. Now Nitish has failed in all accounts. BJP and its allies won handsomely because of Modi and his JD(U) lost because of his opposition to Modi.

The Modi Miracle has worked convincingly to turn the irresistible national mood for change in BJP’s favour, giving his party and its allies, an overwhelming majority in the 16th Lok Sabha, which could provide a strong and stable government at the Centre.

Foreign investors and their capital, which the soon-to-be-installed Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) need in large number and quantity to lift the country’s sagging business morale, are most likely to call shots in shaping the government’s new economic policy even at the prospect of junking some of the key commitments BJP made in its pre-election economic manifesto. These investors have put in over $ 30 billion in the market in the last four months to create a feel-good atmosphere around BJP’s prime ministerial candidate. It is only natural that they would like him to reciprocate.

The BJP’s success marks a sea-change in Indian politics for more than one reason. For the party itself, it has now acquired a responsibility at the national level which he had never done before, not even in Atal Behari Vajpayee’s time when it was a part of a 25-member coalition. Moreover, it predictably fell apart when a familiar trait of the party’s functioning – its anti-minority outlook – came to the fore during the 2002 Gujarat riots.

The chief minister of Gujarat and Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi, speaking at a rally in West Bengal on 27th April, made public his resolve to deport Bangladeshis from India. It is an old BJP charge that most political forces in West Bengal have tried to get Muslim votes by nurturing illegal Muslim migrants from Bangladesh, by getting them government documents to regularise their illegal status. The unsubstantiated underside of this charge is that the West Bengali Muslims look favourably at this development and do not mind this increase in the number of their co-religionists. At the alarmist end of this claim is that West Bengal is staring at an inevitable demographic reversal where Bengali Hindus will soon lose their majority, thus losing their only safe haven (though victims of the 1971 Marichjhapi massacre would say otherwise). That modern yearning for a united Hindu vote (just like monolithic Hinduism) remains unfulfilled. The BJP thinks that in West Bengal’s multi-cornered fight, a renewed push at the consolidation of some Hindu votes might reap some dividends.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Coming events, the saying goes, cast their shadows. The Kerala Congress (M), an important ally of the Congress in the United Democratic Front (UDF) Government in the State, has delivered a clear message to the latter, which cannot but cause utmost concern to that party.

Lawmakers, lawmen and law keepers may disagree; law in India rarely takes a predictable course. Very often, law, which is also regarded as ‘blind’, follows an unknown, or even mysterious and contradictory course, depending upon the profile of the person facing it. If the person is of a prime minister’s status, or that of a chief minister belonging to the party ruling the centre, a super rich like the Ambanis, film megastar of Salman Khan’s repute or Saif Ali Khan’s image, alleged political killers or communal riot engineers such as Sajjan Kumar and Jagdish Tytler and hi-profile land scam suspect Robert Vadra, law is most likely to miss its normal course. Law has been unsuccessfully chasing BJP’s prime ministerial aspirant Narendra Modi, socially stigmatized for 2002 Gujarat communal riot, through a long labyrinthine course like a black adder in the African jungle for the last 12 years, much to the chagrin of the vocal section of the public and media.

The world is anxiously awaiting the results of the 16th general elections in India, the largest democracy and one of the emerging economy. Apart from several power centres in the multi-polar geo-politics, countries which are eager to learn from the experiences of Indian democracy are patiently waiting for the outcome on May16.

LUCKNOW: The 16th Lok Sabha results are all set to change the future course of politics in Uttar Pradesh in general and Samajwadi Party government in the state led by chief minister Akhilesh Yadav in particular.

Once the final tally is counted and the formation of the new government gets under way in the ensuing couple of days, the inescapable priority duly exercising the concerns of the next government must be the choice of the man or woman who will don the mantle of the finance portfolio. The next Finance Minister has the onerous task to steer the economy and lift it from the swamp of slowdown it had sunk into. That the UPA government in its two tenures of close to a decade with two experienced finance ministers Messer Chidambaram and Pranab Mukherjee had messed up the management of the economy was nothing unknown to anyone as the Aam Aadmi in whose name the UPA coalition governed the country had to bear the brunt of relentless rise in prices of even essential items.