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BHOPAL: Former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister and the senior-most Minister in the Shivraj Singh government, Babulal Gaur, is into his tenth consecutive electoral battle from the Govindpura Assembly constituency in Bhopal. Defeat does not figure in the lexicon of the 84-year-old Gaur, who has, so far, fought nine elections and won all of them – and that too without a break. A record that could well be the envy of any politician.

The election season has brought to focus once again whether the political class wants cleaner elections. The answer is an emphatic no. It is because political parties need to wake up to the fact that people no longer have faith in them or even in the system. Vexed with non-governance, corruption, price rise and inflation people say they have had enough, and that is happening all across the country right now.

New Delhi: India and Vietnam signed as many as eight agreements including the one on new investments to be made by the Indian public sector ONGC Videsh Ltd (OVL) in oil and gas blocks in Vietnam for exploration, development and production. Petro Vietnam is also invited to participate in open blocks in India and in joint ventures in third countries.

New Delhi: India is taking the initiative in encouraging the culture of business competition in emerging economies by hosting the 3rd BRICS International Competition Conference.

India’s economic ills emerge too daunting, from the latest OECD Economic Outlook, with persisting high inflation, fiscal balance under challenge, external vulnerabilities from dependence on volatile debt-creating flows to finance current deficit adding to pressure on the rupee, and supply constraints restraining growth.

The abrupt exit of Mr. Yogesh Agarwal as the Chairman of the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA) in the middle of this month has come at an inappropriate time when the legislative imprimatur for the PFRDA Act was given in Parliament just a couple of months ago.

KOLKATA: The two major political formations in Bangladesh are taking each other head on. One is Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League led 14-party alliance. The other is former PM Begum Khaleda Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party-led 18-party alliance, which includes two rabidly communal parties – the Jamaat-e-Islami (JeL) and Hifazat-e-Islam (HeI).

A new trend has unfortunately emerged in national politics, particularly during the poll campaign, to bring to the focus country’s national leaders of repute and to derive mileage from their achievements. Good sense should prevail on the politicians of the day to recognize that these great leaders who sacrificed for the country, though they at one point of time belonged to a particular party, belong to the nation as a whole.

Militant-nationalist euphoria is invariably conjured up whenever India conducts a seemingly sophisticated scientific experiment or makes lethal bombs, missiles or submarines. India’s entry into a supposedly ‘select’ or ‘exclusive’ high-technology ‘club’ is uncritically celebrated, although the club’s members are willing to rain mass death upon innocent civilians—as are all nuclear weapons-states—or seek a fig leaf of legitimacy to cover up heinous crimes against their own citizens.

Had Congress been a normal political party in the sense that it wasn’t so dependent on the Nehru-Gandhi family, then it would have been expected to engage in an extensive search for the next possible prime minister before the general election.