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The Congress party is facing a crisis of leadership. While the murmurs after the humiliating defeat in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls began soon after, it has not died down as is seen from statements coming from senior leaders like A K Antony or Digvijaya Singh. There are others who express their dismay privately. The party simply cannot brush aside them, as there is weight in what they say.

The new Union government seems hell-bent on Hindi-fying the regime and its activities. The original party of the upper Gangetic plain bazaar class is back at doing what Hindiwallahs used to do regularly before Tamils showed them some serious spine. The Union government’s insistence of Hindi promotion by any means necessary and other unnecessary means. At this juncture, one must again question the relationship between people, power and language in a multi-national state like the Indian Union. And if that state wants to be humane and representative, what should its language policy look like?

The telecommunication explosion in India can make or break this country. It can make the country and set it to a double-digit growth path, which looks difficult though not impossible, if it can still build a strong globally competitive equipment manufacturing base within three to four years to support the demand explosion. It can break the national economy if the country fails to live up to the challenge and continues to depend on imports, a dangerous practice that the country has been following ever since the sector was liberalized in the mid-1990s and Modi-Telstra (now Vodafone after several changes of hands) chose Kolkata to launch the country’s first mobile telephone service on July 31, 1994, with West Bengal’s late Marxist chief minister Jyoti Basu having the privilege of making the first call.

With the outgoing Minister of Information and Broadcasting Manish Tewary in the UPA Government having broken ice over the irrelevance of the Ministry of I & B in the current media scenario, his successor Prakash Javadekar in the Narendra Modi Government having endorsed that, rumour is rife in the corridors of power that this Ministry would be dismantled. The private media, both print and electronic, are gung-ho, lapped it as an opportunity for giving effect to the ruling NDA Government’s professed policy for minimum government and maximum governance, and a prop up of the much touted so called self-regulated regime of private media.

After President Pranab Mukherjee’s address to Parliament on behalf of the new government, many people seem to have convinced themselves that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is committed to adopting a “moderate”, rather than hardline Hindutva, stance; some like Congress MP Shashi Tharoor predict that he’ll inevitably evolve into an altogether new person: a liberal “Modi 2.0” who believes in inclusion and reaching out to his opponents.

If the fiscal stimulus put in place by emerging economies such as India and China in the aftermath of the world’s worst financial crisis of 2008 cost them dear in terms of high fiscal deficit and slowdown in growth, the accommodative monetary policy of advanced countries continues to exert a disruptive and disproportionate spillover effect across the globe. More particularly so, in emerging economies such as India which has had to contend with the abrupt exit of institutional investments and speculative attacks on currency.

Former defence minister A.K. Antony is not the right person for analyzing the causes of the Congress’s defeat. For one, his proximity to the Nehru-Gandhi family cannot but limit his perspective, making him overlook the baneful effect of the party’s feudal ambience on its electoral appeal. For another, as a left-leaning person, he will tend to approve of the family’s populism even if groups in the Congress, albeit small ones, may have differed since profligate measures distort the balance sheet.

NEW DELHI: For over 300 Indian passengers of the AI-102 flight from New York to Delhi at noon of Saturday, 14 June, life was placid until they boarded the carrier.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Kerala Pradesh Congress President, V. M. Sudheeran is a happy man these days. Well, he has every reason to feel good. The reason: his vigorous campaign for an anti-liquor movement in the state, has just received a huge boost with senior Cngress leader from Kerala and former defence minister A. K. Antony extending full support for it.

Return of political stability with a single party dominance at the Centre does not automatically translate into unlimited power for the new government to make early breakthroughs in fulfilling the great expectations BJP had generated in its vociferous vote-seeking campaign. These are still early days of the new Government’s learning curve in the art of policy-making, picking out options relatively feasible for a start.