View Articles

The demand for a separate administrative entity for the Darjeeling hills has a long history. The Gorkha community has been looking for official recognition of its political identity ever since Hillman’s Association raised the demand for some form of self-rule for Darjeeling in 1907. The violent agitation for statehood in the 1980s, under the leadership of that the Gorkha National Liberation Front, had culminated in the formation of the semi-autonomous Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council. But starting in 2008, renewed demand for a separate Gorkhaland state by the Gorkha Janamukti Morcha (JGM), meant the hill council couldn’t continue in its given form and shape.

A fatigue against continuous hikes in interest rates appears to have already set in. Otherwise how could those who could benefit from interest hike have asked for a pause. Indian Banks’ Association (IBA) has asked the Reserve Bank governor, D. Subbarao, to take a pause and not raise interest rates following a review of monetary policy slated for July 26. With progressive interest hikes, credit growth has tapered off, while deposits are growing. Thus, the banks are getting saddled with interest liabilities without matching income.

KOLKATA: Slowly but surely the ground rules of politics have changed in West Bengal over the years.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The fragility of the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) Government was severely exposed when the Government came perilously close to being voted out of power on Wednesday.

Even before the ink settled down on the agreement paper creating the self-ruled Gorkhaland Territorial Administration (GTA) within the geographical map of the State of West Bengal, the Gorkha mutineer Bimal Gurung, who made it happen, assured members of the militant Gorkha Janamukti Morcha (GJM) that the Gorkhaland state would soon become a certainty. Union Home Minister P Chidambaram, a key contributor to the tripartite agreement along with West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, may now have little defence against those Andhra agitators demanding Telengana’s statehood. If only three sub-divisions of the Darjeeling district, having as small an adult population as just around half-a-million, is accorded the self-rule status, the centre has little moral and legal ground to prevent the division of Andhra Pradesh to create the Telengana state.

AICC General Secretary Digvijay Singh has made it a habit to make controversial statements on several issues, which sometimes embarrasses the party but ironically the party echoes his sentiments a few weeks after. This has happened not once but many times, showing the clout the leader enjoys with the Gandhis.

Suddenly, when it looked like roses all the way for the charismatic AIADMK supremo Jayalalithaa in her first two months in office, she gets a stern rebuff from the Madras High Court, on her calculated move to halt her predecessor’s Uniform System of School Education (USE), due for implementation from the 2011-12 academic year, under a 2010 enactment.

LUCKNOW: An emergency type situation has been created by the Chief Minister Mayawati in Uttar Pradesh by virtually disallowing the opposition parties to function properly and making herself inaccessible even to her BSP legislators and cadres, apart from public. Ever since, she took over the rein of the administration in May 2007, Mayawati has been ruling like a dictator and her style of functioning has been leading to demoralization and frustration among the cadres of the BSP.

It’s only very rarely that India’s higher judiciary intervenes to remind the executive of its duty to uphold Constitutional values and protect fundamental rights in national security matters. The courts have long been reluctant to tell the armed services and paramilitary forces to follow scrupulously legal methods in fighting separatist insurgencies in Kashmir and the Northeast.

Anna Hazare’s appeal to the Supreme Court to prevent the government from trying to stop his fast is one of the weirdest petitions which the judiciary may have heard. His apprehension that the government will intervene in his case as it had done to scuttle Baba Ramdev agitation may be justified. But what these unusual moves by the civil society activists show is that they are probably reaching a dead end where their campaign is concerned.