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It has taken the prime minister eight years to admit that preference for “outdated ideologies” has been stalling the reforms. What Manmohan Singh left unsaid, however, is that this choice has been a regressive feature of his party’s policies ever since the reforms were introduced in 1991. Right from that period, the belief in the Congress was that the abandonment of Nehruvian socialism for the sake of market-oriented “pro-rich” policies was a mistake and was responsible for its 1996 defeat.

Largely unnoticed by the media and her political opponents, Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader Mamata Banerjee has introduced a new idiom to Indian politics. The name of her latest game: how to check inner party dissidence at public expense!

LUCKNOW: Uttar Pradesh is on fire, thanks to the bitter fight amongst major political parties on the issue of promotion quota for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in view of 204 Lok Sabha polls.

New Delhi: A Judicial Commission is likely to visit Pakistan next week to investigate about 26/11 Mumbai terror attack.

Political parties in Andhra Pradesh, ever in internecine warfare over the decades-old demand for a new Telengana State, have little expectation of any immediate moves by the Centre on an explosive issue, at the meeting called by Home Minister Mr Sushil Kumar Shinde on December 28. It may have been designed as a holding operation to keep the parties at peace and to urge them to await a new deal, balancing the interests of the State’s three regions in the broader context of 2014 elections.

Now that the first phase of polling in Gujarat has been completed, it is time to look at the post-poll scenario. What appears clear is that Narendra Modi is certain to romp home for the third time but with a reduced majority. That will mean that his aspiration to become the BJP’s prime ministerial candidates will be diluted.