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NCP leader Ajit Pawar’s sad demise in a plane crash on Wednesday, January 28 has created such a vacuum in Maharashtra politics that no single politician could fill in the near future. A prospect of political reconfiguration that was already indicated by the election of municipal corporations held on January 15 and its outcome, will soon be taking place, since nature abhors a vacuum, as the ancient principle suggests. Maharashtra will be undergoing a politics of new alliances, identities, and regional bargaining phase.

The Economic Survey 2025–26 presents itself as a document of sobriety in an age of global disorder. It raises India’s potential growth estimate to 7 per cent, underscores macroeconomic stability, and urges delayed gratification in the face of geopolitical and financial uncertainty. Yet when read closely—and when its own data are taken seriously—the Survey reveals tensions that its philosophical framing does not fully resolve.

From Plato’s Republic till today, republicanism has traversed a long journey. It has been enriched at junctures of the French Revolution and its clarion call for liberty, equality and fraternity. The journey has witnessed major ruptures with the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the advent of fascism as orchestrated by Mussolini and Hitler. The idea of republicanism achieved a new life with the defeat of fascism and the unfurling of the red flag atop the Reichstag. It is at the ruins of that anti-fascist war and, with the realignment of the global forces, that the world strived to reorganise itself by transforming the League of Nations to a more all-encompassing United Nations.

KOLKATA: With Assembly elections in West Bengal round the corner, Singur has taken centre stage. Once billed as the site of turnaround of industrialisation in the state, after the Tatas pulled out of its ambitious small car project, it is now the first mile post marking the decline and departure of 34 year Left Front regime.

2026-27 budget is unquiet positioned. Amidst global turmoil, Indian economy is sailing forth merrily. After all, it is not every year that a finance minister gets to prepare a budget when the economy is in a Goldilocks interlude.

The India–European Union Free Trade Agreement has been unveiled at a moment when the global trade order is no longer merely fragmented but openly coercive. With the United States under a resurgent Donald Trump once again wielding tariffs as instruments of strategic pressure—threatening punitive duties on allies and adversaries alike, from Chinese manufactures to Indian pharmaceuticals and Russian energy-linked trade—the comforting language of “rules-based commerce” has given way to a harsher reality: power now speaks through tariffs, standards and sanctions, often simultaneously.

Will the Centre muster courage to act on its much desired political objective of installing a popular ministry in strife-scarred Manipur latest on February 13, 2026? Manipur was placed under President’s rule as usual initially for six months on February 13, 2025 and later circumstances forced New Delhi to extend President’s rule by six months with effect from August 13 2025 [Parliament had okayed the extension on August 5]. Which is to expire on February 12, 2026 and which means by then the state will have been under President’s rule for one year.

A candidate's popularity or lack of it together with the organisational network, performance and promises made by the political party he/she represents are the yardsticks of electoral success or failure in India. But one must not overlook the spending capacity of a nominee which recent disclosures are pointers that the electoral battle is becoming increasingly unequal.

In today’s fractured world, fissures caused mostly by the ongoing Trumpomania, every nation is working post haste to forge new alliances particularly focussed on trade. The best example of this is the India-EU partnership FTA, to be formalized on January 27. The enhanced partnership is going to eliminate tariffs on more than 90% of traded goods, besides imparting a thrust to services and facilitate investments between the two sides.

India and European Union announcing on Tuesday the historic deal on Free Trade Agreement is a major achievement of the Indian Government in the present state of global turmoil after U.S. President Trump’s declaration of tariff war at global level.