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The newly formed Opposition alliance I.N.D.I.A. took a positive step last week in cementing a solid coalition in Mumbai. This decision was made during their third meeting, preceded by two previous conferences in Patna and Bengaluru. Their goal is to replicate the 1977 or 2004 scenario where the weaker Opposition won against the ruling dispensation.

INDIA alliance has a wider political bandwidth compared to the NDA in terms of reach to electorate, various sections of people, number of significant regional and national political parties, spread across the geographical regions, and experience of not only winning elections but retaining their political dominance in their respective states. Though it is advantage INDIA alliance, its constituent political parties are still betraying their old habits of harping their own cords, at a time when they actually need a unified and concerted intensive campaign strategy to approach electorate with right issues in the electoral battlefield.

India had just shaken off the chains of foreign servitude which was a dream come true for its citizens. Nationalism and several discordant voices were in the air in whose backdrop a group of young men gathered at Paradise Cafe, a cafeteria near the junction of Hazra Road and Russa Road in the then Calcutta and gave vent to their search for new ideas to shake up the cultural milieu of the partitioned Bengal.

In Bangladesh, in the background of fierce pre-election campaign, China and the US are engaging in an unconcealed big power rivalry.

NITI Aayog has recently come out with a poverty index, which said 13.5 crore Indians escaped multi-dimensional poverty in five years and that there was a steep decline in the number of multi-dimensionally poor from 24.85 per cent to 14.96 per cent between 2015-16 and 2019-21. Rural areas saw the fastest decline in poverty from 32.59 per cent to 19.28 per cent. The report claimed that India was on track to achieve sustainable development goals ahead of the 2030 deadline.

The recent exercise to — ostensibly “improve the education system and make it rational” — undertaken by the Sangh Parivar, precisely the RSS, in West Bengal makes it obvious that the saffronistas are determined to completely destroy the modern mode of education in the state.

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin’s minister son Udhayanidhi Stalin has given the BJP reason to hike up its ‘Madrasi dhoti’. Udhayanidhi’s outbursts calling for the annihilation of Sanatana Dharma could not have come at a more opportune time for the saffron party which was under siege from the unity of purpose displayed by INDIA, the grouping of opposition parties determined to oust Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Unwittingly, or perhaps knowingly, Udhayanidhi Stalin handed to the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi a reason to live again.

Most presidential candidates publish a hagiographic autobiography tying the personal challenges they’ve overcome to their policy goals and vision for the country. Vivek Ramaswamy’s Capitalist Punishment: How Wall Street is Using Your Money to Create a Country You Didn’t Vote For, released in April of this year, contains almost no information about who he is and fails to mention that he is running for president. Instead, the 240-page book mainly deals with contemporary issues in corporate governance law which are hard to imagine fitting neatly into a stump speech.

Though Union Government has taken a number of initiatives for safety of women across the country as supplemental efforts to strengthen the States and Union Territories (UTs), crimes against women have been increasing year on year except in 2020 when it had decreased 8.3 percent owing to the lockdown caused by the Pandemic and lesser reporting of such crimes.

It is difficult to understand why India is constantly falling prey to China if it is fully aware that China is heavily dumping exports, often “supplying goods at less than raw materials costs.” The question is pertinent in the context of India’s Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal’s recent outburst as moderator at a panel discussion with trade ministers of G20 nations in Delhi where he openly asked Chinese Vice Minister (Commerce) Wang Shouwen: ‘how can you supply goods at less than the raw material cost?’ Goyal must explain why India is forced to import so heavily from China in the last nine years knowing fully well China is dumping goods. How are those dumped imports from China impacting India’s domestic producers of similar items? In 2014, when the BJP-led NDA government came to power, India’s imports from China were worth around US$58 billion. Last year, according to the UN COMTRADE database, India’s merchandise imports from China jumped up to $102.25 billion.