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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.

KOLKATA: Despite protests from South Asian countries to various US authorities, there has been no noticeable improvement in the treatment of illegal immigrants as the official 'search, detect and deport' drive continues in full strength. During the last few days, two planeloads of 50' illegals' each, their cuffs and shackles duly in place, were despatched to Nepal and Bangladesh.

The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, was published in London on February 21, 1848. It was commissioned by the Communist League, and became a foundational text for communism. With its famous call, “Workers of the World, Unite”, it asked the toiling masses to overthrow capitalism and establish their rule. Manifesto outlined not only the scientific methodology of revolution, but also the path to achieve it.

HANOI: Over the last half decade, Vietnam has emerged as a growing middle power in the world. Its economy is one of the fastest—if not the fastest—growing in the world. But just over 40 years ago, before embarking on a set of economic renewal policies known as Đổi Mới, Vietnam was among the poorest countries on earth. Since then, millions of Vietnamese have been lifted out of poverty, and Vietnam has become an economic powerhouse under a socialist-oriented economy.

Gold pushing decisively past the $5,000-a-troy-ounce threshold at the same moment the US dollar slides to a four-month low is not just a dramatic coincidence of charts. It marks a psychological rupture in global markets, challenging assumptions that have underpinned portfolio construction and macroeconomic thinking for decades. What once belonged to the realm of tail-risk scenarios has arrived in real time, forcing investors, policymakers and central banks to confront a reassessment of US political credibility, policy coherence and the role of traditional safe havens in an increasingly fragmented global system.

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.