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A coincidence of events, deliberate or otherwise, has forced the issue of uniform civil code to the fore in time for the crucial assembly elections, so as to help BJP with its agenda of polarisation of voters on religious lines, particularly in the all-important Uttar Pradesh. And in the process, wittingly or unwittingly, the courts have played a part.

Much awaited Uttar Pradesh assembly polls have started and key implications are already clear. If Samajwadi Party has to win Uttar Pradesh, it has to open up a substantial lead against BJP in western UP, in the first two phases of the polls that cover a total of 113 seats. This is because BJP is expected to prove a more formidable opponent elsewhere, where it isn’t being dragged down by the millstone of the farmer’s agitation.

New Delhi: India skipper Manpreet Singh has exuded confidence of winning the next two matches against France and South Africa in FIH Hockey Pro League over the weekend at Potchefstroom.

Hyderabad: A birdie on the first play-off hole enabled Mysore’s 18 year old Pranavi Urs to end a 13-month title drought as she piped Gaurika Bishnoi to win the first leg of the Hero Women’s Pro Golf Tour at the Boulder Hills Golf & Country Club here on Friday.

Chennai: Agra based teenager Shahan Ali Mohsin, dominated both the Free Practice sessions, while veteran Arjun Balu and Tijil Rao also topped time charts in their categories as the fourth and final round of the Indian National Car Racing Championship got underway at the MMRT, here on Friday.

Capitalist governments invariably seek to control inflation by enlarging unemployment. This has nothing to do with any belief in a stable “trade-off” between the two, namely in a stable curve that links the two. Even those who attribute inflation to other causes, such as excessive money supply (“too much money chasing too few goods”) and find the solution to it in monetary stringency, are in effect seeking to control it through larger unemployment, since monetary stringency causes larger unemployment.

While placing the budget in the parliament, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman, proudly announced that 5G service would be launched in this financial year. In the same breath, she announced that 5G service would be launched only by the private telecom companies. It means the public sector BSNL is going to be deprived of 5G technology.

The joining of two BJP rebel MLAs — Sudip Roy Barman and Ashish Kumar Saha — to the Congress has, no doubt, given a boost to the grand old party in the north-eastern state of Tripura. It is a homecoming for the two leaders, as they were associated with the Congress for a long time in the past. This is a jolt to the ruling BJP. Only one year is left for the assembly elections in the state. In fact, some more saffron party MLAs are expected to join the grand old party.

Unemployment in India has become a serious issue in the country since November 2016, when Modi government announced demonetization that immediately resulted in millions of the workforce jobless due to shutting down of millions of enterprises and scaling down of production by million others to even 25 per cent. Moreover, by early 2018, it reached 45 year high, and now highest in the five decades. What is most disturbing phenomenon is that the joblessness is increasingly driving people to suicides and the country witnessed the highest number of suicides among the unemployed in the year 2020, which happened to be the first year of the COVID-19 crisis.

Never before in Bengal’s recent history, state-wide civic elections had become politically as consequential as the present round of polls now being held. On February 12 and February 27. Intriguingly, the probable outcome of these elections, a clean sweep for the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC), could well be no more than a minor footnote in the post-poll scenario. The contours of present political alignments in Bengal are changing and the new emerging trends do not bring cheers for the TMC.