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BOSTON: America is having a midterm election for the Congress in November this year which will be very important for the future course of politics in this country and its impact worldwide. In this upcoming election, the Republicans, as it appears, under the present circumstances, have all the ingredients of winning- a not so popular president, economic issues like inflation (record high at 8%), a discouraged Democratic base and also the historical precedent that the party in Govt. almost always loses the midterm election.

Despite flickering signs of a revival of lost support for the CPI(M) in West Bengal , observers are not yet sure that the party is about to turn the corner in the short term. By no means unsympathetic to the CPI(M) or the Left in general, they refuse to view the party’s recent impressive recovery in the Ballygunge Assembly by-poll as the clinching evidence of a long-awaited upturn.

MSMEs which formed the backbone of India’s industrial development, exports and job creation, may soon get credit card similar to Kisan credit cards to deal with their credit woes that is presently stunting the economic growth. This follows repeated recommendation of the Parliamentary Standing committee on Finance in a bid to not only ensure credit access but also bring them into a formal financing system. The idea behind this move is to help the small businesses with working capital, trade financing and provide capital loans at affordable rates including necessary guarantees.

The last one week has triggered a range of speculations regarding the direction in which Bihar politics is moving which included the claim that chief minister Nitish Kumar will be moving to play a greater political role in New Delhi and the counter claim that he will remain CM of Bihar until 2025. However, despite the claims and counter claims, the political picture is still hazy, but the continuance of the speculation indicates a political underflow in the state which may be heading towards a new era of politics.

Sharad Pawar was not revealing a state secret when he accused the BJP of creating a communal situation in the country. Ever since the hijab-halal-azaan row in Karnataka and elsewhere, the BJP’s intention of raising the communal temperature has been obvious.

“The intelligence of that creature known as a crowd is the square root of the number of people in it”, said somebody and most of us would not get the meaning right because calculating the ‘square root’ is not everybody’s forte. But in today’s climate, the two leitmotifs running parallel are the political parties, and their affiliated mobs, not as in mobsters, but as in thirsting mobs.

We have so many laws to be followed that it is virtually impossible to live for a moment without breaking one. It is a different matter that some of these laws had ceased to have any relevance ages ago, but these continue to fill the statute books for no rhyme or reason. In this context, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s advice to civil servants the other day to help eliminate archaic laws that belonged to some other age and have only nuisance value made sense, but at the same time provided clues to the low priority that the issue receives at the administrative level. Leaving it to bureaucrats, who are known to have a genetic aversion to any kind of change, would mean that the status would continue for at least another century.

Economic outlook for all the countries across the world in 2022 remains fragile due to a range of issues including rising COVID-19 caseloads, higher inflation, and Russian aggression on Ukraine. Economic recovery has been assessed to be slower than the projected earlier, which will make labour market recovery even slower. Fostering a people-centred recovery has therefore become all the more urgent.

Elections in Gujarat have traditionally been direct fights between the BJP and the Congress. However, the 2022 Assembly polls expected to be held in November-December, are set to be different after Aam Aadmi Party announced it would contest all 182 seats.

War is an ugly part of the human experience. Everything about it is hideous. War is most obviously the act of invasion and the brutality that goes along with its operations. No war is precise; every war hurts civilians. Each act of bombardment sends a neurological shudder through a society.