'Somebody will need to blow the whistle, call the play to a halt, and convince all players that they belong on the same side of the goal,' says Shekhar Gupta.
For successive governments the Election Commission remains a 'holy cow', where unhealthy precedents are allowed to be nurtured since Independence, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
Two decisions handed down by the Supreme Court have spread gloom in Kerala as they have shaken two basic faiths of a majority of the people in the state, says T P Sreenivasan.
Justice Ranjan Gogoi, who will demit office as the Chief Justice of India in a week's time, has etched his name in the annals of history by giving finality to one of the most politically and religiously sensitive cases, the Ayodhya land dispute, which dates back to even before the Supreme Court came into existence in 1950.
While notable participants among 22 state units were acting president CK Khanna (Delhi), cornered treasurer Aniruddh Chaudhry (Haryana) and current CAB president Sourav Ganguly (joining on tele-conference), the acting secretary Amitabh Chaudhary (Jharkhand) chose to skip the informal gathering keeping a distance from the revolters.
'If you are in Punjab, Modi is omnipresent as if he is going to be chief minister of Punjab.'
'If he is in Uttarakhand, he presents himself to be the chief minister of Uttarakhand.'
'When he is in UP, he is touted as the chief minister of UP.' 'There is a personality cult which is being built around a person... that he is the panacea of every democratic exercise in India, from panchayat to Parliament.' 'Modi at some point will pay the price for trying to build a very ambitious personality cult.'
Tamal Bandyopadhyay discusses his latest book Bandhan: The Making of a Bank at Bandhan headquarters in Kolkata.
With Maharashtra and Haryana assembly elections, results for 51 assembly and two Lok Sabha bypolls spread across 18 states were declared on Thursday. Here are state-wise results of the bypolls.
'Good politics is not just staying in power. You cannot sacrifice everything at the altar of trying to ensure the coalition remains in power.'
'There is no difference between the earlier government and the present government.' 'They are all following the economic policy based on the Chicago School of thought.' 'This school of thought says the government should have very little role in governing the country and the majority of the work should be handed over to the private sector.' 'This has not succeeded in the US.' 'Yet, it is being tried here by people like Arvind Subramaniam, Arvind Panagariya, Urjit Patel and Raghuram Rajan.'
'Modi's more than dozen interviews are helping him fine-tune the rough edges of his campaign. He is trying to influence floating voters, undecided voters, non-committal and caste-neutral voters into deciding whether to go for the Lotus or not. These could have been Congress voters, but its divided house, torn between the old guard and Rahul Gandhi, seems to have got completely confused.' Rediff.com's Sheela Bhatt lists what the Congress did wrong to find itself in such a sorry mess today.
The Modi government's e-auction policy for coal, meant to shield the consumer against hike in electricity charges, has already led to serious allegations of cartelisation among the bidding corporates. Matters came to such a pass that the government at one point last week was considering inviting the Central Bureau of Investigation to probe the matter, reports Sheela Bhatt/Rediff.com.
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