'Modi wants to go down in history not necessarily as India's first overtly Hindu RSS pracharak prime minister, but as a world statesman who built the idea of India as a great nation.'
'If Mr Modi and Mr Shah have made a poisonous, polarising campaign their brahmastra for 2019, Mamata Banerjee is showing them its limitations,' says Shekhar Gupta.
'The frequency of 'vikas' being used in speeches and slogans has reduced noticeably. Why is the 'BJP's Chanakya' so aggressive and combative?' asks Utkarsh Mishra.
The Budget chose to stick to an ambitious disinvestment programme for 2016-17.
Taking a dig at Bharatiya Janata Party's prime ministerial candidate, Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar said he feared that there were grim indicators of Indian democracy being concentrated in one person's hand after the marginalisation of party veterans like LK Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi.
'People want to see Mr Sinha win again because he has always been there for Patna whether he has been a leader or not.' 'Even when he was an actor, he was a proud Bihari.' 'He is not doing it because he only wants to win an election, he wants to do it because he really loves Bihar.'
Mr Modi, it came across, did not want to be seen as favouring any one business group.
Read what the ex-chief of R&AW, A S Dulat, told our readers on Rediff Chat!
In the Modi government, he was the mentor -- he groomed half a dozen of those who became ministers. Some remembered, others did not -- Jaitley seemed to care little. Aditi Phadnis reports.
'Indian secularism doesn't deserve a tombstone. It needs a new shrine,' argues Shekhar Gupta.
'This Ram Navami -- the birth anniversary of Lord Ram -- presents the majority community an opportunity to shed its minority complex and offer an olive branch and discrimination- free society to the minority,' suggests Colonel Anil A Athale (retd).
'The Aam Aadmi's prophet is out of touch with both the city and his own flock.'
The Rajya Sabha on Wednesday took up the four bills related to the GST, with the Opposition urging the government to insulate taxpayers from harassment and questioning how the new regime was "ideal" when 40 per cent of the revenue base of the GDP was kept out of its purview.
The Sikhs love a good fight, and that's what the Modi government has given them.
'We are telling them we have isolated them and their religion as not only unwanted,' says Aakar Patel.
The success of the government will depend substantially on the quality of its team of key ministers, officials and advisors
India's freedom, its rambling but working Constitution, its parliamentary democracy, its lumbering administrative machinery all have many a father, but its greatest claim to fame, especially today, that of being a modern state, is due to but one person: Its first and longest-serving prime minister, Nehru, says Shreekant Sambrani.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has brought Hindi into vogue in the external affairs ministry and managed a diplomatic coup by inviting SAARC leaders, including Nawaz Sharif, to New Delhi for his swearing-in. Sheela Bhatt's impressions of the Indian prime minister's first day in office.
'The new generation of teenagers which has taken the forefront is largely an amorphous, leaderless mass.' 'It is extremely difficult to find a representative with whom to negotiate now, unless one turns to a militant leader.'
If the fight against black money seems half hearted, the same is not the case with gau raksha, says Subir Roy.
'Could the Chinese have taken a leaf out of our book?' 'That their unprecedented build-up is their attempt at coercive diplomacy with India?' 'And if so, what is it that they could be expecting as a quid pro quo?' asks Shekhar Gupta.
'A close look at the time-lines tells you that exactly as the back-channel negotiations were in their most crucial stage, "somebody" was planning the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai,' says Shekhar Gupta questioning Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri's account of a peace deal with India.
Pakistan has taken too much of a chance with Pulwama - with the wrong government in India, and at the wrong time.
'Minorities should not fear a Modi sarkar... Who has given the right to kill in the name of religion? No one! You are not James Bond 007, that you will just take a shotgun and kill anybody at your whims and fancies. We are not living in a banana republic...' The inimitable Shatrughan Sinha on Narendra Modi as a dabbang action hero, what a Modi Sarkar would be like.
'Lending to Mr Mallya was the bankers' season ticket to corridors of power and glamour. Borrowing from them was like a favour Mallya did to them,' says Shekhar Gupta.
'Look at the number of billionaires, the number of new billionaires in India.' 'Adani and Ambani are not the only ones.' 'What's wrong with people making money as long as it benefits us?'
Here's the full text of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's address to the United States Congress.
If this election is about Narendra Modi, then it is also about the RSS, notes Mihir S Sharma.
The Emergency greatly influenced the RSS' makeover from a fringe force in the Indian political imagination to one that could have its own man sworn in as prime minister in two decades' time. A riveting excerpt from Christophe Jaffrelot and Pratinav Anil's India's First Dictatorship: The Emergency, 1975-1977.
NDA under Mr Modi is as focused on the rural poor with doles and hand-outs as the UPA under Dr Singh was.
The government package for public sector banks, announced last Friday, has been welcomed by the stock market with the PSU banking index booking smart gains.
'The RSS doesn't intervene, interfere or try to dominate government policy-making... The responsibility of running the government is entirely in the hands of the BJP.'
Modi said India and Russia have been friends for a long time and thanked Putin for inviting him for the first-ever informal meeting at Sochi.
'We know each other for quite some time.' 'He could provide stability to the country for five years.' 'But he could not provide confidence to the countrymen that he is our leader.'
With Jaitley preferring continuity over change, good days might take a little longer to arrive, says Shankar Acharya.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday met Bollywood actors and filmmakers, including Shah Rukh Khan and Aamir Khan, and released a cultural video with the theme 'Change Within' to mark the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi.
'Modi's victory is his own victory. Now what he has done thereafter, it seems to me, leads us to believe that he was a bit too prolific with his promises.' 'One achievement of Modi's I will praise is that he has put the fear of God among his ministers and officials.' 'Indira Gandhi's sentiment of controlling everything, centralising power in to her hands is the quality that persists in Modi' Veteran journalist Inder Malhotra casts his experienced gaze on one year of the Modi Sarkar.
'Engagement should never stop.' 'Reassure Kashmiris that they will be treated at par with the rest of India.' 'The peace you crave will be peace with honour.' 'Your special status will not be tinkered with.'
The civil services seem to have gone sour under the NDA government. Ministers exercise executive power in a partisan manner. Consequently, a regime of favouritism holds sway over the corridors of power, feels Ram Ugrah.
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