Bharatiya Janata Party leader Jaswant Singh's biography of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, out on Sunday, promises to be much discussed.
India needs another shot of difficult reform, of the kind only possible at gunpoint. Mr Trump holds that gun to our heads now. A drastic reduction in tariff protection, other elements of sarkari wet-nursing will force entrepreneurial India to become competitive again, argues Shekhar Gupta.
He was colourful. He was dramatic. He was The Master of His Craft. There never will be an editor as versatile as Pritish Nandy, notes Nikhil Lakshman.
Budget speeches have been replete with incomprehensible and even hilarious statements, says Rathin Roy.
With the role of the venerable elder thrust on him in UP, Mr Singh has had to attune himself to the politics at the Centre, observes Aditi Phadnis.
In a sharp attack on Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party campaign centric around him, expelled party veteran Jaswant Singh on Sunday deprecated "veneration" of an individual and said world was full of graveyards of those who are considered indispensable to their nation.
A rotating chief ministership as a way to appease factions can work only if there is a credible guarantor, explains Aditi Phadnis.
Party sources said the course of action against Shourie could be decided against the backdrop of the swift action taken against Jaswant Singh who was expelled last week. "The party has taken note of the utterances of Mr Shourie. It shall be responded to appropriately after discussions," BJP spokesperson Rajiv Pratap Rudy said in New Delhi.
The finance minister presented the Interim Budget for 2004-05 in the Lok Sabha on Tuesday.
'Taranjit has the ideal temperament to deal with the Americans who understand firmness and appreciate flexibility.' 'He can hold his ground with a cheerful face and still make it clear that India and the US are partners, rivals,' says Ambassador T P Sreenivasan.
No confidence motions have been moved in the Lok Sabha 27 times in the past, and all of them have either been defeated or remained inconclusive, data compiled by a think tank shows.
'The Modi visit will prove to be the watershed where India and the United States commenced technology trade and transfer.'
The less charitable in the party say he owes his appointment Sonia Gandhi -- the family wanted someone who wouldn't talk back and would not exert himself too much, notes Aditi Phadnis.
The battle on creating jobs is virtually lost. If the battle for achieving higher growth too is lost, then its political consequences could become difficult to manage, says A K Bhattacharya.
'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.
'The Modi Model we see now is still the old Gujarat Model.' 'But with an acknowledgement that governing India is more challenging than governing Gujarat,' notes Shekhar Gupta.
The Modi government is notoriously honest about one fact: It does not listen to economists, observes Shekhar Gupta.
Amit Shah now enters an unfamiliar and interesting phase of his political career. His success or failure will henceforth be assessed based on his performance as a key minister, points out Shekhar Gupta.
What the railways need to do is to establish a clear link between higher fares and better service, says T N Ninan.
Going by the number of changes Mr Jaitley's next Budget is likely to see, he will go down in the history of Budget-making as the finance minister who ushered in the largest number of changes in a single Budget, says A K Bhattacharya.
Forget about interim Budgets, one cannot easily recall even a full Budget of any government in recent times having rolled out benefits of this order to such a large number of people, says A K Bhattacharya.
What the Indian economy looks like next January will influence her view on India, not her genetics, notes Shekhar Gupta.
'Both have a very nationalistic view of foreign policy.' 'They think they are shrewd and clever diplomats.'
A major slugfest erupted on Thursday over Bharatiya Janata Party MP Chandan Mitra's demand for stripping Nobel laureate Amartya Sen of the Bharat Ratna award and the economist offering to return it if Atal Bihari Vajpayee asks him to do so.
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.
Gujarat is a flourshing state but its business model is not so well accepted at national level.
"(Former PM) Atal Bihari Vajpayee said 'raj dharma' was not followed in Gujarat (during the 2002 riots). Now, 'raj dharma' is not being followed in case of Andhra Pradesh. We have been denied what was rightfully ours," he claimed.
S Jaishankar turned out to be a chip of the old block and that too, in modern parlance, a fully loaded chip. The father laid down the precepts of Indian strategy and diplomacy and the son put them into practice. T P Sreenivasan on India's new foreign secretary.
A long crisis with a lack of sound short-term, long-term actions can result in sluggish growth in India, similar to that in Japan.
'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.
'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.
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