Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah will soon get around to reworking their organisational set-up and administrative priorities to regain lost ground in the wake of the Delhi electoral debacle, but there's third course available to them as well. That is to introduce the presidential form of government, which prime ministers Indira Gandhi and A B Vajpayee flirted with before abandoning it. Will Modi go further than them? N Sathiya Moorthy analyses the scenario.
Relations between an elected government of Delhi and the LG can never be cordial: It is just the way the relationship is structured.
It would be a miracle if demonetisation doesn't extract a political price from the BJP and Modi, says T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan.
'The next prime minister will be from an Opposition party and not from the BJP.' 'The BJP may be the single largest party, but not with a majority and there will be a fractured verdict.' Anti-Modi and non-BJP parties will be in a majority.'
Late Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray made BJP leaders remove posters that proclaimed Modi, then CM of Gujarat, as the 'Hindu Hriday Samrat'.
'The Aam Aadmi's prophet is out of touch with both the city and his own flock.'
Naidu, a former BJP ally, said he will meet non-BJP political leader and convince them about the need to fight collectively against the BJP.
Engineering conglomerate fended off three corporate raids but emerged stronger.
There was an urgency in Modi's words, a sense of accountability, a feeling of transparency, a realisation that this man was here to do a job for us
Aggarwal also hit out at the media, saying why it was only talking about Jadhav when hundreds of Indians were lodged in Pakistani jails.
'While the meeting on December 6th was perfectly legal, was it ethical?' asks Colonel Anil A Athale (retd).
'I hope he will continue to be what he is. And doing so, he won't be much different from those whose example he is being given right now,' says Utkarsh Mishra.
Former Kerala minister T H Mustafa was on Thursday suspended from the Congress for calling Rahul Gandhi a "joker" and saying that the party vice-president should be removed if he does not resign in the backdrop of the party's debacle in the Lok Sabha polls.
In a gracious, 45-minute victory speech in Vadodara, Modi said the government does not belong to any particular party but to all the people of the country
Veteran Congress leader and former Lok Sabha Speaker Balram Jakhar passed away in New Delhi on Wednesday. He was 92.
An interesting contest is on in Malkajgiri, the biggest Lok Sabha constituency in the country.
The President may not have agreed with the government on many occasions. Not once was this ever made public -- though he told off ministers in private.
Jammu and Kashmir Bharatiya Janata Party on Thursday demanded immediate arrest of separatist leaders who had waved Pakistani flags during a rally in Srinagar, saying it was not satisfied with the "mere registration" of a police case against them.
Preparations are on a war footing at Rashtrapati Bhavan in anticipation of the formation of a new government next month. President Pranab Mukherjee has already completed two rounds of reading his predecessors' judgments and interactions with Constitutional experts.
Without the handsome receipts from the sale of government equity in PSUs and sharp increases in excise revenues from oil, Mr Jaitley's fiscal consolidation drive would have become even more arduous, says A K Bhattacharya.
He is talking, making sense, and India is listening. Rahul Gandhi needs to listen to him, too, says Shekhar Gupta.
While it is the right-leaning Bharatiya Janata Party(BJP) which chose Kovind, Narayanan, a diplomat-turned politician, became vice president in 1992 and the president in 1997 courtesy active support from the Left, which had proposed his name first
Policy discussions now should urgently focus on the road map for serious economic and institutional reforms to put India on a sustained high growth trajectory like the Chinese economy, says Jayanta Roy.
'Given his stint in Beijing, as India's longest serving ambassador there and that too through some challenging and interesting times, Jaishankar ought to have been appointed as foreign secretary in 2013 itself,' says Sanjaya Baru.
'The debate, by being mostly in Hindi, lost much of its educative relevance to the southern states.' 'All the prime minister's debating skills and oratorical prowess went over the heads of the South Indian audience,' points out B S Raghavan, the distinguished civil servant.
'No one institution can cleanse it: Not the courts, government or activists.' 'And least of all the Indian Police Service,' argues Shekhar Gupta.
In a sensational twist to the death of Shashi Tharoor's wife Sunanda Pushkar, Delhi Police on Tuesday registered a murder case on the basis of a medical report that concluded her death was unnatural and due to poisoning but nobody has been named as a suspect as yet.
No successive government thought of reviving the idea of an exit policy.
'This was the worst phase yet in the state's human rights history.' 'Notorious interrogation centres were set up, large numbers died in firing on civilian mobs.' 'This is what today's generations might identify better as the Haider phase in Kashmir's history,' says Shekhar Gupta.
'How do we explain that on the economic, internal security and strategic fronts, India's unstable coalitions have acted more decisively and boldly than all our full-majority governments yet?' asks Shekhar Gupta.
'What Trump and Kim have demonstrated is that leaders need not remain prisoners of the status quo and they can, by showing the necessary will and courage, break out of the hang-ups and constrictions of the past and carve out a new pathway for themselves,' says B S Raghavan.
"Even when Vajpayee is ill in hospital, I was the first one to visit him, since the Congress believes he has contributed to the country," he said.
The Rajya Sabha election was personal so it had to be won and Amit Shah needed to be sent a message.
'I can't say who is to blame for this incident; it could be anybody. I leave it to you and the people to decide,' Selja told Rediff.com, adding this was the first time she has been attacked in her career.
Does Pranab Mukherjee want to be 'PM' by office, not just by initials? The very prospect, with memories of the Narasimha Rao years scarred into their memories, scares the Nehru-Gandhis, says T V R Shenoy.
'When it vanishes as a national force (meaning when it can no longer get sufficient votes to hold onto its symbol, the hand) it will not have been the first large Indian party to die,' says Aakar Patel.
Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who is hailed as the architect of economic reforms in the country, is a member of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance, it was announced on Tuesday.
The Indian economy was on an impressive growth path through the first decade of this century till it was brought to an abrupt halt by the policy inertia during UPA2 and the Modi government's inability to restore economic and financial momentum. Fascinating glimpses of what went wrong from Puja Mehra's must-read book The Lost Decade: How India's Growth Story Devolved Into Growth Without A Story.
'I had expected them to fight this election on the issue of development, but they are not doing that.' 'Now they have decided to belittle Gujarat's development.'
Some analysts believe that it suits Prime Minister Narendra Modi at this stage to debunk the image of Sonia Gandhi as a woman who declined the prime ministership of the country with great personal sacrifice, just as it would suit him to portray Rahul as a coward who was afraid his mother would be killed -- claims made by former Union minister Natwar Singh in his yet-to-be-released book. Rediff.com contributor Renu Mital reports.
