Crores of first-time voters will vote against the Congress -- and tens of crores of existing voters shall do the same. The challenges the Congress shall face after the general election of 2014 may be the most severe that the party has ever tackled, says T V R Shenoy.
Assembly elections in Bihar, where the Bharatiya Janata Party is set for a battle against a united Janata Parivar, are likely to be held sometime in September-October when extensive central forces and a reworked expenditure monitoring system will be deployed to curb money and muscle power.
Finance Minister P T R Palanivel Thiagarajan has proclaimed his determination to set Tamil Nadu's fiscal house in order in five years, and Friday will show how he plans to go about it when he rises to present the Stalin government's maiden budget, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
She stepped down after failing to win over her ministers with a revised strategy over her plans for the UK's withdrawal from the European Union.
The BJP wants to win a state where it has been out of power for 15 years. The Congress wants to make its mark in a state where it has been a bit player for nearly 30 years. And the BSP wants to recapture power it lost 5 years ago.
The expectation that Mr Modi would be a major reformer, capable of reinvigorating the Indian economy, were based on a complete misreading of both his actions and his performance as Gujarat chief minister, says Mihir S Sharma.
At a time when more and more of government spending is done by states, the impression you get from these large advertisements could well reflect the slogan of Emergency days: the nation is on the move, says T N Ninan.
'Hopefully, the new majority government will give the country a fool-proof electoral system,' says Saisuresh Sivaswamy.
A K Bhattacharya lists three reasons why Finance Minister Arun Jaitley will most likely present a full Budget on February 1, 2019.
'Hindu voters in coastal Karnataka lean more towards Hindutva than Hinduism which explains why the Siddaramaiah government's perception as anti-Hindu worked wonders for the BJP in coastal Karnataka.'
