View Articles

All those with a salary upto Rs 12 lakh per annum can tell Income Tax sharks to get the hell out to sea and not return. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman read out her eighth straight budget speech and beat Morarji Desai’s six-in-a-row record. More importantly, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's prayer to 'Maa Lakshmi' didn't fall on deaf ears!

Foreboding that the Hindutva fanatics and saffron ecosystem would convert India into a theocratic state and christen it as the Hindu Rashtra in 2025 appears to be taking a realistic shape and character with the Hindu saints and rightist forces unveiling the “Constitution of Akhand Hindu Rashtra” on February 2, the Basant Panchami, at the Mahakumbh and forwarding the same to Prime Minister Narendra Modi for consideration by the BJP as also his government.

One state may call it business summit and another investor meet. But the commonalities in the publicity campaign preceding such conclaves – some states do it annually and some others like West Bengal have opted for once in two years – are striking. States big and small will not spare any efforts with money made available liberally by the concerned exchequers to tell the world in rosiest detail of the advantages of building industries and services centres there. At the end of two or three-day jamborees, state governments are found to be going wild in announcing the number of memoranda of understanding and investment intent received. But as is the experience so far, for most states, only a portion of the investment promised is realized and as a consequence a good number of promised projects remain good on paper.

In a rare and powerful display of naval strength, India's two major naval forces—the Western and Eastern Fleets—came together during the ongoing TROPEX-25 exercise. This marks a major shift in India's approach to maritime security, showing that the country is prepared to respond to threats in the Indian Ocean with a unified force.

What is happening to the proposed official visit of the Russian President Vladimir Putin to India early this year? Is the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s invitation to the Russian President to visit India given at the BRICS summit at Kazan on October 22 still valid? Doubts are being raised about the visit as more than three months have passed since Indian Prime Minister’s invitation to the Russian President, but no confirmation is available from the Indian external affairs ministry on the dates of the visit, though hectic preparations are on in South Block for organising Narendra Modi’s visit to Washington for bilateral meeting with the President Donald Trump in the third or last week of February.

The key narrative of the Economic Survey 2024-25 is that India’s real GDP growth in the financial year 2025-26 is expected to be between 6.3 to 6.8 per cent, suggesting a sluggish economic condition for the country in the next financial year. Since India’s GDP growth rate has already likely to slip down from 8.2 per cent in 2023-24 to four years low in the current financial year 2024-25 to 6.4 per cent, the country has very hard times ahead.

The sudden emergence of a Chinese AI model has upset the settled world of Western AI industry. The Chinese had released its indigenously developed AI machine in the third week of January 2025. What followed thereafter is anarchy. Technology majors of America suffered market capitalisation loss that no one had seen before.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is sucking up to the gods ahead of his government’s second budget of his third term. The god he chose, but, of course, ‘Maa Lakshmi’, the goddess of wealth and prosperity. Somebody spoke of a ‘Hindu goddess’, which is ridiculous because monotheistic religions don't have goddesses and more than one God!

There is no more ambiguity. The lid on the stampede tragedy at the Mahakumbh in which more than hundred pilgrims died according to unofficial reports, though the Uttar Pradesh government put the figure at thirty, has been taken off. At least three reasons are said to be responsible for the gruesome tragedy. First, the clash of egos between the top BJP leaders in their mission to attain the status of the new public face of the politics of Hindutva, second, saffronisation of the Uttar Pradesh bureaucracy and police and third, the pervasive passion of the BJP leaders to use the facilities of VVIP treatment to boost their political stature.

KOLKATA: “Somewhat better in recent days” is what regular Manipur watchers say, perhaps, for the first time in 21 months since the outbreak of ethnic violence in the north-eastern state on May 3, 2023 between Meiteis and Kuki tribals. The reference is obviously to the law and order situation and when they qualify their answer with “recent days”, they obviously refer to the changes that have taken place in Raj Bhavan early January and at the secretariat around mid-January. Raj Bhavan’s new occupant Ajay Bhalla is the immediate past Union home secretary who has had a six-year innings in that key post.