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WHY IS THE LEFT FRONT COALITION in West Bengal, led by India’s biggest left-of-centre party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which runs the longest-surviving state government in the country, staring defeat in the face? Why is Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, once hailed as the epitome of a pragmatic New Left, appearing like a beleaguered figure straight out of a Shakespearean tragedy, stoically awaiting the coup de grace? The principal opponent of the West Bengal communists...

Elections to the Bihar legislative assembly are scheduled for October-November and twice-elected Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's political opponents are trying to tarnish his reputation by highlighting the circumstances that led to the sacking of his Excise Minister Jamshed Ashraf in February. Ashraf has alleged that the state government is neck-deep in a scandal involving evasion of taxes on liquor that has led to revenue losses worth Rs 500 crore (Rs 5 billion), a charge the chief minister...

HIS BODY LANGUAGE SAID IT ALL as he walked past the row of television cameras and scampering journalists waiting impatiently outside the Supreme Court. He did not respond to the questions thrown at him. The 51-year-old long-distance runner had always been the underdog in the bitter battle for control of India’s natural gas resources, but he had chosen to take on his elder brother and, with him, the might of the establishment. On that muggy morning of 7 May 2010, however, Anil Ambani realised...

WHY DOES Andimuthu Raja have a charmed existence as Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, despite accusations that he has virtually singlehandedly caused a staggering loss to the national exchequer somewhere between Rs 50,000 crore and Rs 100,000 crore? Has his continuance as boss of Sanchar Bhavan — headquarters of the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) — got something to do with the fact that he’s a Dalit, as his mentor, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) supremo and...

LESS THAN A YEAR after the second United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government assumed office in New Delhi, it is not just the ruling coalition, but the Congress party which leads it, that appears to be at war with itself. The kind of open dissension that is being witnessed in the incumbent regime has not been seen in many years, if not decades. The public airing of differences has undermined the authority of not just Prime Minister Manmohan Singh but also one of his most important colleagues in...

THE RAJYA SABHA, the Upper House of Parliament, recently passed a historic bill reserving for women 33 percent of the seats in the Lok Sabha, the Lower House (though, ironically, not in the Upper House), with its 534 elected representatives, and in the 30 state legislative assemblies. Congress president Sonia Gandhi appeared to have reached a new high in her political career. The 63-year-old widow of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi is exuding more confidence today than she ever has before...

IT IS OFTEN TOUTED as the ‘world’s largest social security scheme.’ Its critics call it the worst form of wasteful government expenditure. It is held responsible for the victory of the Congress party-led United Progressive Alliance coalition in the 2009 general elections. Now, the name of the ‘Father of the Nation’ has been prefixed to make the acronym even more cumbersome than it was. Love it or hate it, the National—now, Mahatma Gandhi—Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) is here to stay...

WHEN, ON THE MORNING of 26 February, the diminutive, bespectacled finance minister, Pranab Mukherjee, gets up from his seat in the Lok Sabha to present the Union government’s annual budget for the fiscal year that will end on 31 March 2011, don’t expect fireworks. There is every possibility that the bulky document he will read out will be greeted with quite a few yawns. The editors of the pink dailies and breathless anchors on television screens with running tickers where stock quotations change...

THE IRONY WAS ALL TOO OBVIOUS. And it happened less than 24 hours after the planet’s three largest polluters – the United States, China and India (in that order) – came together with two other emerging economies (Brazil and South Africa) to thrash out an uneasily brokered, messy political statement on tackling climate change. The statement was forged at Copenhagen in the teeth of opposition from much of the rest of the world after more than a fortnight of bitter wrangling and public posturing...

Andimuthu Raja has chosen to brazen it out. But are his days as Communications and IT minister numbered? The Congress-led UPA today needs the support of the DMK less than it ever has since May 2004. After the CBI raids, there is no doubt that the spectrum scam, running into more than Rs 50,000 crore, is turning out to be an embarrassment for the government. Raja says he consulted the PM and Pranab Mukherjee while allotting mobile phone licences with spectrum on a ‘first-come-first served’ (FCFS)...