LK Advani sees neither the Congress nor his own party, BJP, leading the next government in New Delhi. Not many would disagree with that perception, but few in positions such as that of Advani would be willing to say it in public. Read more

Nobody expected the Reserve Bank to cut interest rates in its quarterly monetary policy unveiled on Tuesday. Neither did D. Subbarao spring any surprise. The RBI governor, however, sounded unusually alarmist and helpless, as he sharply slashed the GDP growth forecast for 2012-13 from 7.3% to 6.5% and warned that high inflation was here to stay for many more months. Read more

I am not a fan of Anna Hazare, for reasons that I will keep for another day to explain. But I also cannot belittle the importance of the issues he has raised just because his campaign is apparently backed by the RSS or that it is run by a disparate alliance of not-so-accountable civil society groups. Read more

After three days of drama, the Congress-DMK saga has had a happy ending. Both parties have decided to stay together, in what DMK patriarch M Karunanidhi called the larger interest of the alliance — read the interest of Tamil Nadu’s first family and its billions. For the Congress and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, it marks a new low, however. Read more

Nationalist Congress Party Sharad Pawar is worried that the ruling UPA is being increasingly seen as anti-corporate, thanks to a sudden spurt in business scams and the investigations that have followed them. Read more

Last week, Rahul Gandhi offered to become “a soldier in Delhi” for the Dongria Kondhs, an endangered tribe fighting to stop bauxite mining project on the Niyamgiri hills in western Orissa. Read more