The Congress cannot rest on its oars in Karnataka even if it gets, as predicted by several exit polls, a clear majority in the state assembly. Its real test will be in the Lok Sabha polls when the electorate will vote for the next government at the Centre. Read more

If Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United) and the Bharatiya Janata Party do indeed break their alliance, a rapprochement may not happen between the old allies even in the outside chance of Narendra Modi leading his party to a tally close to double hundred. Read more

The storm over Raja Pervez Ashraf’s pilgrimage to Ajmer Sharif was needless, to state the least. The Pak Premier was on a private visit and India went out of the way to make it appear as one, without, of course, causing any diplomatic affront to the visitor. Read more

I find the Arun Jaitley-Markandey Katju spat hugely interesting for it has added value to the ongoing democratic discourse. Read more

A standing joke in Pakistan’s media circles on Rehman Malik is that the only time the Interior Minister isn’t telling lies or making a fool of himself, is when he isn’t talking. Read more

The message from the Congress’s Jaipur convention wasn’t as much about Rahul Gandhi’s elevation – which was a long-due formality – as about the party’s bid to reach out to the increasingly restive urban middle class. Read more

Lot’s happening within Pakistan: the country’s in election mode; the Army has revised its India-specific security doctrine to declare domestic terror a bigger danger; a religious preacher of Canadian nationality has dislodged Imran Khan’s Tehrik-e-Pakistan as a major challenger to the established political order. Read more

“Undo it, take it back, make every day the previous one until I am returned to the day before the one that made you go. Or set me on an airplane traveling west, crossing the date line again and again, losing this day, then that, until the day of loss still lies ahead, and you are here instead of sorrow.”
Nessa Rapoport

If I could’ve helped, I’d rather not have had 2012 in my life. Read more

Why is crowd management becoming so difficult in our country, especially in big cities when protesters are from among the increasingly vocal middle classes? Read more

General Pervez Musharraf is essentially day-dreaming when he says he’d be back in Pakistan before the 2013 elections. Another figment of his fantasy is the claim to joining active politics to “set things right” in the country hurtling from one crisis to another. Read more