Hope springs eternal

It seems at least a section of the Congress is harbouring dreams of returning to power at the Centre in 2019. Fond hopes perhaps, but Congress leader Rajeev Gowda — who prepared the dossier presented by former PM Manmohan Singh and former Finance Minister P Chidambaram on the status of the economy on Monday — betrayed as much when he joined in to try and puncture the government’s claims. Gowda said the opposition party would make the status report an annual feature and hoped that other political parties would maintain the tradition “when the Congress came back to power in 2019”. The Congress fielded the heavyweight economists to come out with the report to highlight “failures” of the Modi government’s policies, as it anticipated the Centre presenting a rosy picture of the economy when it tables the economic survey in Parliament on Tuesday.