In Punjab, the declared killer of a former state chief minister is honoured by those speaking in the name of a whole community. In Tamil Nadu, Andimuthu Raja returns to his home state as a conquering hero, after having had to resign as communications minister and then spending 15 months in jail. In the first case, the killer is awaiting execution, while in the second the trial is still to get under way. In that sense, the two are on different planes. But it is necessary to ask whether the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) is no better than some of the Akali factions when they cock a defiant snook at the law.

Lionising the indicted 

Business Standard

Close on the heels of recent needless interventions and rollbacks on cotton exports, from which exporters and farmers are yet to fully recover, the government has now come out with a draft cotton trade regulation Bill to further hassle the sector.

Spinning disaster

The latest attempts to relax the rules for Special Economic Zones (SEZs) are a good example of all that is wrong with India&rsquo;s economic policy. SEZs were conceived in 2005 as a means of providing exporters with China-style tax-free enclaves outside the purview of the country&rsquo;s restrictive labour laws, the idea being to stoke exports and employment. It is an open secret that far from achieving these objectives, SEZs have degenerated into real estate plays, or means for infotech companies to extend tax breaks they lost under the Software Technology Parks of India (STPI) scheme (a large proportion of approved SEZs are in the IT sector). By Commerce Minister Anand Sharma&rsquo;s own admission to Parliament, only about a fourth (154) of the 587 SEZs that the government approved under the 2005 Act are operational. That&rsquo;s less than half the 380 that have been notified.

Admission of failure

Oil Minister S Jaipal Reddy has proposed an additional excise duty of Rs 1.7 lakh on small diesel cars and Rs 2.55 lakh on bigger diesel cars. Diesel costs almost Rs 30 a litre less than petrol.

Tinkering with dual pricing

The ruling United Progressive Alliance has never looked as disunited as it does now. The leader of the UPA&rsquo;s second-largest constituent, Trinamool Congress chief and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, has teamed up with Mulayam Singh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party to completely derail the Congress.

The last straw

A series of leaks from the White House about the United States&rsquo; war against al-Qaeda affiliates in Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan have, over the past month, caused even greater attention to focus on its tactics. Much attention has been fixed on the report that President Barack Obama personally scrutinises each proposed target of a strike by an unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, through meetings at which &ldquo;kill lists&rdquo; are discussed. In Pakistan, in particular, the US&rsquo; use of drones to target suspected militants in that country&rsquo;s lawless northwestern frontier (the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA) has become something of a cause celebre for an alliance of the country&rsquo;s Islamist right and its extensive anti-American liberal elite. Indeed, the tactics, policies and methods of control that the US is developing for its attacks inside Pakistan need to be carefully studied, for it is increasingly likely that they are the future of war.

Game of drones 

Any relief over the Congress having stood up to bullying by its ally, the Trinamool Congress, over the choice of its presidential nominee will necessarily be transitory. The Congress was essentially left with no choice when Trinamool Congress leader and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee snubbed her party&rsquo;s ally and its president &ndash; as well as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh &ndash; by rejecting Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee&rsquo;s candidature and proposing Dr Singh&rsquo;s name instead. That the Congress finally got its act together, firmed up lines of communication with Ms Banerjee&rsquo;s putative ally, Mulayam Singh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party, and ensured that the United Progressive Alliance&rsquo;s (UPA&rsquo;s) other constituents lined up behind Mr Mukherjee shows the party is still capable of manoeuvring when it wishes to.

Short-lived euphoria

The government&rsquo;s new kharif pricing policy, suggesting a steep 16 to 53 per cent increase in the minimum support prices (MSPs) of various crops, is unlikely to fully satisfy farmers even as it will stoke food inflation and swell the food subsidy bill.

Maximum support prices

The conviction of Rajat Gupta in a Wall Street insider trading case has sent shock waves through the corporate universe. Mr Gupta embodied the Indo-American dream: an orphaned immigrant with a stellar academic record, he reached the top at McKinsey. Side by side, he built a reputation as a philanthropist. He was also a prime mover in establishing the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. He also served on many boards, including at Goldman Sachs and Procter &amp; Gamble.

After Rajat

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has chosen to hold both the repo rate and the cash reserve ratio steady. There are reasons why it might have thought that monetary loosening is a bad idea. Prominent among them is the concern that the euro zone will not be able to get its act together on Greece quickly enough to ensure that liquidity does not freeze up worldwide the way it did in 2008. It might be keeping its powder dry for that eventuality.

Inadequate response

It is hard to understand why European leaders collectively expressed so much relief at the prospect of Greece forming a coalition government. It is not obvious how a coalition between two old rivals &ndash; the centre-right New Democracy, which won 29.7 per cent of the vote, and the Socialist Pasok alliance, which came third with 13 per cent of the vote &ndash; will alter the Greeks&rsquo; economic predicament.

No answers from Greece

The international credit rating agency Fitch has lowered the outlook for India&rsquo;s sovereign rating to &ldquo;negative&rdquo; from &ldquo;stable&rdquo;, saying that high inflation, the lack of progress in fixing the fiscal deficit, and stalled reform required that action. While there are many reasons why credit rating agencies have lost credibility since the crisis of 2008 &ndash; not least their seeming inability to accurately judge the risk of default, which is rationally still negligible with India &ndash; they can at least still serve as a marker of investors&rsquo; lack of confidence in the India story. Fitch has followed Standard &amp; Poor&rsquo;s in suggesting that high inflation and a weak global economy mean that there is &ldquo;an even greater onus on effective government policies and reforms&rdquo;. In any case, that the country&rsquo;s macroeconomy has taken a turn for the worse over the past year is hardly possible to deny.

Work for an upgrade

There will be some high-profile absentees, but 120 heads of government are still turning up at&nbsp;Rio&nbsp;de Janeiro for the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, or Rio+20. Their task is so daunting that they are practically set up to fail: to chalk out a strategy for earth-friendly economic development, focused at eradicating poverty and hunger and meeting basic needs while simultaneously conserving the planet&rsquo;s natural assets. This is even harder than it sounds; a UN report put out ahead of the&nbsp;conference says that of the 90-odd objectives agreed to in the original Earth Summit at Rio in 1992, barely four have seen adequate progress. However, that summit did serve as a progenitor for a series of crucial and unprecedented global accords.

Not just another summit

The dispute over engineering entrance examinations gets to the heart of several issues on which India needs to take a call. Worldwide, school-leaving examinations grade a broad range of basic skills, while higher education requires specialised aptitudes. Most premier institutions of higher learning wind up using school-leaving results as a pre-qualifier and devise additional criteria. In the UK and the US, for example, universities often require student applications to be accompanied by essays and recommendations in addition to results from standardised school-leaving exams. India has a plethora of school boards with varying syllabi and uneven examination standards, and so a single-stage admission process would be difficult to implement fairly. It is also true that having to sit for a multitude of entrance examinations places a huge burden on higher secondary students. Hence the desire to introduce a common entrance test (CET) for engineering.

Examination of options

Microsoft&rsquo;s share price has gained 0.75 per cent on Nasdaq after the company announced on Monday the launch of its tablet, Surface. Investors saw in it an attempt by Microsoft to ring-fence its Windows franchise. The personal computer market is fast evolving from laptops to tablets, and Apple&rsquo;s iPad lords it over this market with a share of almost 50 per cent. With its own tablet, Microsoft will perhaps be able to ensure a longer life for Windows, the latest version of which, Windows 8, is to be launched soon. That the Surface might bring Microsoft in conflict with its big customers like Dell and Hewlett-Packard doesn&rsquo;t seem to bother investors, nor does the question of whether Microsoft will be able to develop a sufficiently large ecosystem of software applications, or apps.

Microsoft's big gamble

On Thursday, the Bharatiya Janata Party&rsquo;s (BJP&rsquo;s) leader in the Lok Sabha, Sushma Swaraj, described the face-off between the party&rsquo;s Gujarat chief minister, Narendra Modi, and its ally from the Janata Dal (United), Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, as &ldquo;irrelevant&rdquo; and &ldquo;unfortunate&rdquo;. Unfortunate it may be for the BJP, but hardly irrelevant. The national executive meeting of the BJP in Mumbai recently was widely seen as endorsing Mr Modi&rsquo;s prime ministerial ambitions. Mr Kumar has, in the past, made his discomfort with Mr Modi publicly known, preventing him from campaigning in Bihar as far as possible. He will have been emboldened by the fact that the state&rsquo;s Muslims appear to have rewarded his distancing by swelling the mandate that returned him to power. Mr Modi, meanwhile, has lashed out at &ldquo;leaders from UP and Bihar&rdquo; who are &ldquo;mired in caste-based politics&rdquo;.

Bursting the bubble

A year and a half since it occurred, it might make sense to describe the hopefully labelled &ldquo;Arab Spring&rdquo; of December 2010 as little more than a brief winter of discontent. From Tunisia, where it all started with the suicide of a fruit seller, through Algeria, Morocco, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Syria and the Emirates, it would be difficult to find a civil rights protestor satisfied with the outcome of those globally televised protests. If anything, the region has become even more radicalised and minorities more vulnerable than ever before. North Africa and West Asia remain a long way from the civil rights and prosperity for which people took to the streets.

Broken spring

The division bench of the Calcutta High Court annulling the law under which the Trinamool Congress government of West Bengal sought to return land to Singur farmers unwilling to sell to the Tatas is not the last word on the subject. Most likely, the state will appeal to the Supreme Court. While a part of the verdict rests on a technicality &ndash; the legislation, dealing with a subject under the concurrent list, lacks the President&rsquo;s approval &ndash; it also points out that returning land to landowners and farmers cannot be deemed to be in the public interest. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has hinted that she will follow a dual-track approach &mdash; legal and political. For the latter, she appears on the way to reviving the grass-roots coalition of forces that spearheaded the agitation against what was described as forcible acquisition of land for the Nano project.

Setback to Trinamool

The amount of agricultural credit has exploded in the recent past. But its impact is not showing up to the extent it should. Going by the Reserve Bank of India estimates, the total disbursement of agricultural credit soared by 755 per cent between 2000 and 2010. But it has resulted neither in commensurate growth in farm productivity, nor in the sale of seeds, fertilisers, pesticides and farm machinery. More importantly, the dependence of farmers on informal sources of credit, notably moneylenders, has not declined. The Planning Commission estimates that about 80 million of India&rsquo;s 128 million land-holding farmers continue to be out of the institutional system of credit. Clearly, much of this expansion of credit is missing its target, and is not reaching small and marginal farmers &mdash; who need it the most.

Arbitrage galore

Over the weekend, Indians were told that the Centre planned some big changes for Monday, Pranab Mukherjee&rsquo;s last full day as finance minister and the first working day after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh returned from a series of global summits. Expectations were ramped up, considerably, with the prime minister promising action on reform. Mr Mukherjee said, specifically, that measures would be announced to halt the slide of the rupee; India&rsquo;s currency has depreciated beyond what most analysts would suppose is the exchange rate that economic fundamentals suggest. In response, markets saw some excitement. Stock exchange indices rose, and the rupee appreciated by a percentage point against the dollar. But when Monday rolled around, the news was disappointing: the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) stopped at liberalising foreign exchange regulations marginally. The rupee lost most of the gains it had made, and market indices closed at the day&rsquo;s low.

Not enough

Even as the indifferent monsoon is threatening to affect crop sowing in the current season, the recent spike in the prices of some fertilisers and related developments in the fertiliser sector are adding to disquiet over kharif production prospects.

Soil imbalance

Incisive columns and editorial comment by top opinion leaders

Page 619 - Editorial Comment