Ten years after the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre came down in New York, the world is taking stock. In the ensuing &ldquo;war on terror&rdquo;, though the Al Qaeda has been defeated, it hasn&rsquo;t been destroyed. The terrorist organisation&rsquo;s key calculation, that a furious United States homing in on targets in West Asia would provoke a general Arab uprising, has been belied. Osama bin Laden and many of his key aides are dead, and no Arab nation wants to have anything to do with the organisation. If anything, the &ldquo;Arab Spring&rdquo; is a negation of Al Qaeda-style terrorism and a vote for representative democracy (different from bin Laden&rsquo;s dream of a unifying caliphate). No one can rule out fresh outrages by motivated groups in isolated cells, but in a decade when there have been Al Qaeda-inspired attacks in Britain, Spain, Indonesia and elsewhere, there have been none in the US, or none that have been successful.

A costly victory

Business Standard

On balance, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh&rsquo;s visit to Bangladesh has been good and useful, with several important agreements that will strengthen the bilateral relationship. However, it hasn&rsquo;t turned out to be the much-anticipated &ldquo;historic&rdquo; visit envisioned originally. The author of this sorry chapter was West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. The Teesta and Feni river waters agreement was, of course, not as important as the trade concessions that India has offered and the land transfers and border agreements on which both countries have agreed. It took the Indian government a considerable effort to make the concessions on textile trade, and Bangladesh has appreciated this fact.

Good, not historic

During the Indo-Pak talks in New Delhi on April 8, 1974, the Pakistani delegation leader suggested to the Indians inclusion of a phrase &ndash; &ldquo;on the basis of sovereign equality&rdquo; &ndash; in the agreement they were about to sign, which reiterated the two nations&rsquo; resolve to work toward achieving durable peace in the subcontinent.

B Z Khasru: Mamata's folly

As the clamour for CCTV surveillance rises with every bomb blast and terror strike, it is not incorrect to say that privacy is becoming an increasingly elusive and complicated issue in our modern lives.

Private limited

The French Connection&rdquo; was the evocative name given to a dinner organised by the Bangalore Wine Club at the Blue Ginger, Taj West End, Bangalore, on August 20, that paired French-Vietnamese cuisine with four wines from Bordeaux.

Winevestment

A few years ago, while doing research for a story, I visited a theatre called Moti Talkies in old Delhi. A quick look around gave me a sense of how the communal film-viewing culture in this part of the city was fading. Families rarely came together to watch films now, one of the theatre&rsquo;s employees told me, so there was little motivation or money for revamping. The barely maintained hall with its crumbling seats specialised in irregular screenings of Bhojpuri films: B-movie posters on the walls showed buxom heroines, street-Romeos trying to look cool in shades, and leering policemen twirling phallic batons.

Slum-side theatres

India&rsquo;s social fabric has been dented in the past month over the issue of corruption. Corruption has many faces, one of the more important of which is tax evasion. Tax evasion can be unilateral, on account of taxpayers alone, or bilateral, through collusion between taxpayers and the tax collector, thus robbing the state of its due revenue, or multilateral, where a society participates in it through resistance to remedial measures.

Parthasarathi Shome: Tax evasion as corruption

Five years ago, the World Economic Forum gave India a competitiveness score of 4.3, one notch below China&rsquo;s 4.4. Earlier this week, the latest scores were the same 4.3 for India, and 4.9 for China. The average score for 80 emerging and developing countries has moved up in these five years from 4.1 to 4.4. From being ahead of that average, India has fallen behind.

T N Ninan: Divergent narratives

Business Standard looks at how civil aviation, telecoms, technology and insurance sectors changed after the terror attack on America.

Post-9/11, the world has changed the way it goes about its job...

The alert issued by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) about a possible resurgence of the dreaded bird flu virus needs to be taken seriously for several reasons. For one, India is among the six countries identified as being at high risk. The others so identified are Bangladesh, China, Egypt, Indonesia and Vietnam. Worse, this danger comes from a mutant strain of the common bird flu virus H5N1, which can bypass the protection offered by existing vaccines and can, therefore, pose unpredictable risks to poultry and human health. The FAO has explicitly indicated the presence of the new strain, described as H5N1 2.3.2.1, in China and Vietnam, from where wild and migratory birds are carrying it even to previously virus-free countries like Israel, the Palestinian Territories, Bulgaria, Romania, Mongolia and Nepal. Clearly, no country, least of all India, can consider itself safe.

Early bird warning

The problems of terrorism and Left wing extremism are the two major challenges that our society and polity face today. The terrorist attack in Delhi last Wednesday is a stark reminder that there can be no let up in our vigilance. Terrorists seek to justify such violence based on misplaced sense of ideology. The institutions and instruments of our democratic polity allow sufficient opportunity for articulating differing points of view without recourse to violence.

Manmohan Singh: 'Terrorists have a misplaced ideology'

The only bright spot in the latest Census, 2011, was the data on literacy. It seems to be increasing by leaps and bounds. In fact, one would imagine that walking into the forests of Jharkhand, the first man you meet will know how to read and write fluently in Hindi or the local dialect.

Sreelatha Menon: Should Bihar celebrate?

The government&rsquo;s troubles mount, with the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) coming out with two more damning reports, one on Air India/Indian Airlines and the other on oil and gas. The criticism has been long anticipated (parts of a draft report had leaked), and many of the findings reflect what has been aired earlier in the media. What view Parliament&rsquo;s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) takes of the reports is, of course, another matter; the PAC has been split down the middle on the telecom spectrum issue, and become more partisan than in the past. Meanwhile, there are elements in the reports that would warrant the criticism once again that the government&rsquo;s auditor is over-stepping its brief.

Two more

The government has done well to quickly bring to Parliament a Bill for replacing the 1894 law on land acquisition, and thrown into the bag new provisions for relief and rehabilitation. A draft version of the composite Bill was put out for discussion some weeks ago by the rural development minister. Some key changes have been made to that draft, and the minister has said that further changes can be considered as the Bill goes through parliamentary scrutiny. Indeed, although the issue has gained some political urgency because of the protests over forcible land acquisition in many states, it would do well to hasten slowly so that what gets enacted into law is not one that creates new, unanticipated problems.

Hasten slowly

An economist and this newspaper&rsquo;s columnist, Arvind Subramanian, has written a provocative book announcing the potential arrival of China as the world&rsquo;s &ldquo;dominant&rdquo; economic power sooner than widely imagined.

Sanjaya Baru: A Sinopolar world

It is unfortunate that sixty four years after independence and twenty one years after the liberalisation process started, we are subjected to a set of labour laws which are colonial in origin.

First foray into labour reforms? revisiting the Factories' Act

A working group set up by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on non-banking financial companies has recommended a very progressive framework to regulate non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) but the path ahead can be treacherous and needs to be treaded upon carefully.

NBFC policy: Devil in the detail?

Now that the negative list for the service tax is out, though a tentative one, for public consideration and evaluation,the next logical thing that should happen to complete the structure of the whole new regime of goods and services tax is that the government should come out with a tentative negative list for goods tax .

Now negative list for goods tax

The Supreme Court last week ruled that manufacturers of laminated particle board will be liable to pay a higher excise duty as after processing, the product becomes a distinct marketable commodity different from the original one. The panels, after lamination, become water resistant, scratch resistant and look attractive due to printed design paper. In this case, Commissioner of Central Excise vs Kitply Industries Ltd, the appellate tribunal had accepted the argument of the manufacturer that laminated board was similar to particle board. The court overruled that view.

SC: Pay excise duty on laminated particle board

Last few weeks saw Indian media debating on how multinational corporations are at logger heads with Indian Revenue in relation to shifting profits out of India. In the world of taxation this concept of transfer pricing is amongst the more popular topics.

Transfer pricing law - reflections & prejudices

Important signals on the government&rsquo;s economic policy imperatives and priorities have emerged from the macro-economic framework the Planning Commission has outlined for the Twelfth Five Year Plan starting next April. These indicate that our planners have already acknowledged the unlikelihood of any major step-up in the speed of policy change in the coming few years.

A K Bhattacharya: Marking time on reforms

Business Standard brings you expert opinions on various issues

Page 732 - Opinion Specials