Above the Fold: Top stories of the day
1. With the monsoon so far coming at just 2% under average, fears of a drought year are starting to recede.
2. Russia has proposed to massively expand its civil nuclear cooperation with India, suggesting it will build 20 nuclear power units in India instead of just 12 and also involve India in the construction of other units elsewhere.
3. Indians have bagged three titles at this year's Wimbledon, with Sumit Nagal winning the boys' doubles title and both Leander Paes and Sania Mirza combining with Swiss star Martina Hingis to win the mixed and women's doubles titles.
The Big Story: Face-ing Trouble
The potential pitfalls for the grand Janata Parivar alliance are clear for all to see and will come into focus once seat-sharing talks properly begin. But across the aisle, on the Bharatiya Janata Party side, things are hardly settled either. Over the last few days alone, the BJP has set out to win over the Yadavs, traditionally voters who have stuck to Lalu Prasad Yadav's Rashtriya Janata Dal. At the same time potential BJP ally Jitan Ram Manjhi, a former chief minister, has said he will only join hands if a seat-sharing offer is "respectable". And BJP leader Shatrugan Sinha stirred the pot by saying Lok Janshakti Party chief Ram Vilas Paswan would make a good chief minister.
Most people think that the lesson of the BJP's Kiran Bedi debacle, which saw the renowned activist and former police officer be parachuted in as a chief ministerial candidate in Delhi only for the party to be completely routed, had something to do with Bedi's personality itself. True, she wasn't exactly the most charming of candidates. But Bedi's imposition was also effected late in the game, as the BJP began to get worried that current chief minister Arvind Kejriwal was successfully running against effectively no one. That prompted the BJP to field a face at a rather advanced stage of the campaign, one that made its own workers unhappy.
As chief minister Nitish Kumar starts to use his outreach to make it clear that the Janata Parivar candidate will be him and no one else, the BJP is increasingly going to come under the same sort of pressure that it did in Delhi. Its own allies and leaders will start talking up potential chief ministerial candidates, other allies might complain about seat-sharing and Kumar will say he is going up against no one. The downsides to naming a chief ministerial candidate for the BJP, however, are as many as not naming one. It isn't going to be an easy couple of months.
The Big Scroll: Scroll.in on the day's biggest story
Sushil Modi's chief ministerial ambitions are causing infightingin the Bihar BJP. This is why media’s assumptions of Muslim consolidation behind anti-BJP alliance in Bihar are all wrong.
Politicking & Policying
1. Just days after a joint statement saw Pakistan promising it would do whatever is necessary to move forward in the Mumbai attacks trial, the prosecutor in the case said they would not be submitting voice samples of Lashkar-e-Tayyeba commander Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi to the court.
2. A Right to Information request filed by the Indian Express reveals that the government did not approach anyone else for the post of Film and Television Institute of India chairman, though numerous unidentified sources have sought to tell newspapers that "numerous eminent people" turned down the post.
3. Jammu and Kashmir finance minister Haseeb Drabu is set to have talks with the Centre over a demand for a Rs 1 lakh crore development package, which some suggest might be announced by the Prime Minister on Eid.
4. The Bharatiya Janata Party plans to launch a "sub-campaign" in Madhya Pradesh to convince the people that chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan was the "real whistleblower" in the massive Vyapam examination-rigging scandal.
5. The government is in a hurry to improve the functioning of the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust, which handles half of India's container trade, since this is a key part of the Doing Business Index.
Punditry
1. Neelkanth Mishra in the Indian Express explains how successive governments have used accounting tricks to stick within India's stated fiscal deficit, to the detriment of the economy, and the same problem is likely to happen this year.
2. While the government might claim it is doing well thanks to the GDP numbers, other indicators including industrial growth should be cause for concern, says a leader in the Business Standard.
3. "Economic thinking has saturated our common sense to such an extent that it has become almost impossible for us to imagine that there might be an alternative vision of social change that has nothing to do with development or an economistic agenda of progress," writes G Sampath in the Hindu.
Don't Miss
Anu Kumar tells us what brought the original James Bond to Upper Assam after World War II.
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1. With the monsoon so far coming at just 2% under average, fears of a drought year are starting to recede.
2. Russia has proposed to massively expand its civil nuclear cooperation with India, suggesting it will build 20 nuclear power units in India instead of just 12 and also involve India in the construction of other units elsewhere.
3. Indians have bagged three titles at this year's Wimbledon, with Sumit Nagal winning the boys' doubles title and both Leander Paes and Sania Mirza combining with Swiss star Martina Hingis to win the mixed and women's doubles titles.
The Big Story: Face-ing Trouble
The potential pitfalls for the grand Janata Parivar alliance are clear for all to see and will come into focus once seat-sharing talks properly begin. But across the aisle, on the Bharatiya Janata Party side, things are hardly settled either. Over the last few days alone, the BJP has set out to win over the Yadavs, traditionally voters who have stuck to Lalu Prasad Yadav's Rashtriya Janata Dal. At the same time potential BJP ally Jitan Ram Manjhi, a former chief minister, has said he will only join hands if a seat-sharing offer is "respectable". And BJP leader Shatrugan Sinha stirred the pot by saying Lok Janshakti Party chief Ram Vilas Paswan would make a good chief minister.
Most people think that the lesson of the BJP's Kiran Bedi debacle, which saw the renowned activist and former police officer be parachuted in as a chief ministerial candidate in Delhi only for the party to be completely routed, had something to do with Bedi's personality itself. True, she wasn't exactly the most charming of candidates. But Bedi's imposition was also effected late in the game, as the BJP began to get worried that current chief minister Arvind Kejriwal was successfully running against effectively no one. That prompted the BJP to field a face at a rather advanced stage of the campaign, one that made its own workers unhappy.
As chief minister Nitish Kumar starts to use his outreach to make it clear that the Janata Parivar candidate will be him and no one else, the BJP is increasingly going to come under the same sort of pressure that it did in Delhi. Its own allies and leaders will start talking up potential chief ministerial candidates, other allies might complain about seat-sharing and Kumar will say he is going up against no one. The downsides to naming a chief ministerial candidate for the BJP, however, are as many as not naming one. It isn't going to be an easy couple of months.
The Big Scroll: Scroll.in on the day's biggest story
Sushil Modi's chief ministerial ambitions are causing infightingin the Bihar BJP. This is why media’s assumptions of Muslim consolidation behind anti-BJP alliance in Bihar are all wrong.
Politicking & Policying
1. Just days after a joint statement saw Pakistan promising it would do whatever is necessary to move forward in the Mumbai attacks trial, the prosecutor in the case said they would not be submitting voice samples of Lashkar-e-Tayyeba commander Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi to the court.
2. A Right to Information request filed by the Indian Express reveals that the government did not approach anyone else for the post of Film and Television Institute of India chairman, though numerous unidentified sources have sought to tell newspapers that "numerous eminent people" turned down the post.
3. Jammu and Kashmir finance minister Haseeb Drabu is set to have talks with the Centre over a demand for a Rs 1 lakh crore development package, which some suggest might be announced by the Prime Minister on Eid.
4. The Bharatiya Janata Party plans to launch a "sub-campaign" in Madhya Pradesh to convince the people that chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan was the "real whistleblower" in the massive Vyapam examination-rigging scandal.
5. The government is in a hurry to improve the functioning of the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust, which handles half of India's container trade, since this is a key part of the Doing Business Index.
Punditry
1. Neelkanth Mishra in the Indian Express explains how successive governments have used accounting tricks to stick within India's stated fiscal deficit, to the detriment of the economy, and the same problem is likely to happen this year.
2. While the government might claim it is doing well thanks to the GDP numbers, other indicators including industrial growth should be cause for concern, says a leader in the Business Standard.
3. "Economic thinking has saturated our common sense to such an extent that it has become almost impossible for us to imagine that there might be an alternative vision of social change that has nothing to do with development or an economistic agenda of progress," writes G Sampath in the Hindu.
Don't Miss
Anu Kumar tells us what brought the original James Bond to Upper Assam after World War II.
Soon afterwards, Izzard found himself in India. He reported for the Daily Mail on the trauma of Partition. When he read about the buru, he exchanged letters with Charles Stonor, who admitted that he had not seen the creature either but merely said that if the buru indeed existed, it was a reptile “of the size of an ox, with a prominent snout.” Stonor surmised it was “either a primitive kind of crocodile, or even a dinosaur." It was this speculation that would fuel the new pseudoscience called cryptozoology, dedicated to animals rumoured to be in existence but never seen.
