Too good to be true
The one sensible course for any Finance Minister at this time of huge imponderables is to show he has a firm grip on government finances and a healthy respect for the market. Yeshwant Sinha does poorly on the first count and slightly better on the second. There were impossible expectations from the BJP's first Budget.

Waiting to dominate
The BJP leadership may have decided to conduct the Pokharan tests for reasons of national security. It can be given the benefit of the doubt if only for the sake of argument. But even it can scarcely deny that these tests were also conducted with the expectation that they would help its party to gain more support from the people as well as to gain greater preponderance over its allies, rather members of the governing alliance.

Playing straight into Pakistan's hands
Although the public euphoria and media hype over the nuclear tests, which end years of ambiguity, is understandable, the military relevance or otherwise of nuclear symmetry in the context of South Asia has unfortunately been overlooked. While establishing India's edge in the nuclear field in South Asia, the tests pose innumerable problems.

  The Left is always right