A broad-spectrum antidote
The government has instituted a Task Force to develop the modalities for setting up a National Security Council (NSC), a long-overdue measure. In September 1983, Indira Gandhi anticipated changes in the security environment and instituted a Cabinet Committee on National Security (CCNS). But it got sidetracked after 1984.
The loneliness of Atal Behari Vajpayee
There was a time when death seemed to stare Atal Behari Vajpayee in the face. He was seriously ill in New York. But there was the spirit to fight back, and he had even given poetic expression to it. Today Vajpayee shows little determination to meet the gathering storm that seems to have hit his fledgling prime ministership.
More public works
In the good old days governments used to heed Keynesian advice to spend their way out of an economic recession by starting civic works on a large scale. Many holes were dug and filled up but some governments did better and built roads and irrigation bunds. Today, the universal prescription for kick-starting the economy is once again those public works programmes.
Beyond Coimbatore
The White Paper presented by the Tamil Nadu government on the blasts that shook Coimbatore on the eve of the Lok Sabha elections has elicited predictable reactions from the contending political camps. None of these, however, reveals the necessary recognition of the main political point that needs to be made.
Preview of the day after
Every other week some teenager, somewhere in the world, gets into a sensitive US installation's servers and replaces the picture of its director with that of a nude woman. "Hey," say America's digital watchdogs dismissively, "kids will be kids." But privately, they have long anticipated the day when this children's game in cyberspace becomes a full-fledged war game.
"We have nothing to say in our defence, we were compelled to join Sukh Ram"
BJP national secretary Narendra Modi represents the party's young and aggressive face. A swayamsewak since his childhood -- he is still a pracharak -- the 45-year-old leader steered his party to success in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh in the recent Lok Sabha elections.
