A report mentioning the spurt in the number of aged people by 2025 has been recently released. There has been a massive changeover in the ratio between young and aged people. China is now going through this phase. The main reason for this is to having clamped down ‘one child policy’. With this, the number of young people reduced in that country and the aged were in double numbers. Before the situation got out of hand, China went easy on that policy and encouraged couples to have more children.

Through the bandh that was called by opposition parties on Monday, it has been very evident that people are very upset with the current regime. The bandh called by Congress, other parties and other pro-people organisations has been a whopping success.

The BJP led by Modi used rising petrol prices as their most powerful weapon to attack the UPA government in the run up to 2014 elections. They added generous amounts of fuel to this petrol fire and spoke at rallies at lengths. Today, those speeches are coming back to bite him.

Is it a constitutionally granted right of the upper caste people to exploit the dalits? Is there an attempt to weaken the act against atrocities on Dalits? The bharat bandh that was called for on Thursday in northern states of India gave rise to such a suspicion and fear. The bandh was called to protest against the concurrence given by the Supreme Court to the atrocities act tabled by the central government.

Terrorism and extremism are the biggest problems plaguing the world. Terrorists and extremists didn’t descend from the skies. Terrorism is a result of excesses of the rich countries. Similar realities are the reason for the genesis of Naxalism in north east and other parts of India. The attack and assault unleased on them made them lose faith in the democratic system, and reach out to weapons to protect themselves.

PM Modi assumed chair declaring ‘na khaunga, na khaane dunga’ (in essence, he wouldn’t go corrupt or wouldn’t allow corruption to thrive under him either). It has been almost four and half years since he came into office saying he would fix everything that people who ruled the country for 70 years did wrong. His bhakts have been saying the same thing as well. In another 8 months, his tenure will get over and the country has hardly seen any changes. Instead, common people had to face difficulty owing to bad execution of GST and demonetization.

Perhaps it was Karkare and his team of ATS officers who were investigating the Malegaon blasts that first recognized the roots of saffron terror gaining ground in the country. The whole team then mysteriously died in an attack by terrorists. Even today, the answer to whether Karkare was killed by internal miscreants or external terrorists is not clear.

Political parties are working on strategies to face the Lok Sabha elections due to be held next year. All parties are only focused on winning elections, and none of them are bothered about the kind of candidates they would be staging for the polls. Their sole need is to get a winning candidate into the fray. Congress party has already held a meeting under the leadership of state incharge K C Venugopal to strategise the approach to elections because the party has to win maximum number of seats in Lok Sabha elections. Hence, media reports suggest, the winnability of the candidate will be the most decisive factor. Yeddyurappa of BJP has also said something similar to this. Who are such candidates who will ‘win for sure’? What are their qualities? No party has bothered to elaborate on these aspects.