Daily Hindu Editorials

👉There is a change in the electoral cartography of Karnataka, also highlighting the potential for alliances👈 There are some trends that stand out in Karnataka’s 2018 Assembly elections. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has held on to the Central Karnataka region and the coastal and Malnad belt. In the Bombay-Karnataka region, while the BJP has held on to its existing advantage, in the Lingayat region of central North Karnataka, it has conceded much more space to the Congress as compared to the 2013 Assembly elections or the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. However, the BJP has made significant advances in the Hyderabad-Karnataka region, except Ballari. Moreover, it has emerged as the rival to the Janata Dal (Secular), or the JD(S), in the southern belt dominated by Vokkaligas, replacing the Congress, although in Mysuru and Chamarajanagar the latter is still holding out. In Bengaluru city the BJP and the Congress are almost equipoised. In the North Bombay-Karnataka region, hitherto...

👉With the Congress losing the mandate and the BJP not getting one, the JD(S) may get lucky👈 A three-way contest without a dominant campaign issue in a politically fragmented State was always going to be too close to call. As the last vote is counted in Karnataka, all the three major parties, the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Congress, and the Janata Dal (Secular), believe they have a right to stake claim to form the government. The Congress clearly lost the election, but the BJP could not win it. The JD(S) retained its core support base, and finished a respectable third. In such a situation, the contest continues beyond the announcement of the results. Quickly realising it had lost the mandate, the Congress wasted no time in reaching out to the JD(S) with a promise to back its leader H.D. Kumaraswamy for the chief ministership. In contrast, the BJP was slowed down by its own ambition. As the early trends showed it ahead in a majority of the seats, the BJP made no overtures to the J...

👉Cauvery basin States must quickly agree on an authority to apply the water-sharing award👈 Now that the Karnataka election is over, the Centre has finally mustered the courage to submit a draft scheme in the Supreme Court to implement the final decision on apportioning the Cauvery waters among the riparian States. The draft, which gives no name for the authority it proposes to create to monitor implementation of the Cauvery Tribunal’s final award, as modified by the Supreme Court, has been largely drawn from the Tribunal’s directions. It will be a two-tier structure, with an apex body charged with the power to ensure compliance with the final award, and a regulation committee that will monitor the field situation and water flow. The powers and functions of the authority are fairly comprehensive. Its powers would extend to apportionment, regulation and control of Cauvery waters, supervision of operations of reservoirs and regulation of water releases. The draft makes the authority...

👉A lack of sufficient funds, rampant payment delays and abysmal wage rates are to blame👈 The ₹11,000 crore fraud that diamond merchant Nirav Modi is said to have created is a figure that needs to be put in perspective. The total amount of wages pending under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) scheme for the whole country (2016-17) was around ₹11,000 crore too. This sum is a fifth of the MGNREGA budget announced for financial year 2018-19. MGNREGA stands out in its worker-centric legislation and stated emphasis on transparency and accountability. Several potentially progressive measures such as a real-time management information system have been put in place. The scheme is meant to be demand-driven in the sense that the government is mandated to provide work within 15 days of a worker seeking work. Otherwise the worker is entitled to an unemployment allowance. A second key provision of the Act pertains to payment of wages within 15 days of com...

👉There are compelling reasons for PM Modi and President Jinping to stay the course👈 Missed opportunities and false starts have been the hallmarks of the India-China story. In the 1950s, the “brotherly friendship” between the two countries led by strong leaders — Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Chairman of the Communist Party of China Mao Zedong — promised to redefine Asia. Dreamers even entertained the idea of India and China piloting a post-colonial Renaissance in the developing world. But the trust-shattering 1962 war annulled all such hopes. The overhang of the border row has marred a full-scale rapprochement between the two countries ever since. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s ambitious visit in 2014 was sullied by the military face-off in Chumar in Ladakh. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s journey to China in 2015 was trailed two years later by a near-war situation in Doklam. But the late-April meeting of the two leaders in Wuhan may yield a more bountiful harvest, n...