THE recent remarks by union defence minister Rajnath Singh with regard to nuclear weapons have set alarm bells ringing. He said that while India has firmly adhered to No First Use (NFU) policy with regard to nuclear weapons in the past, what happens in the future “depends on circumstances”.Ever since India came out as a nuclear weapons power in 1998, it has adhered to the NFU, which was formally established as part of India’s strategic doctrine by the Cabinet Committee on Security Affairs on January 4, 2003.

WHAT was notable about the spate of legislations presented in the first session of parliament was the hurried manner in which they were passed without any legislative scrutiny.  There was no reference to the standing committees or select committees to get the bills vetted and considered.

THE image of President Trump speaking to the media in Washington in the presence of Pakistan Prime Minister, Imran Khan, about Modi’s purported request to him to mediate on Kashmir has had a shattering effect. The issue is not whether Modi actually asked Trump to mediate or not, but how this episode has revealed the fiasco that Modi’s foreign policy has turned out to be. Imran Khan’s visit to the United States was an affirmation of how the Trump administration has changed its approach to Pakistan.

THE sordid happenings in Karnataka have reached a climax with the resignations of 14 MLAs belonging to the Congress and the JD(S) and two independents who were supporting the coalition. This development has come after a series of attempts by the BJP in the past one year to topple the Kumaraswamy government. The BJP was not reconciled to the fact that it could not run a government with majority support after the 2018 assembly elections, even though it had emerged as the single largest party.The BJP has brazenly gone about luring and bribing legislators belonging to the ruling coalition.

THE president’s address to the joint session of parliament, the first after the Lok Sabha election, was expected to spell out the vision and priorities of the second Modi government.  But President Ram Nath Kovind’s speech was sparse in detail and more went unsaid than said. It is clear from the speech that the ruling party sees the “New India” as radically different from the India before 2014.  The RSS notion of a Hindu nationalist Bharat underpins their vision of a ‘New India’. The president refers to the mantra of ‘sab ka saath sab ka vikas’ relating to the previous term of the