INDIA'S struggle for independence was not simply to free India from British rule but also to build a nation that would deliver development to its people. The fruits of freedom would be bitter if independence did not lift its people out of the abject poverty that resulted from two centuries of colonial rule.

DOES the Ukraine war and the action of the US, EU, and the UK spell the end of the dollar as the world's reserve currency? Even if the peace talks between Russia and Ukraine reach a 15-point peace plan, as Financial Times has reported, the fallout for the dollar still remains. For the first time, a major nuclear power and major economy were treated as a vassal state. Its $300 billion foreign exchange reserves lying with the US, EU and the UK were seized.

THE war in Ukraine is now part of three interlocking wars: the physical war, the information war and the economic war. If we want to know what today’s hybrid war looks like, this is it. This is what the US has been preparing for and is now executing, with its control over the world’s biggest digital platforms and weaponising the dollar.

THE possibility of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – or the Iran nuclear deal –being revived, though difficult, has brightened. This could have been accomplished much earlier except for the Biden administration’s attempts to extract concessions from Iran that went far beyond the original deal. The premise of Trump’s pulling out of the 2015 Iran deal, was that he could get a better deal than what Obama had negotiated.

EVERY year, this is the time that the Modi government and the BJP has a serious problem. Its claims of being the nationalist party founders against the brutal reality of almost having no leader of any stature that stood up to the British in India's freedom struggle. That is why its attempt to appropriate any leader of stature, even if they belong to the other political streams.