INDIA and Pakistan formally became the latest members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) at the latest summit of the grouping held in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, in the second week of June. The two countries had enjoyed observer status in the organisation for many years and have now been elevated to full membership. Iran is the next country that is expected to join the grouping in the near future. The original members of the grouping initially known as the Shanghai Five that was established in 1995 were Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

A CPI(M)  delegation along with the sons of Md. Iklakh and Pehlu Khan, both victims of lynch mobs, and other affected families met Home Minister Rajnath Singh on July 4 and gave him a memorandum detailing five specific cases of violence and lynching against Muslim families in the NCR region. The delegation comprised of Polit Bureau member Brinda Karat, Surinder Malik and KM Tewari (secretaries of Haryana and Delhi state committees of CPI(M) respectively), Sehba Farooqui, Inderjit Singh, Abdul Salam, Mubarak Khan and Danish Khan and Gangeswar.

THE Bank Employees Federation of India, in a statement issued on the Financial Resolution and Deposit Insurance Bill 2016 (FRDI) cleared by the union cabinet on June 14, 2017, said that this bill is a piece of legislation for overnight closure of banks impelling doom for crores of depositors, not to speak of lakhs of bank employees.

MUCH hype has surrounded the transition to the Goods and Service Tax (GST regime) which has tended to be elevated to the status of being the magical solution to all of India’s economic problems. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. Quite independent of the intrinsic merits or demerits of GST compared with the structure of taxes it has replaced, the changeover does not address the fundamental challenges of the Indian economy even in the sphere of taxation.If at all GST is a reform, it is a reform of the indirect tax regime.

NARENDRA Modi’s attempt to imitate Jawaharlal Nehru by giving a mid-night speech on July 1 at the Central Hall of parliament, while inaugurating the Goods and Services Tax, could perhaps be passed off as a merely laughable idiosyncracy. His equating, or even putting on a parallel footing, a mere tax-reform with the grand historic event of India’s attaining independence, could perhaps be shrugged off as just harmless self-promotion by one who prides himself as the author of the tax-reform.