THE BJP rulers of Uttar Pradesh have a medieval communal mindset. Nothing exemplifies this attitude more than their attempt to denigrate the Taj Mahal which is considered as one of the most beautiful buildings in the world.The vilification of the Taj Mahal was begun by the Chief Minister Adityanath himself. In June this year, he called the Taj Mahal and similar Mughal monuments as not reflecting Indian culture. This was followed by the Uttar Pradesh Tourism department omitting the Taj Mahal from the places of tourist interest of the state in a booklet that it brought out.

FOR long one could divide the world’s currencies into three distinct categories: (i) the leading currency, typically belonging to the leading imperialist power,in the present case the United States, which was considered “as good as gold” by the world’s wealth-holders; (ii) other metropolitan currencies in terms of which the world’s wealth-holders also held their wealth, but which, precisely by virtue of not being considered “as good as gold”, had to maintain a certain stable value vis-à-vis the leading currency through the pursuit of appropriate macroeconomic policies, including contraction

LENIN, who was in exile, kept pace with the developments in Russia which were moving with ‘hurricane like velocity’. Along with directing Bolshevik activities from exile, he was immersed in another important task of finishing his monumental work, ‘State and Revolution’, which he started writing in August. He used his experiences from the Russian revolution to explain the theoretical propositions of Karl Marx and Engels.The Kornilov revolt and its defeat had accelerated the Russian revolution tremendously.

THE appointment of Dr Soumya Swaminathan, director general of the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR), as a deputy director general (DDG) of the World Health Organisation is a welcome development. She joins Jane Ellison of the UK as one of the two newly appointed DDGs and will be in overall charge of programmes, while Jane Ellison will be in charge of ‘corporate affairs’. The WHO elected Tedros Adhanom of Ethiopia as the new director general (DG) at the World Health Assembly in May 2017, to replace the outgoing incumbent, Dr Margaret Chan.

BJP president Amit Shah’s son, Jay Shah, has become the centre of a case of crony capitalism and questions are being raised about business malfeasance. According to a well-researched report in “The Wire”, an online news portal, Jay Shah owned a private limited company, Temple Enterprise Pvt Ltd, which had a revenue of only Rs 50,000 in 2014-15 but which rose to a turnover of Rs 80.5 crore in 2015-16, which is a 16,000 fold rise.  The company had unsecured loans of Rs 16.78 crore from a financial services firm.  However, in October 2016, the company abruptly wound up its business.An