View: Of two exits and one (re-)entry: Urjit Patel, Upendra Kushwaha, Vijay Mallya

The hanging sentence has many functions. One of its more salient ones is to keep coming to any conclusion at bay. So we have 'Urjit Patel resigns as RBI chief...', 'Upendra Kushwaha resigns as Union cabinet minister...' and 'Vijaya Mallya now resigned to return to India...'

The ellipses in each of these precarious sentences present cheeky options for tying them all together like laces for a one-size-fits-all news that's fit to print. But being of empirical mind, one must let the three bits of information be gauged on their own -- even if the government can be made to see, and show, that all of these bits bring it cheer that should range from decent to good.

An RBI governor stepping down 'for personal reasons' at a time when much has been made of a sparring match between the central bank and the central government is the thing that polite society will approve. And politeness, all this while a casualty, may be seen to have returned in wake of the RBI-GoI fracas.


The British court ordering Mallya's extradition to India -- coming on the heels of Christian Michel's extradition from Dubai last week -- can be seen as an heady concoction of India's hard, soft and poached power, topped with the unbeatable dressing of 'bringing a bad guy (read: fat cat) to justice'. This is good news, from whichever side one looks at it -- except perhaps from that of the former King of Good Times.

Rashtriya Lok Samta Party (RLSP) chief Kushwaha 'suddenly' overturning the ludo board because of unhappiness with his boss, the prime minister's, and the BJP president's, way in which they are seeking to win elections 'by hook or by crook' (read: by the way tickets were distributed in Bihar for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections among NDA partners), may be seen as good riddance... Another hanging sentence, that.

All in all, hung assemblies or not, these three disparate hanging pieces of information have managed to add some dots for punters to join before tomorrow's assembly poll verdicts. The government and the ruling party can relax till then, and consider -- as surely they already do -- the two exits and one entry as some good old winter cleaning. For spring will only arrive next year.