WILL DEFEAT RSS IDEOLOGY, SAYS PRIYANKA IN 1ST PARTY MEETING

NEW DELHI: In her first official meeting, the Congress’s newly appointed general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on Thursday told her party colleagues she had vowed to fight the ideology of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The Congress general secretary for Uttar Pradesh east was attending a meeting of general secretaries and state incharges at the party headquarters at 24, Akbar Road.

In her first intervention at the meeting, Priyanka Gandhi said the “ideology and thought process” of the RSS-BJP combine needed to be countered, according to three functionaries present at the meeting.

Priyanka Gandhi, 47, also said she is new and inexperienced but asserted that she will give her best. Congress president Rahul Gandhi, for his part, said he did not expect a “miracle” from Priyanka Gandhi Vadra and Jyotiraditya Scindia, party general secretary incharge of Uttar Pradesh west, in two months, and that they should not feel any pressure. However, he asked them to lay the structure for a Congress revival and make it fighting fit for the 2022 assembly elections in the state. MUMBAI: India’s central bank unexpectedly cut interest rates on Thursday, along with an anticipated change in its policy stance to neutral, citing easing inflation and the need to sustain growth in the world’s fastest growing major economy.

The Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) monetary policy committee (MPC) cut repo rate by 25 basis points to 6.25%. Only 11 of the 43 economists surveyed by Bloomberg expected the central bank to effect a rate cut. Banks, however, remained ambiguous about passing on the benefit to borrowers.

The rate cut, the first such move by RBI since August 2017, comes as the central bank trimmed its retail inflation forecast for the first half of the next fiscal and marginally lowered its economic growth estimate to 7.4%. The monetary stimulus, announced in governor Shaktikanta Das’s debut policy meeting, will aid the government in boosting economic growth.

“The shift in stance from calibrated tightening to neutral provides flexibility to address, and the room to address, sustained growth of India’s economy over the coming months as long as