Dwarkanath S Kotnis was sent to China in 1938 as part of an Indian medical mission after China was invaded by Japan. He served on the frontline and saved the lives of many Chinese soldiers. After four years in China, he fell ill and died at the age of 32.

In China, Dr Kotnis fell in love and married a Chinese nurse who worked with him. Quo Qinglan, who remained in China, died last year in the city of Dalian. They had a son, who was studying to become a doctor but he died when he was 24.

"The army has lost of a helping hand, the nation a friend. Let us always bear in mind his international spirit," China's former communist leader and revolutionary hero Mao Zedong reportedly said in a tribute.

Following a long tradition, Premier Li Keqiang will visit the doctor's family in Mumbai, where his 92-year-old sister will receive him. "We are overwhelmed that even after so many years, my brother is remembered and loved by the Chinese and that the premier is taking pains to meet us," Manorama Kotnis, who has met three Chinese leaders, told the Indian Express.

At home, Dr Kotnis appears to be a little-known figure these days, although he was immortalised in a 1946 film and is still mentioned in text books.

In China, he is revered as a hero to this day: stamps bearing his picture have been printed and there is a memorial to him in Hebei province. Dr Kotnis was chosen as one of the "top 10 foreigners" in a 2009 internet poll of China's foreign friends in a century. The doctor "continues to be revered by the Chinese people," says China Daily.

What accounts for Dr Kotnis's popularity in China and why have the country's leaders felt the need to visit his family since 1950?

China experts like Srikanth Kondapalli say a visit to the Kotnis family by Chinese leaders is loaded with symbolism of a shared history of anti-imperial and colonial struggles long before border disputes led to a full-blown war in 1962 and soured ties between the two countries.

"By visiting the family, they are harking back to the solidarity between the two countries when both India and China were fighting colonialism and imperialism," says Prof Kondapalli.

In 1924, India's first Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore visited China and spoke about his admiration for "its world of beauty", "wisdom" and "touch of the human". He spoke about the need for "eternally revealing a joyous relationship unforeseen" between the two countries.

In 1940 - seven years before India's independence and nine years before the Chinese revolution - Mao wrote to the man who would become independent India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and said that "our emancipation, the emancipation of the Indian people and the Chinese, will be the signal of the emancipation of all down-trodden and oppressed".

And in 1942, Mahatma Gandhi wrote to late Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek saying that he had "always felt drawn towards you in your fight for freedom, and that contact and our conversation brought China and her problems still nearer to me".

Prof Kondapalli says when Chinese leaders pay homage to Dr Kotnis they evoke the bonhomie of the high noon of Sino-Indian relations.

The world has changed since then.

China and Japan are two of the world's three biggest economies, and India does business with both. Japan's relations with China are repeatedly strained over a deadlocked territorial dispute and historical grievances. India's relations with China come under strain over the ill-defined border they share.

Through all this the memory of Dr Kotnis endures.

For a government which has lurched from one crisis to another, developments over the weekend evoked a sense of deja vu.

Two senior ministers, reportedly handpicked by the prime minister himself, resigned over links with corruption claims, plunging the party into another crisis.

Pawan Bansal quit as the railway minister after police arrested his nephew for bribery, and Ashwani Kumar stepped down as the law minister amid claims he influenced a report investigating a coal scandal. Both deny wrongdoing.

Mr Singh's government is already hobbled by corruption scandals involving his cabinet ministers ranging from allocation of resources (mobile phone spectrum licenses and coal) to plain old-fashioned bribery allegations (money for transfer of officials to "lucrative" postings). Critics are already calling Mr Singh's government the most corrupt one in India's history.

But corruption charges are only part of the problem.

Jobs have shrunk, the economy is crawling, inflation and interest rates remain high, the current account deficit is threatening, manufacturing has hit the buffers and skittish bureaucrats privately complain of "policy paralysis". To make matters worse, India's politics looks broken: bipartisanship has collapsed, and nothing much gets done these days in the parliament.

And now, much of the blame is being laid at Mr Singh's door.

Never have the headlines been harsher: the media is no more enamoured of Mr Singh.

India Today magazine calls him Dr Dolittle. Descent Of A Man is the Outlook magazine cover, which says that Mr Singh is piloting a "sinking ship". No, Prime Minister, says the feisty Tehelka magazine in a long and unusually strong critique of Mr Singh. Once Was King, says Business Standard.

Analysts say Mr Singh's image has taken a battering for a variety of reasons.

Some, like historian Ramachandra Guha, say he's "timid and status quoist" and should have put in his papers in 2009 after he led the government to a second term in office.

Others say he did not "show enough spine" when the corruption scandals began to emerge. ("He should have gone to the party and said, I refuse to carry the can, but he did not do that," Mr Singh's former press advisor Sanjaya Baru told Tehelka. Mr Baru says the prime minister "never assumed that authority".)

Still others say the fabled Delhi diarchy - Mr Singh would run the government, while the powerful Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi ran the party - has failed. One commentator likens the prime minister to a CEO who was not allowed to pick his own team: "the proprietor [Sonia Gandhi] did so for him".

One of the more perceptive and well-argued critiques has come from journalist Mihir Sharma. Writing in Business Standard, he said Mr Singh's "mismanagement of the economy" had hit his image hardest. Also, he wrote, the scandals over allocation of telecom spectrum and coalfields stemmed from his "hurry" to speed up building much-needed infrastructure without sufficient regulatory capacity.

The irony is that Indians never really get to hear Mr Singh's defence. Painfully media-shy, he hardly gives interviews. Sonia Gandhi has also avoided the press. With less than a year set for general elections, this silence does not bode well for the future of Mr Singh's government and the Congress party.

A lot of the "anger" has been played out on TV news channels. Some of them described Singh, who died in a Lahore hospital, as a "martyr".

India's social media are predictably buzzing with sentiments ranging from the maudlin to revulsion.

Bollywood star Salman Khan said it was "freedom at last" for Singh; Actress Sonam Kapoor said she felt "betrayed as an Indian". A leading script-writer and poet, Javed Akhtar, described Singh's death as an act of "extreme meanness by a very petty minded establishment".

The leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Sushma Swaraj, unsurprisingly, called it "cold blooded murder". Senior journalist Rajdeep Sardesai tried to knock some sense into the debate, asking where all the rage had been when Sarabjit's family fought their "lonely battle for years".

Owais Sheikh, Sarabjit Singh's lawyer in Lahore for the past four years, told me he had been lodged in a solitary cell like other prisoners on death row.

"I have heard reports that he was attacked by two inmates with steel bars when he was returning to his cell from a 15-minute walk which the guards used to take him out for every evening," Mr Sheikh said.

"The question is how could such an attack happen in custody? It's a mystery. I am waiting for the inquiry report."

In many ways, the flare up of emotions over Singh's death again brings to the fore the neuroses that mark relations between the two nuclear-armed, estranged South Asian siblings.

But much of the distrust and misgivings, many believe, are rooted in grim realities, which sometimes escape attention.

One of them, says former top diplomat Chinmaya Gharekhan, is Pakistan's "failure" to protect Singh in custody.

Singh had complained last year that he was being ill-treated in prison and that he feared for his life. On the other hand, says Mr Garekhan, India spent $3m to set up a special cell and protect Mohammad Ajmal Amir Qasab, a Pakistani who was the sole surviving gunman from the 2008 Mumbai attacks. He was executed last November.

"This is really the bigger point," Mr Gharekhan tells me. "We managed to protect Qasab, who was convicted on a charge of terrorism, in custody. Pakistan failed to protect Singh. This is an issue which will rankle with many people."

Others, like former diplomat Kanwal Sibal, say that Pakistan could have defused the situation "somewhat" by taking quick, exemplary action against officials of the prison where Singh was lodged - "like sacking the jail chief" - and by telling India that it would allow him to be sent to India for treatment, a demand raised by his family. "It would have been a political gesture," he says.

So will Singh's death come as a fresh setback to the tetchy relations between the two neighbours? Hardly, believe diplomats in India. Relations, they say, will remain frozen until general elections have been held in both countries. Pakistan goes to the polls in a week, India not for another year. Diplomats believe Singh's death may become political fodder for the BJP in the run-up to general elections next year, but may not end up fetching many votes.

The larger question is how the two countries treat each other's prisoners, held for lesser charges like straying into each other's territory.

Hundreds of Indians and Pakistanis are languishing in each other's jails, many after completing their sentences. One Pakistani man in India has been stranded for 13 years for overstaying by just three days. Both countries appear to have abandoned him to his tragic fate, a BBC investigation found last year.

Diplomats and rights activists believe it is high time the two countries forge an agreement on how to treat each other's prisoners held on lesser charges. The unfortunate death of Sarabjit Singh again highlights how ordinary citizens have actually become the biggest victims of an intractable rivalry.

The sceptics insist that growth has been largely jobless and deepened inequality in an already hierarchical society.

The optimistic refute this gloomy thesis and believe that the rising tide has lifted all boats.

As an example, they point to the emergence of a small but growing class of Dalit (formerly known as untouchables, the lowest in India's wretched caste hierarchy) millionaires.

So much so that Dalit activists like Chandra Bhan Prasad like to call it a "golden period" for Dalits where "material markers are replacing social markers".

Studies have also shown that the wage gap between Dalits and other castes have narrowed and their standing has improved. There is even a Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

But new research by Lakshmi Iyer, Tarun Khanna and Ashustosh Varshney paints a less rosy picture.

Delving into the relationship between caste and entrepreneurship, the researchers have found that scheduled castes and tribes, the most disadvantaged groups in Hinduism's hierarchy, owned very little businesses despite a decade of sprightly economic growth and a long history of affirmative action.

Mining information thrown up by the 2005 economic census covering more than 42 million enterprises, they found schedule castes owned only 9.8% of all enterprises in India in 2005, well below their 16.4% share of the total population.

The scheduled tribes owned only 3.7% of non-farm enterprises despite being 7.7% of the population.

However, ownership of business among OBC's - an acronym for Other Backward Castes or the "middle castes" who "neither suffering the extreme social and economic discrimination of the Scheduled Castes, nor enjoying the social privileges of the upper castes" - has grown.

OBCs comprise 41% of India's people. Their members owned 43.5% of all enterprises in 2005, and accounted for 40% of non-farm employment.

This is a remarkable achievement considering that affirmative action for this group was widely introduced only in the 1990s.

The pattern of dismally low ownership of businesses among the most disadvantaged groups, the researchers found, is not specific to any one region or state in India.

Even in states like Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra that were among the first to have social movements to end caste discrimination, ownership of enterprises is low.

States with high population of the disadvantaged groups also show that they are under-represented in ownership of businesses.

The researchers say there could be a host of reasons - caste discrimination itself (members of other castes refuse to work with the lowest castes), lack of knowledge, illiteracy, and problems with securing finance.

"All these factors," they say, "can prevent scheduled castes from entering industries that have significant economies of scale."

Growth possibilities are limited by differences in the size of worker networks - scheduled caste owners find it easier to work with scheduled caste workers.

I asked Dr Varshney, who teaches at the US's Brown University, whether the findings really came as a surprise, given that deeper social changes in societies like India take a lot of time.

He said he wasn't.

"I should, however, add that the story of the rise of the Dalit millionaires is not small either. Though numerically insignificant, it is politically, economically and socially very significant," he told me.

Over time, he believes, the rise of Dalits "may well become comparable" to the rise of Nadars - a southern caste - in Tamil Nadu.

Until about 150 years ago Nadars - mostly "toddy tappers" - were condemned to a near untouchable status. Today, they are a leading business community in the state and are found in all classes.

I asked Dr Varshney whether increased representation in politics had anything to do with higher ownership of business for different caste groups? I cited the example of the increasingly influential OBC-led politics in the country.

"Whether that happens remains unclear. The correlation undoubtedly exists, but the causes are still to be sorted out," he said.

I also wondered why decades of affirmative action and more than two decades of economic liberalisation hadn't still unleashed entrepreneurial energies among the most disadvantaged.

"Such transformations can take a long time," he said. "The rise of the Nadars, for example, took nearly eight to 10 decades, depending on how one defines the rise."

Monday's decision means generic drugmakers can continue to sell copies of the drug at a lower price in India, one of the fastest growing pharmaceutical markets in the world.

For one, Dr Selvaraj says, the judgement upholds India's "progressive" patent laws that throw out frivolous patents and clearly distinguish between what is new and what already exists.

"The law sends out the signal that we don't want to encourage companies to take patents on substances which already exist."

More importantly, the decision is a major boost to cheap life-saving drugs in a country where the healthcare system cannot cope with the demands on it and most people end up buying their own medicines if they can afford to.

India spends a little over 4% of its GDP on healthcare, compared with an average of 8-9% among developed countries.

Some 70% of this spending is by individuals and households. A substantial amount of household spending in India is on medicines, government figures show. Most of that is on generic drugs as patented drugs comprise less than 10% of drug sales.

That explains how critical cheap drugs are to saving lives in India.

Also, as experts like Dr Selvaraj point out, the judgement will be happy tidings for people around the world.

India, they say, is the "pharmacy of the world".

Some 40% of the drugs produced by its $11bn pharmaceutical industry, one of the largest in the world, are exported. The majority of the exports comprise cheap generics.

Not surprisingly Novartis is unhappy with the ruling - it says the move "discourages innovative drug discovery essential to advancing medical science for patients".

The company had sounded out a warning ahead of the judgement.

"If the situation stays as now, all improvements on an original compound are not protectable and such drugs would probably not be rolled out in India," Paul Herrling, former Novartis's head of research and development, told the Financial Times.

"Why should we?" he added

Experts like Dr Selvaraj believe such warnings are specious.

"India can actually hold such a threat out to other developing countries, not the other way round. A substantial amount of its generic drug market is in Europe and the US," he says.

Also, India possibly doesn't need to worry about this decision affecting foreign investment in its drug industry, which, at less than 2%, is low.

Most foreign pharmaceutical companies appear keener to acquire Indian companies, or they trade in imported medicines.

"They make very little medicine here," Dr Selvaraj says.

Glivec, which is used to treat chronic myeloid leukaemia and other cancers, costs about $2,600 (£1,710) a month. The generic equivalent is currently available in India for just $175.

Do drugs really have to be so expensive? asks Michelle Childs of Medicins Sans Frontiers.

It's a good question.

"It is true that innovative new drugs can change the way we treat people and we need more of them," she wrote in an article on the BBC News website last week. "But innovation is of little use if people cannot access new treatments because they are so expensive."

Clearly, as Michelle Childs says, a new approach is needed.

Considering the knotty situation both the countries had got in over the issue - India's Supreme Court barring the Italian ambassador from leaving the country and insisting that he had effectively surrendered his diplomatic immunity with his affidavit promising the marines' return - Rome's decision certainly defuses an unsavoury diplomatic row.

Indian foreign minister spokesman Syed Akbaruddin tweeted that "intensive diplomatic contacts in the last 24 hours led to Italy informing that the marines will return as per time line set up Supreme Court." His Twitter timeline is now littered with congratulatory messages hailing the development as a "victory" for Indian diplomacy.

But some, like former top diplomat Kanwal Sibal, believe the decision to return the marines is actually a "sorry commentary on the ineptness of Italian diplomacy", rather than a big triumph for the Indians.

"The Italians didn't consider the matter seriously. They underestimated the Indian response. Once they saw that the script was not moving as they had anticipated they began to review the matter after treating the marines as heroes," he told me.

"The fact that they decide to send them back projects Italian diplomacy in poor light. It also indicates sharp divisions in the government. Many in the government must have disagreed with Rome's decision not to send back the marines, otherwise they would not have reversed the decision."

Indian diplomats believe Rome did not want to escalate the crisis further after what they describe as the Supreme Court's "bold but questionable decision" to restrain the Italian ambassador from leaving the country in what was described as a violation of the Vienna Convention.

There was also rising concern about the fallout of this crisis on considerable Italian interests - defence deals, for example - in India.

Italy believes they have come out of the crisis with a face saver - it has reportedly received assurances from India about the marines' treatment, their human rights, and the fact that they are not at risk of receiving the death penalty, which in any case seemed highly unlikely.

But, as Indian diplomats are saying, "the stakes had become too high for Italy and they buckled".

It is not a place frequented by tourists and is not a camping area, locals say.

This is not the first time a Swiss citizen has been raped in India.

In 2003, a 28-year-old Swiss diplomat was forced into her car by two men in the capital, Delhi, and raped by one of them. The rapist was never caught.

Foreign tourist arrivals have risen steadily in India - nearly 20 million visited in 2011, compared with 14.4 million in 2009.

There is no evidence to show that rapes have led to a decline in tourist arrivals in the past.

But the latest attack is a huge embarrassment for India after the international outrage over the December gang rape of a student in Delhi.

This comes after increasing it to 18 in a tough anti-rape ordinance following the outrage after the fatal gang rape of a student in Delhi last December.

Raising the age of consent to 18 has placed India among the more orthodox countries in a world where the norm and the global average is around 16 years.

Many believe that raising the age of consent is fraught with risks.

India is a divided and hierarchical society where relationships between men and women belonging to different castes, classes and religions can spark violence and feuds. Sex before marriage remains taboo.

Nevertheless, India's young are more sexually active than ever before. A 2007 study by the International Institute for Population Sciences and the Population Council found that more than 42% of men and 26% of women aged 15-24 in relationships had sex with their partner.

Many fear that a higher age of consent could lead to young men being packed off to reform homes on the basis of complaints by the irate parents of the young women.

Last year, a judge in Delhi expressed fears that such a move would "open the floodgates for the prosecution of boys for offences of rape on the basis of complaints by girls' parents [even if] the girl was a consenting party".

Also, as leading women's right's lawyer Flavia Agnes points out, a third of rape cases in India are filed by parents against boys with whom their daughters have eloped.

"All that raising the age of consent to 18 years will do is to give society greater control over the lives of young people and young boys in consensual relations with girls," says lawyer Vrinda Grover.

Raising the age of consent can have other unfortunate consequences.

Many young people rush into marriage quickly as it is widely considered to be sanction for having "legal" sex.

Many of these marriages fall apart quickly as their partners are mentally not prepared for it. A large number of girls aged 15-18 are also kidnapped for marriage.

Supporters of a higher age of consent for sex argue that those under 18 are not prepared to handle sexual relations.

They say a higher consent age also checks widespread child abuse, teenage pregnancies, human trafficking and rape.

Over a century the age of consent in India has been raised from 10 to 18 reacting mainly to concerns over child marriage, and much later over rape and teenage pregnancies.

Still, according to the National Population Policy, over 50% of girls marry below the age of 18. Conflating age of marriage for girls (18) with age of consent, says researcher Pallavi Gupta "negates any form of sexual freedom that young girls below that age group can exercise".

But clearly, India needs to do more to protect its girls and stop child marriages than raise the age of consent.

But the death in prison of a man accused in the gang rape and murder of a student in Delhi has raised questions about security in what is South Asia's largest prison.

Ram Singh's death is also a huge embarrassment for the authorities. "So, one can commit suicide under the watchful eyes of the Tihar Jail. Great!," tweeted writer and activist Meena Kandasamy.

The 55-year-old jail houses more than 12,000 inmates, although it has an official capacity of about 6,000. It is also India's most high-profile prison, where a number of prominent politicians and businessmen facing trial in corruption cases are being held.

Authorities say Tihar is one of the most secure and modern prisons in India. It is equipped with CCTV cameras, mobile phone jamming devices, scanners and metal detectors.

The sprawling campus hardly looks like a jail. Visitors are shown a model prison where inmates make bread, shoes, furniture, paper and clothing, among other things.

In January, lawyers representing the accused in the Delhi gang rape case had complained that their clients were being tortured. Tihar spokesperson Sunil Gupta had then told the BBC that the safety of the five men was "guaranteed".

So what went wrong?

Mr Gupta says Ram Singh was not on suicide watch, and that he "used a blanket in his room as an improvised rope" to kill himself.

Mr Singh's lawyer and family don't seem to believe the official account: they have been telling the media that he was "murdered" in prison.

His lawyer told the BBC that his client, who had pleaded not guilty, appeared to be in good health the last time he saw him on Friday, and that he had no reason to commit suicide.

Suicides and murders in Indian prisons are not uncommon.

A total of 1,436 inmates died in 1,393 prisons in 2010, the latest year for which figures are available. Ninety-two of them died of "unnatural causes", including suicide and murder.

Most of the "unnatural" deaths were due to suicide (68) and murder by fellow inmates (12).

Tihar does not have a spotless record either on suicides of prisoners in its custody. There were 18 inmate deaths, including two suicides, last year, according to the prison chief Vimla Mehra.

Inmates have died because of lack of medical care too. In 2011, the Delhi High Court ordered the authorities to pay compensation to the wife of biscuit tycoon Rajan Pillai who died in Tihar in July 1995 for lack of proper medical care.

The court also said deaths at Tihar were not an "uncommon phenomenon".

A report by the People's Union for Democratic Rights in 2011 raised questions about the rights of prisoners in Tihar with "respect to receiving visitors, access to medical care".

Senior prison officials I spoke to say they are surprised to hear that Ram Singh was not put on suicide watch.

They say high profile prisoners - usually on trial or convicted in murder or terrorism-related cases - are often kept under suicide watch and given more protection as they face massive media coverage and are deemed to be at risk from other inmates.

In many cases fellow inmates are instructed by their jailors to keep a watch on such prisoners, I am told, and guards are posted outside the cell, which may also be under CCTV coverage.

Some years ago I remember sitting in a jailor's room in a Calcutta prison and watching grainy black and white CCTV footage streaming from a tiny cell housing Aftab Ansari, who is serving a death sentence for his involvement in a 2002 gun attack on a US cultural centre in the city.

More than 10,000 inmates have died in prisons in India since 2000, hundreds of them in "unnatural" ways. Deaths in custody are a terrible blot, and clearly a lot more needs to be done to protect the lives of inmates.

"Asking me whether you want to be the prime minister is a wrong question," Rahul Gandhi of the ruling Congress party told MPs at an informal meeting on Tuesday. "The prime minister's post is not my priority. I believe in long-term politics."

He reiterated that his priorities lay in decentralising power, democratising the party, building local leaders. Nobody disagrees that the Congress direly needs all of this to energise its rank and file and improve its political prospects.

And then, if local reports are to be believed, he made a curious comment on his marriage prospects.

"If I get married and have children, I will be a status quoist and will be concerned about bequeathing my position to my children," he reportedly said.

The context of this remark is not clear, but in the past Mr Gandhi has publicly expressed his discomfort with dynastic politics, of which he himself is a privileged beneficiary.

His latest remarks seem to have baffled political watchers.

In January, he was promoted to the number two position in the party, becoming its vice president. (His mother, Sonia Gandhi, is the president.)

Many analysts - and party supporters - then said the 42-year-old leader's elevation was a step forward in nominating him as the party's candidate in the 2014 general elections.

Now he appears to be - again - sounding reluctant about becoming the prime minister.

Many believe Mr Gandhi's remarks on Tuesday may have been timed to counter a recent attack on Congress's dynastic politics by Narendra Modi who, many believe, is being positioned as the prime ministerial candidate by the main opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

On the face of it, Mr Gandhi may be caught between a rock and a hard place.

On the one hand, it appears that he genuinely believes in democratising his party - political power and patronage in the Congress has traditionally flowed from the top, thus thwarting the organic growth of strong local leaders and weakening the party in key states like Uttar Pradesh. Mr Gandhi has said he believes in a more democratic politics and that merit should score over dynastic privilege.

On the other, his message may not be finding too many takers within his own party, where generations of leaders and workers have believed that there is no life beyond the Delhi dynasty. The raison d'etre of the Congress, they believe, is loyalty to the Gandhi family. It is what keeps the flock of leaders and workers together.

"The party is completely anchored in one family. Most of the leaders at the top and bottom have no bases of their own. All power flows from the high command. Local leaders are measured by what they can do for the high command and keep it in good humour," says Aarthi Ramachandran, author of Decoding Rahul Gandhi, a well-researched study of the man and his politics.

Mr Gandhi's dream reforms require him to remain in control and allow leaders to become powerful under his watch. Will he able to strike that balance? It requires astute political thinking and management. Does he possess that? Only time will tell.

In the end, however, Mr Gandhi may even be a bit ahead of the curve. Indian voters actually still do not seem to have a problem with dynastic politics.

As analyst and editor of The Indian Express newspaper Shekhar Gupta pointed out recently, there are at least 15 new politically significant dynasties which are thriving in key states like Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Orissa.

"Each one of these now has a strong, proprietary vote bank and total ownership of its party. A pan-national [Gandhi-Nehru] dynasty no longer has the ability to breach these fortresses," he says.

So is it strictly a problem of opaque dynastic politics that is impeding the growth of Congress? Or is it, as many argue, an inability to tap into the political zeitgeist and face up to the reality that building powerful local leaders and tapping into regional issues are key to its national electoral fortunes?

India's government thinks so. Plans for such a bank - the first state-run one of its kind in India - were announced in the annual budget.

Finance Minister P Chidambaram said the bank was likely to be launched in October, with an initial capital of $184m (£120m), and will be run by the government.

The bank will employ women, lend mostly to women and "address gender-related issues, empowerment and financial inclusion", he said.

On the face of it, a bank for women appears to make sense.

Just 26% of women in India have an account with a formal financial institution, compared with 46% of men. That means an account in either a bank, a credit union, a co-operative, post office or a microfinance institution, according to a recent study by the World Bank.

With more and more women going to work in India - and a larger number of them in the informal economy - a bank for women, say its supporters, helps empower and provide financial security.

Many Indian women typically give their earnings to their husbands - when in fact women are seen as more astute savers than men and it would make sense for them to have a bank account of their own.

But experts like Vijay Mahajan, a leading social entrepreneur, says a bank for women is mere tokenism in a country where there are "deep institutional problems" which lead to financial exclusion of women.

For one, he says, banks don't lend to women easily because a significant number of them work from home and are not a part of the formal economy.

Also, banks insist on collateral against loans and since a large number of Indian women don't have the rights or title to property, they are unable to provide any collateral.

Critics of the move also wonder why the government does not replicate the example of Sewa Bank, a 41-year-old all women's co-operative bank, which was begun in Gujarat by social worker Ela Bhatt.

The profit-making bank has more than 60,000 members, and offers savings, credit and insurance.

Others believe what India really needs is more financial inclusion for both women and men.

Only 35% of people have access to banking services against a global average of 50%.

There are only around 100,000 bank branches in India and a large number of the country's more than 650,000 villages don't have a single bank.

Poverty, illiteracy, lack of regular income and steep transaction costs keep out the poor from India's banking system. Many are at the mercy of predatory money lenders who charge steep interest rates and often bankrupt borrowers.

India's central bank has initiated moves to bolster financial inclusion: no-frills savings accounts with low minimum balance requirements; the use of regional languages in banking documents; using microfinance institutions and NGOs for improved outreach; and providing easier credit and financial education.

India possibly needs more of this rather than a bank for women.

In 2012, India topped the list with $70bn (£47bn) of remittance inflows, followed by China ($66bn), the Philippines and Mexico ($24bn each), Nigeria ($21bn), according to the latest World Bank figures on migration and remittances.

Most of them come from villages, are elderly, and belong to the higher castes. Many are worldly people turned ascetics eking out spartan lives as kalpavasis (those who spend their days in silent prayer) at the ongoing Kumbh Mela, the biggest religious gathering in the world.

Consider the events that have made the front pages this week.

Last year, India's most respected election watchdog Association for Democratic Reforms informed us that nearly a third of MPs - 158 of 543 - in the parliament faced criminal charges.

Suicide in India - July 2012

For a shy and reticent politician who's rarely heard in the parliament and has never given a proper media interview, Mr Gandhi delivered an unusually candid and heartfelt speech to mark his anointment as the number two in the party.

Fast track courts are not new in India - have they worked?

When the unidentified woman died in a Singapore hospital early on Saturday, the victim of a savage rape on a moving bus in the capital, Delhi, it was time again, many said, to ask: why does India treat its women so badly?

As violent protests erupted in the capital, Delhi, at the weekend over the horrific gang rape of a 23-year-old student, many Indians were asking this question.