Politics

Almost one in four Right to Information (RTI) rejections in India have been made by the Ministry of Finance, according to the RTI Annual Return Reports for 2005-2010. Adjusted for the number of requests received, the Finance Ministry tops the rejection rate at 24 per cent, followed by the Prime Minister’s Office (12 per cent) and the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas (11 per cent), an analysis of the reports by the PRS Legislative Research (PRS) has revealed. The Finance Ministry possibly...

There is something perverse in the fact that the politics of poverty always brings out the poverty in the politics of the day. So when the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, told the Supreme Court about the commission’s desire to fix Rs 32 a day as the poverty line in urban India, the ensuing debate metamorphosed into all about politics. Number-crunching, when about an emotive issue such as poverty, is less of an exercise in economics, and more of political one...

When Mamata Banerjee swept away the Left Front and became Chief Minister of West Bengal earlier this year, expectations had preceded her. She had many tasks at hand, one of them being bringing Maoists to the negotiating table. Some 100 days into her tenure, she has scored a few points, including a tripartite agreement with the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM). But restoring peace in the Darjeeling hills is not the same as doing it in Jangalmahal forests. The more days pass by, it becomes obvious...

As the holier-than-thou debate rages on in the Indian media, most of the critiques and harangues have centred around Kisan Baburao ‘Anna’ Hazare – some defending him outright, others castigating him in equal measure. Of the members of the so-called Team Anna, the one who has probably been written about the least is Kiran Bedi, the original media darling. And that she has always been, since she shot to fame for having ordered then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s vehicle to be towed away for a...

"Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. One man thinks himself the master of others, but remains more of a slave than they." -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau; Economie Politique (Discourse on Political Economy) Freedom means different things to different people. It varies from one individual to another, from one generation to another. Yet, it is a word that is known by all and sundry. And needless, to say, there are different kinds of freedoms. As also, the literal and the metaphorical. It...

The tell-tale photographs of the street protests in Srinagar and elsewhere in Kashmir that raged during the summer of last year are difficult to forget. Pitched battles were fought between Kashmiri youths and Indian security personnel. Indian authorities came down on the protests with a heavy hand and on the protesting youths too. Much was said in the Indian media about the youth having been led astray by parochial political leaders in Kashmir, and how these were hands that had been hired for a...

The death penalty is back in the limelight in India after a long time, this time for all the wrong reasons — mostly political. The issue came back into focus after Indian President Pratibha Patil approved the executions of two death row prisoners. Patil accepted the Indian Home Ministry’s recommendations to reject the mercy petitions of death row prisoners Devinder Pal Singh Bhullar and Mahendra Nath Das. Bhullar was sentenced to death in 2001 for plotting terror attacks that killed nine people...

In all 102 MLAs i.e. 35 per cent (out of 293 analysed) in the new West Bengal Assembly have pending criminal cases as per their own declarations. Seventy-five MLAs out of these 102 analysed have declared serious IPC charges like murder, attempt to murder, kidnapping and theft against them. All major parties have MLAs with pending criminal cases. The Trinamool Congress has 69 MLAs out of 183 analysed (38 per cent), the Congress has 17 out of 42 (41 per cent) and CPI(M) has seven out of 40 (18 per...

If it is the Indian mainstream media which has been keeping you informed about Kashmir, trust me, you have been in the wrong hands. Lies are peddled by the government, and in turn faithfully disseminated by the Indian media. This is a brief attempt at dispelling those lies-turned-myths. Kashmir is militant-infested Who told you so? Watching too many Bollywood films, or what? If the official admission is anything to go by, there are not more than 500 militants operating today in Kashmir. And all...

William Wilberforce is a man one should know about, but few actually do. Wilberforce (1759-1833) was a British politician and abolitionist, a man who spent his life fighting for the abolition of the slave trade in Great Britain and across the British empire. The movement that he led in Parliament was met with stiff resistance both in the House of Commons and outside. Among others was a campaign that almost silenced him once and for ever. The argument that made this campaign menacing was that...