Lawyer and co-chairman of the joint draft committee on the Lokpal Bill, Shanti Bhushan, has urged Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram to make public the report prepared by the Central Forensic Science Laboratory (CFSL), Chandigarh, on the controversial CD containing his purported conversation with Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Mulayam Singh and former SP leader Amar Singh. The Chandigarh CFSL report said the CD was a “cut-and-paste” job, contradicting the Delhi lab...

Before the break of dawn, they began to queue up. By the time the two polling booths, adjoining each other, opened, more than half of Netai had assembled to cast, perhaps, the vote of their lifetime. The young and the old, the landed and the landless, the men and women; they were all there to avenge the killing of nine unarmed villagers five months ago by the Harmads - an...

The joint drafting committee on the Lokpal bill made some headway on Saturday on contentious procedures for sanction for prosecution of public servants. A broad consensus emerged over the need to review existing laws that have been criticized for shielding corrupt officials. Civil society sources on the panel said the proposed Lokpal may not require permission for prosecution while investigating offenses with amendments being considered to section 19 of the prevention...

Days after two forensic laboratories gave conflicting reports on the genuineness of a contentious CD, Lokpal drafting committee member Shanti Bhushan asked home minister P Chidambaram for copies of the reports. He said that despite writing to the Delhi Police commissioner and ACP (special cell), he had received no information on these two reports. The CD purportedly contains a conversation between Shanti Bhushan and Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav with...

The arrest of Suresh Kalmadi on 25 April marked yet another scene in the prolonged drama surrounding the Commonwealth Games held in Delhi in October 2010. Yet the general media focus on Kalmadi may have served to distract attention from the many other acts of omission and commission that mark the sordid history of that extravagantly planned and deeply flawed public show. In these other actions, there are stories of funds...