The Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council will send the Working Group's Draft Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence (Access to Justice and Reparations) Bill, 2011 to the Union Home and Law Ministries within a week to solicit their comments, especially on its “legal dimensions,” NAC sources told The Hindu on Thursday. Once the Centre responds to the draft, the Working Group will revise the Bill and bring it back to the...

The CBI has admitted that it received two complaints against former CJI K G Balakrishnan but refused to give details under RTI. CBI's Chennai bureau dismissed one complaint citing "vague and unverifiable" allegations and forwarded the second complaint to the New Delhi office for further probe. CBI refused to give details about the complaints in response to an RTI query saying that the information related to a third person. Balakrishnan is...

“All members will continue on panel” Civil society members on the Lokpal Bill drafting committee on Saturday decided to stay together despite the smear campaign against some members, with Karnataka Lokayukta Justice Santosh Hegde declaring that “all members will continue to work in panel until the proceedings are over.” A two-hour meeting of the activists, chaired by Anna Hazar here, also decided to write to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Chief Justice...

After having been beaten black and blue by Team Anna, the Congress party and the government are finally waking up to take the Gandhian on even as media managers in the party have so far not come out actively against the anti-corruption crusaders. While a senior Congress leader made it clear that party chief Sonia Gandhi is unlikely to reply to the publicly distributed letter of Anna Hazare which complains against...

Expectations of changes resulting from a movement bereft of a clear political and ideological thrust would be far-fetched. FROM the vacuum left by mainstream politics to the confusions of ideology and practice emerging out of half-baked socio-political engagement – the political trajectory of Anna Hazare's “anti-corruption” satyagraha movement demanding early introduction of the Lokpal Bill in Parliament can well be summed up thus. The wide support that the movement received from...