-The Times of India   The CBI raided the secretary to Speaker Meira Kumar for corruption, sending Parliament into a tizzy and prompting the Lok Sabha chair to remove him with immediate effect. R A Pathak was raided by CBI for acquiring assets disproportionate to his income between 1995 and 2005, a period when he served in the road, transport, highways ministry. Belonging to the 1984 batch of central Engineering service, Pathak joined...

-IANS   From collecting mounds of garbage, removing slush caused by rains to cleaning toilets, a group of volunteers, mostly students from premier medical and Engineering colleges, kept Ramlila Maidan, the nerve centre of Anna Hazare's movement, clean at a time when it saw unprecedented footfall on all the 13 days of his fast. Initially, most of these students came to lend support to Anna Hazare's movement against corruption, but swayed by the...

What can power do to a political party’s financial health? Quite a lot, it seems. An RTI query by a Chennai-based activist shows that the income of India’s longest-ruling national party, the Indian National Congress, increased from Rs 69.55 crore in 2002-03 to a whopping Rs 467.57 crore in 2010-11. Documents accessed by activist V Gopalakrishnan show that the jump is even more evident when figures from 2003-04 are compared with...

In the current hullabaloo about the lok pal bill and the Anna agitation, one question has frequently been raised, both by protagonists of the Congress and the government and by constitutionalists and legal experts: however laudable the goals of Anna and his supporters, aren’t the methods adopted by them illegitimate? Doesn’t a fast unto death amount to blackmail of the legislature? Isn’t it an attempt by the unelected to usurp...

-IANS   A group of 20 youngsters enter Delhi Metro, shouting 'Vande Mataram' and urging commuters to sing along. As their voices begin to fade, a middle-aged woman announces, "They don't know a thing about Lokpal, corruption has brought them together." This statement, addressed to nobody in particular, pretty much sums up what the movement is all about. It's not the Lokpal bill, it's not a 74-year-old man on fast who has turned...