Social activist Anna Hazare, whose last week's fast forced the Centre to form a joint committee to draft the Lokpal Bill, on Monday asked Communications and HRD Minister Kapil Sibal to resign from the panel if he felt that it would be able to achieve nothing. Mr. Sibal reportedly said on Sunday that the Bill would not be able to solve problems related to education, health or civic issues. However, on...

This is India’s Tahrir square, read one of the tweets soon after the campaign against corruption succeeded last week and forced the government to accept the demands of social activist Anna Hazare to announce a committee for considering a new Lokpal Bill against corruption. After watching widespread public demonstrations in Tunisia, Egypt and other Middle-East countries to rid their countries of dictators, there was a frisson of excitement among our socially...

Any perceptive analyst of democracy will testify that there is no necessary relationship between democracy and a corruption-proof regime, or development, or political stability. If we were to evaluate democracy from the vantage point of the desired ends we expect it to realise, it would fare rather poorly when compared to authoritarian governments, say the one institutionalised in Singapore by its former prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew. Yew transformed Singapore...

For all his damage-control efforts, Anna Hazare's praise for Narendra Modi has emerged as a touchstone, however unwittingly, for determining the political character of the Jan Lokpal movement. Adverse reactions from his own supporters indicate that civil society is not satisfied with Hazare's clarification that he had patted Modi only in the context of rural development and that, as a Gandhian, he was opposed to communal disharmony. Hazare is under pressure to...

Anna Hazare made an odd statement. He explained that he would never seek to contest an election because he would lose — indeed, forfeiting his deposit, as the “ordinary voter does not have awareness. They cast their vote under the influence of Rs 100 or a bottle of liquor or a sari offered by candidates. They don’t understand the value of their vote.” The line between this disdain for the...