“Shanti Bhushan has never met Amar Singh” Member of the joint drafting panel on the Lokpal Bill Prashant Bhushan on Wednesday said every fee that his father and co-chair of the panel Shanti Bhushan got for providing professional services as a lawyer was accounted for and tax paid on it. He was reacting to the charge of the former Samajwadi Party leader, Amar Singh, that the SP had paid a fee...

To ask a people burdened with systemic bribery to accept bribe-giving as legal is to demand they accept corruption and the existing structures of power and inequity it flows from. Let's get this right. The Chief Economic Adviser to the Ministry of Finance, Government of India, wants a certain class of bribes legalised? And says so in a paper titled “Why, for a Class of Bribes, the Act of Giving a...

A former bureaucrat has said that most business houses "maintain" MPs to influence government policies or decision making in their favour. "Some of the large industrial houses also fund politicians who are in the Opposition as a hedge to ensure that any decision that may be given in their favour is not opposed by them. They also treat such funding as a long term investment," writes former Economic Intelligence Bureau director...

Itself the outcome of a bottom-up movement, the Jan Lokpal bill ironically proposes a centralised framework against graft. Without checks and balances. There was never any doubt that India needs a strong Lokpal Act. The protest has paved the way for its enactment. With the exultation over the anti-corruption campaign’s ‘victory’ quieting down, it’s time to take stock. Nuanced arguments—and indeed substance—have to recover lost ground to take the discourse...

Do we, the Indian middle class, see the corruption within us? I was too busy being corrupt to join Anna Hazare’s camp last week. For four days, I heard nothing but stories of our Tahrir Square-like revolution against the corrupt unfurling right under our noses in Delhi’s Jantar Mantar. But it was school admission time and I had some serious palm-greasing, document-fudging, string-pulling, weight-throwing and tout-chasing to do. I had...