The absence of a law regulating surrogacy makes India, especially Anand, a top destination for couples from abroad. UNTIL about 2008, the future looked bleak for Sharadaben Solanki. A landless daily-wage worker in Anand, Gujarat, she earned a paltry Rs.600 a month. Her husband earned an equal amount working as a construction labourer. Together the couple supported three children and their parents. That was when she heard from Maganbhai, the owner of...

The largely urban, middle-class agitation led by “Team Anna” Hazare for the acceptance of a particular version of the Lokpal bill in order to end corruption in India, has raised several questions regarding the scope, legitimacy, credibility and sustainability of such protests. It has also led to some rather hasty comparisons with powerful movements in the past — including, quite unbelievably, India’s freedom struggle, arguably the biggest mass movement in...

The Anna Hazare agitation is showing signs of becoming a political and social monster. There are several disturbing elements already in evidence, perhaps more disturbing than the awfulness of corruption. Whatever one thinks of the anti-corruption bill drafted by the government, the agitation, by the day, is growing scarier. There is a combustible mix here of hero worship, cult propagation, populist absolutism and irrational exuberance, mass hysteria, de-politicization, militarization, and,...

Anna Hazare's agitation in defence of his version of the Lokpal Bill seems to have revived public memories of the 1974-75 Jayaprakash Narayan-led anti-corruption mass agitation, especially among the new generation of technology-driven middle class youth in metropolitan towns of India. But can Anna Hazare's anti-corruption crusade become a benchmark comparable with the historical mass mobilisation movements launched by Gandhi from 1920 to 1947 or the one popularly known as the...

While the rest of the world is saluting the birth of a miracle - the manifestation of the best of the human spirit in a peaceful movement that is uniting millions of people across religions, geographies and social and economic groups - Arundhati Roy has seized the opportunity to be intellectually irreverent. Sadly, her vituperative dismissal of this powerful human revolution in her piece, ‘I would rather not be Anna' published...