The draft bill seeks to create an institution that will be independent of those it seeks to police, and will have powers to investigate and prosecute all public servants, and others found guilty of corrupting them. A number of commentators have raised issues about the provisions in the draft of the Jan Lokpal Bill. They have asked whether it would be an effective instrument to check corruption. They have pointed to...

The Lokpal (ombudsman) Bill would help fight corruption only at the centre and not in states where the magnitude of graft is alarming, cautions former Supreme Court judge Justice N. Santosh Hegde amid the escalating hype over the proposed legislation. Hegde, also the ombudsman for Karnataka, is part of the 10-member committee set up by the government to draft the new bill following the hunger strike by reformer Anna Hazare that...

The government on Monday told the Supreme Court that it had given its consent for a CBI probe into alleged corruption in the utilisation of National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) funds in Orissa. “The consent to have an investigation into the alleged misappropriation and diversion of funds for the scheme has been given by the minister concerned (Ministry of Rural Development),” Additional Solicitor General Indira Jaising told a bench headed...

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...

In fashionably liberal circles, Prashant Bhushan is an authentic modern hero, the people's advocate who uses the killer argument to avenge the aam admi on the bloodless battlefield of the Supreme Court. Among his lawyer peers, Bhushan is somewhat disdainfully seen as an "activist who takes up causes, not cases". Some politicians call him a "self-righteous" busybody with a penchant for the sensational storyline. Some others loathe the 55-year-old, who helped...