'We want to pressure the government and assert our rights as citizens.' Arvind Kejriwal received the Magsaysay award in the Emergent leadership category in 2006. A mere five years later, he has far surpassed that milestone, winning acclaim and notice for the way he conceived and crafted Anna Hazare's anti-corruption movement. He talks to Vidya Subrahmaniam about the Jan Lokpal campaign, what it accomplished and why it often became controversial. The scale...

The Lokpal legislation, in whatever form, will not be the only law we have on corruption. Apart from statutes on prohibition of benami transactions and prevention of money laundering, there is the IPC (Indian Penal Code). Under Sections 169 and 409 of IPC, depending on the offence, public servants can face imprisonment (from two years to life) and fines. This wasn't enough of a deterrent and after Bofors, we had...

Over the last few days, as a desperate government tried to tide over the Lokpal Bill crisis, it received over half-a-dozen variants of the draft legislation. On Saturday, both Houses of Parliament took up the subject and though the debate was mostly confined to the Jan Lokpal Bill, it made the political point that while an effective law should be devised to tackle corruption, Parliament’s supremacy must be maintained. The...

Congress negotiators and Anna Hazare's associates repeatedly shifted the goalposts through the four-and-half-month stand-off on the shape and structure of the Lokpal Bill. The Anna group flagged as many as 40 issues during the many rounds of discussions in the joint Lokpal drafting committee set up after Mr. Hazare ended his April 2011 fast in Jantar Mantar here. Of these, 34 were more or less resolved by the time negotiations broke...

-The Hindu   The Communist Party of India has protested against the decision of the Centre to support the Chhattisgarh government's move on the Salwa Judum, and urged it to withdraw support to the State government ordinance. The ordinance, which reappoints the Special Police Officers (SPO) “to do precisely the same activities and with the same qualifications as earlier, shows complete disrespect for the spirit of the Supreme Court judgment [declaring the Salwa...