The Supreme Court will on Friday granted bail to Civil Rights activist Binayak Sen, who has been sentenced to life imprisonment on charges of sedition and for having links with the Naxalites. Earlier, Sen, 61, has challenged a Chhattisgarh high court order that rejected his bail plea on February 10. He sought bail contending that the trial court had erred in convicting him without substantial evidence. Sen had filed a petition in the...

The brief gap between the World Cup and the Indian Premier League would have been painfully boring but for the display on national TV of the collective meekness of the Congress/UPA leadership in the face of the challenge to India's parliamentary system mounted by Anna Hazare and his bandwagon. The bandwagon comprises Civil Rights activists, RSS/Hindu Mahasabha/Baba Ramdev foot soldiers, ex-bureaucrats in search of a cause, sections of the urban...

I am opposed to any kind of communalism or discrimination on religious or caste lines: Hazare Beware of vilification campaign, Modi writes to social activist The clarification by social activist Anna Hazare on his praising Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi for his “rural development model” has failed to satisfy his supporters who threatened to dissociate themselves from the movement against corruption. “That is exactly what we are questioning: Mr. Modi's rural development model,...

Alleging that Uttar Pradesh is the most corrupt of all states, the Congress today asked social activist Anna Hazare to start a movement from the state if he wanted to start a state-based campaign. "UP is having the most corrupt system with maximum cases of human rights violation, if Hazare wants to start any such movement he should start it from here," UPPCC president Rita Bahuguna Joshi said in a reply...

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...