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...
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‘Monopoly’ upsets Cong by Sanjay K Jha
Many Congress leaders feel that it was improper for Anna Hazare and his group to act as the sole conscience keepers of the civil society. The leaders are wondering if Anna Hazare’s letter to Sonia Gandhi, asking her to rein in Kapil Sibal and Digvijay Singh, was prompted by a perception that the Congress duo were expressing views on subjects the activists had monopolised on. Sibal had apparently said in an informal...
More »Bhushans should come out with proof, says Amar Singh by Gargi Parsai
The former Samajwadi Party leader, Amar Singh on Monday challenged the father-son duo Shanti Bhushan and Prashant Bhushan to prove that the controversial CD allegedly containing a conversation between Mr. Shanti Bhushan and him (Amar Singh) and SP chief Mulayam Singh on a legal deal was fake and asked the Bhushans to step down from the joint drafting panel on the Lokpal Bill. Addressing a news conference here, Mr. Amar Singh...
More »Too many in India by Alaka M Basu
Late last month we received the exciting news that India now has a population of 1.21 billion. This figure generated less discussion than I expected. Maybe it would have been more mind-boggling a few months ago, before all the Scams and scandals inured us to the large number of zeros that a billion signifies. Or maybe we were distracted by the other bad news in the census results — the...
More »The People Legislate by Saikat Datta
For over a year, travelling to various parts of the country, activist and prime mover of the Jan Lokpal Bill, Arvind Kejriwal, has been repeating the same story over and over again, on the anti-corruption structures we have currently. Last month, at a huge gathering of RTI activists in Shillong, Meghalaya, he explained. “When an official acts as a whistle-blower and complains against his boss, a senior officer, the Central...
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