-The Indian Express Bihar order against criticism of government online is against governance. The Chief Minister must scrap it. The Bihar government’s decision to designate “objectionable and indecent” comments made online against the state government or its ministers, MLAs, MPs and officials as cyber-crime is one more example of elected governments abusing their power to buy themselves a Teflon shield against criticism, dissent and accountability. In November last year, the Kerala government...

-National Herald While Americans take themselves as citizens and demand responsibility and accountability from power, Indians are still slavish, says Kannan Gopinathan, who resigned from IAS What happened in Washington DC at the Capitol Hill Building was watched in horror and everybody said, “Look democracy can fail even in America.” To me it looked like the triumph of American democracy. Attempts to overturn the Presidential election failed. State after state stood up to...

-The Hindu He is 91 and still angry. The veteran cop talks of how the police-neta nexus can be broken Having tackled the underworld in Mumbai and Khalistani terror in Punjab, you’d think retired IPS officer Julio Ribeiro would have seen it all. Yet, the Vikas Dubey ‘encounter’ killing in Uttar Pradesh and the custodial deaths of a father and son in Tamil Nadu so shook the 91-year-old “supercop” that he wrote...

-The Hindu There is a resonance between Saramago’s literary world and the migrant labour distress in contemporary India The novel, Blindness, by Portuguese Nobel Laureate José Saramago, is strikingly prescient about a sweeping illness. The plot revolves around a mysterious epidemic because of which people suddenly turn blind. The thread It starts with a person driving his car who turns blind while waiting at a traffic signal. He pleads to be taken home and...

-The Telegraph Experts slam Delhi police response New Delhi: Neutrality, prevention, prompt containment, confidence-building, protection of religious places, accountability of officials and prosecution of rioters — the Amit Shah-headed Union home ministry’s guidelines on tackling communal violence cover it all. But the Delhi police, who report directly to Shah, flouted most of these “Guidelines on Communal Harmony” during last week’s rioting that killed at least 48 people, according to eyewitnesses, security experts including...