-EPW   Bereft of any meaningful vision, political parties have reduced politics to gladiatorial contests. Much was promised of the Lokpal Bill in the winter session of Parliament. While a toothless bill was indeed passed by the Lok Sabha, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) was unable to have even this endorsed in the Rajya Sabha on the last day of the session. Did this have to do with the inability of the UPA...

Though Anna Hazare gets much of the credit for focusing the national spotlight on corruption, India was only too aware of the problem even before his agitation. According to a Pew Research poll in October 2010 (six months before Hazare emerged on the national scene), 98 per cent of Indians indicate corrupt political leaders as a “very big” or a “moderately big” problem. Hazare’s campaign did not attune Indians to...

The year 2011 saw the highest number of cases disposed of in recent years, with more than 79,000 cases cleared under the leadership of Chief Justice of India S.H. Kapadia. In his Law Day address, Justice Kapadia rejected the allegation made in certain quarters about the huge pendency of cases and said: “There is a backlog of cases. However, it is not as big as is sought to be projected.” Seventy-four...

The Republic of India has a billion (and more) citizens who, at any given time, are involved in a thousand (and more) controversies. Knowing which controversy is the most significant is always hard, and often impossible, to judge. Even so, we can be fairly certain that 2011 will go down in Indian history as the year of the Great Lokpal Debate, just as 1962 was the year of the war...

Nikhil Dey, co-convenor of the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI), has said that Team Anna’s opposition to the Grievance Redressal Bill is outdated as it seems to be based on the older version of the Bill which is available on the Internet.   The din over the Lokpal — which is at best a “huge police agency that will send people to jail” — he says, has drowned the...