Recent actions of some senior BJP leaders hint at an understanding between the Congress and the main opposition at the leadership level. THE Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) credentials and commitment as the principal opposition party of the country have been repeatedly questioned in the past seven years, the period in which the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) has held the reins of power at the Centre. Recent developments in Parliament...

There is a fundamental inequality in the governance arrangement in New Delhi that continues to plague the United Progressive Alliance. Members of Congress party president Sonia Gandhi’s National Advisory Council feel they have the right to criticise the government and its functionaries all the time, while no one in government is willing to return the compliment. In an interview to this newspaper, (March 13) the self-proclaimed father of India’s green...

Meeting of Secretaries convened for 8 March; data on 1,000 officers already in Union Cabinet Secretary K M Chandrasekhar is calling a meeting of union secretaries here on 8 March to convey to them a government decision making it mandatory for bureaucrats to put details of the moveable and immoveable property they own on a government website. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been pushing for this as part of a promised clean-up...

India’s Supreme Court has questioned clearances to industries on the basis of environment impact assessments (EIAs) carried out by private consultants in the pay of project proponents. A special bench of the court led by Chief Justice S.H. Kapadia, that is hearing a petition challenging approvals granted to the French company Lafarge to mine limestone, likened the practice to "paying the piper to call the tune." Kapadia’s bench noted that every report...

The Supreme Court on Thursday struck a blow for Indian democracy. It quashed the appointment of P.J. Thomas as the Central Vigilance Commissioner, and thereby returned institutional integrity to the office. Thomas’s appointment had been controversial from the very beginning. In fact, apart from the 1992 palmolein imports case that has compelled this reversal, Thomas, as a former telecom secretary, had already offered to recuse himself from investigations into the...