This essay describes and compares Parliament and the Supreme Court and examines the relationship between them. Parliament may still be a great institution, but its members are no longer great men. How long can a great institution remain great in the hands of small men? The SC has held its place in the public esteem rather better than the Lok Sabha, despite the occasional allegation of financial impropriety. Parliament, the...

The Joint Lokpal Bill Drafting Committee concludes its meetings without any agreement on major issues. ON June 21, as the five government representatives and the five civil society members of the Joint Lokpal Bill Drafting Committee ended their deliberations after exchanging their versions of the draft Lokpal Bill, the battle lines were clearly drawn. The government was in no mood to agree with the civil society members led by Anna...

Report is now dead, says Congress A war of words broke out at the first meeting of the newly constituted Public Accounts Committee (PAC) here on Tuesday. While some members were vociferous in their view that the committee's contentious draft report on the 2G spectrum allocation scam was “dead” as it was “returned” and “rejected” by the Lok Sabha Speaker for lack of proper procedure in its adoption, others felt...

-The Economic Times The Parliamentary Standing Committee on finance has questioned the government's move to introduce a right to food bill when it did not have a single, widely-accepted definition of the poor. The "criteria of identification of the poor remains nebulous," the Yashwant Sinha-headed committee has observed. The proposed food security bill, seen as the largest such legislation anywhere in the world, hinges on the definition of the poor. The...

Marked by distrust and, on the government's part an element of coercion as well, the civil society-UPA exercise to jointly draft a Lokpal bill formally ended in failure on Tuesday with the two sides exchanging conflicting drafts. The government is unable to accept civil society's version of an anti-corruption authority with sweeping jurisdiction over the Prime Minister's Office, top judiciary and actions of MPs in Parliament along with merging entities like...