-The Hindu The commission, which has won acclaim for conducting elections with fairness and integrity, is now in danger of seeing a huge gutting of its powers to do so The Union Government has told the Supreme Court that, in its view, the Election Commission of India has no power to disqualify a candidate on grounds of “correctness or otherwise” of his/her election accounts. A counter-affidavit filed by the Union Law Ministry...

-The Asian Age Sonia Gandhi’s economic and political ideology may have apparently triumphed over that of Manmohan Singh. The neo-liberal finance minister Palaniappan Chidambaram may be conveying an impression that he’s turned socialist with a vengeance by increasing taxes on the rich in the run-up to the 16th general elections. But the truth is that Mr Chidambaram has made certain assumptions about subsidies, inflation and the expected growth of gross domestic product...

-First Post The Jaipur literary festival is almost notorious for creating storms in a teacup. To its credit though, if offers a different flavor of literary tea every year. Last year, it was a variant of the Rushdie phenomenon, where a group of aspiring litterateurs read out passages from the Satanic Verses and then succumbed to political correctness. This year, the controversy came in a session chaired by Urvashi Butalia, publisher Zubaan, where...

-The Hindu Although Ashis Nandy has explained the context in which he made his corruption remark, the furious pace of TV and Internet does not allow space for a re-evaluation As I watched the clip of Ashis Nandy, at the Jaipur Literature Festival, belligerently asserting that most of the corruption in India was the work of the Scheduled Castes (SC), the Scheduled Tribes (ST) and the Other Backward Classes (OBCs), I thought...

-The Hindu Gopal Subramanium, former Solicitor-General of India, a member of the Justice J.S. Verma-led Committee that was constituted last month in the aftermath of the gang rape and murder of a young student in the national capital, to recommend amendments to laws relating to offences against women, speaks to Sandeep Joshi on how it went about its tasks, the rationale behind some of its key recommendations and its expectations of...