-Outlook Former Chief Election Commissioner S Y Quraishi has proposed mandatory annual audit of funds and donations received by political parties. "We want all political funding should be transparent and checked. There should be annual compulsory audits by an independent auditor to be picked up from a panel suggested by the Election Commission," Quraishi told PTI. He said the report of such audit should be put in the public domain. "Everybody will be able...

-Tehelka By brazening it out against graft allegations, our netas are mocking common decencies. IT IS extremely unlikely that India Against Corruption, or the political arm it has promised, will win too many votes or even a single seat in the 2014 Lok Sabha election. It goes without saying though that at the current juncture, it is winning a perception and media battle against the political class. Each time a politician is...

-The Times of India The income tax department on Thursday carried out searches on the offices of infrastructure major GMR, which has developed the Delhi international airport among several other large projects. Officials said searches were undertaken across several GMR offices in Delhi, Bangalore and Hyderabad on suspicion that the company had not disclosed all financial information. The operations were underway till late in the evening but details were sketchy. The order...

-Mainstream Weekly Intense and motivated propaganda, powerful national and international diplomatic pressure, verging on pure and simple arms-twisting of the kind the Third World has been facing for decades by means of the active role of the econo-mic hit-men in the policy establishments, huge cash-back lobbying, both in India and abroad, blunt attempts to bamboozle the persons holding key positions in India’s policy establishment through a combination of hissing and kissing...

-The Hindu Property empire was built on soft loans handed out in unusual circumstances, documents show In February, as rumours of the ambitions of Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law swirled amidst the heat and dust of the election campaign in Uttar Pradesh, her daughter Priyanka moved to scotch speculation about Robert Vadra’s possible political future. “He’s a successful businessman,” the younger Ms. Gandhi said of her husband, “who is not interested in changing...