What can power do to a political party’s financial health? Quite a lot, it seems. An RTI query by a Chennai-based activist shows that the income of India’s longest-ruling national party, the Indian National Congress, increased from Rs 69.55 crore in 2002-03 to a whopping Rs 467.57 crore in 2010-11. Documents accessed by activist V Gopalakrishnan show that the jump is even more evident when figures from 2003-04 are compared with...

Anna Hazare is not MoHAndas Gandhi or Jayaprakash Narayan. No one wants to seriously hear his diagnosis of the ills of the Indian political system or his vision of a future India and, so, it is pointless to find fault with either. He is not even a Gandhian satyagrahi looking for self-purification or waiting to listen to his inner voice. He has used his fasts to unashamedly pressure a corrupt,...

-The Indian Express   The issue of fertiliser shortage took an ugly turn on Sunday when a farmer, Manjit Bhoi (35) of Talab village under Dhankauda block allegedly committed suicide by consuming pesticide as he could not afford urea to save his crop. It was only on Friday that farmers under the banner of Sambalpur Zilla Krushak Surakhya Sangathan had gheraoed Agriculture Deputy Director Ashok Kumar MoHAnty demanding measures to prevent black...

In the current hullabaloo about the lok pal bill and the Anna agitation, one question has frequently been raised, both by protagonists of the Congress and the government and by constitutionalists and legal experts: however laudable the goals of Anna and his supporters, aren’t the methods adopted by them illegitimate? Doesn’t a fast unto death amount to blackmail of the legislature? Isn’t it an attempt by the unelected to usurp...

Residents of the state capital, who had planned to binge on non-vegetarian food after Sawaan, will have to go slow because of an increase in the price of onions, a common ingredient in meat and fish dishes. Ironically, vegetarian dishes, too, will cost more as the prices of greens have also shot north. Though you and I have to shell out more, there has been only a marginal increase in the wholesale...