The UPA government has come under severe criticism for trying to hurriedly pass the Land Acquisition (amendment) and the Resettlement & Rehabilitation Bill during the ongoing Parliamentary session. Both the bills have been dubbed as anti-poor as their provisions are seen to promote forced dispossession of farmers’ land as well as large scale displacement of rural people. The haste with which the two Bills are being promoted could be assessed...

The bizarre politics behind the UPA's withdrawal of the controversial sugarcane price order. It was the quickest retreat that any government has made in recent times. It took just a day’s protest outside Parliament before the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government decided to withdraw the controversial provisions of a notification it had issued last month on the payment of fair and remunerative prices to sugarcane farmers. You may describe it as an...

If the ordinance is not withdrawn, farmers will stop supplies to the capital, says Ajit Singh Rashtriya Lok Dal leader Ajit Singh on Thursday put the Central government on notice and warned that unless the sugar cane pricing ordinance was withdrawn, farmers would stop supplies of commodities and milk to the capital. “We will shut down Delhi,” he declared at a massive rally of farmers. The rally, which stopped Delhi on...

The capital got a fulsome dose of the country today, and the country a swift pledge from the capital. Within hours of swarming in from the restive western Uttar Pradesh neighbourhood and trapping New Delhi in feisty gridlock, farmers had forced a retreat by the government on sugarcane pricing and sent the Congress panicking over the electoral consequences of provoking rural anger. Rahul Gandhi, who is blue-printing the Congress’s comeback bid in...

The S.C. and S.T. (Prevention of Atrocities) Act has failed to make Dalits any safer. THE ascent of the Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) to power in Uttar Pradesh on May 13, 2007, was seen as a defining moment in the politics of Dalit empowerment in the country. The Scheduled Caste (S.C.) leader of an avowedly “Dalit assertive” party had been Chief Minister earlier too, but the difference this time...