The brief gap between the World Cup and the Indian Premier League would have been painfully boring but for the display on national TV of the collective meekness of the Congress/UPA leadership in the face of the challenge to India's parliamentary system mounted by Anna Hazare and his bandwagon. The bandwagon comprises civil rights activists, RSS/Hindu Mahasabha/Baba Ramdev foot soldiers, ex-bureaucrats in search of a cause, sections of the urban...
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Why tar all politicians with the same brush? by Madhu Purnima Kishwar
We should be grateful to Anna Hazare for dedicating his life to the people and battling for accountability in governance. Millions look to him for inspiration and guidance. We are all sick of Mismanagement, venality and the lack of accountability that plague not only governance but also other institutions, including many NGOs that call themselves “civil society” institutions, the term made fashionable by international donor agencies. The support base of this...
More »Bangladesh: Before Accusing Sheikh Hasina Government Need for a Close Look at Yunus’ Grameen Bank by Amitava Mukherjee
It is difficult to predict what denouement the spat between the Sheikh Hasina-led Bangladesh Government and Mohammed Yunus, the Noble Laureate, would ultimately reach but it has undoubtedly brought to the fore many pitfalls of the micro-credit system which has so far been hailed as a panacea for poverty alleviation not just in the Third World countries but in many developed nations too. It may be a bit unfair to...
More »BJP demands CID probe in job scheme
Training its guns on the state government over the Mismanagement of schemes that are being run to provide employment to the poor, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Thursday alleged that officials were siphoning of crores of rupees which should have been be distributed to the poor as remuneration in the Employment Guarantee Scheme (EGS). “There is a multi-crore scam in the EGS scheme. There needs to be CID inquiry to...
More »You Are Herewith Sentenced To Life by Pinki Virani
Let Aruna die? No, with her alive, there’s more power, media attention. Hence, the politics of mercy in medicine. Lucknow airport. Late ’90s. Khushwant Singh and I are waiting for our flights, we talk about Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee mentioning my book Once Was Bombay in a speech on collapsing cities. He suddenly asks, “You wrote that book on the woman who neither lives nor dies, you still see her?” I...
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