NEARLY 80 km from Pune is Ralegan Siddhi village with about 3,000 people. It would have been one among the hundreds of nondescript villages in Parner taluk of Ahmednagar district, Maharashtra, had it not been for Kisan Baburao Hazare, 71, better known as Anna, or older brother, a title that was appended to his name after he made the village more than just a dot on the map. Until he was...

In less than a fortnight of its formation, the joint committee for drafting the Lokpal Bill is falling apart. Even as civil society representatives Shanti Bhushan and Prashant Bhushan are battling attacks on their integrity, another civil society leading LIGht, Justice N Santosh Hegde, is thinking of quitting the panel. Stung by Congress general secretary Digvijay Singh's references to his ineffectuality in dealing with corruption in Karnataka, Hegde, who is the...

The Jaitapur nuclear power project has drawn blood even before its boundary wall is ready. One person was killed in police firing on Monday, which by all accounts was unnecessary to disperse peaceful protesters. There was arson in Madban, at the site’s centre, which gutted some grass and a part of a tiny makeshift shed belonging to the Nuclear Power Corporation of India. The police went berserk and intruded into...

The Communist Party of India (Marxist) on Tuesday condemned the police firing at people protesting against the Jaitapur nuclear power project. It demanded adequate compensation for the kin of the deceased and those injured. In a statement, the party said the local people had opposed the location of the plant in their area and refused to accept the forceful acquisition of their lands. It said the Jaitapur project to be set...

Irom Sharmila Chanu and Anna Hazare have one thing in common – the ability to fast indefinitely for what they perceive is right. But the similarities end there. She has been on a political fast for 11 years but her silent resilience moves you when you realize the sheer magnitude of what she is single-handedly trying to achieve. Far from the glare of studio LIGhts of television channels and tangled wires of...