A businessman I know was approached by representatives of a leading Indian national newspaper and offered a deal: Give us a stake in your company, and we’ll give you advertising space and favorable editorial coverage. A publisher told me that she received a similar proposition: Pay us, and we’ll interview your authors and write features about them. Sushma Swaraj, the parliamentary leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party, has said that...

  Democratic political systems in every advanced western country have faced challenges posed by the role of political finance or money spent during elections. On the basis of their specific experiences, these countries have tried to tackle the issue of political funding during polls. The democratic political system is corrupted if elections are contested on the basis of financial resources provided by rich individuals or business corporations as these donors, from the...

Kancha Ilaiah’s Post-Hindu India should be essential reading for all who get panicky about Mayawati’s brand of Dalit politics. Unlike the bsp supremo’s bid to empower marginalised groups through the levers of Electoral Democracy by wooing a wider ‘sarvajan samaj’, Ilaiah wants to launch an all-out civil war between Dalit Bahujans and Hindu society. This is an angry, provocative book written by a leading Dalit thinker, who is convinced that...

Vice-President Hamid Ansari on Monday said challenges still remained in the electoral system. The real empowerment and participative governance at the third tier of the government was still a work in progress. He expressed the hope that the electoral process at the local self-government level would benefit from coordination and sharing of experiences and resources with the EC. He was addressing the diamond jubilee celebrations of the Election Commission of India. Similarly,...

Democracy is, everywhere, a work in progress. Like many other countries, India has imposed electoral quotas to improve the political empowerment of women and racial-ethnic minorities – that is, it has a political system that requires women to be elected to certain leadership positions. These rules represent a form of affirmative action, but they also resemble a feature of our own Constitution that reserves space in the Senate for two representatives...