One hopes that the hotly contested Lokpal Bill will reach its final denouement during the winter session of Parliament. In fact, the debate on corruption in Parliament and media has focused on the single demand for the establishment of an omnipotent institution of the lokpal with its powers of enforcing the citizen’s charter, establishing state-level lokayuktas and encompassing the bureaucracy from a peon to head of the department. It has...

Harvard University has dumped former union minister and Janata Party President Subramanian Swamy from its 2012 summer school faculty after protests from teachers and students over an allegedly anti-Muslim opinion article Swamy wrote for an Indian newspaper earlier this year.  "Harvard has established a principal that the person teaching there is accountable to whatever he writes elsewhere is a not good for them," Swamy said reacting to the university's action. Only dangerous...

A.K. Ramanujan, while referring to the diversity and apparently contradictory element of unity in the Indian traditions, refers to an Irish joke about whether to classify trousers as singular or plural: singular from the top, plural from the bottom.1 A Concurrent Discipline Course in the University of Delhi for Second Year Honours students not doing History was introduced in 2005 on ‘Culture in India—Ancient’, and had sought to very sensitively...

A state-run temple in BJP-ruled Karnataka has lifted a ban on a ritual in which backward castes roll on banana leaves with food leftovers of Brahmins believing they will be “blessed”, sparking an outcry. Groups representing lower castes, academicians and social activists have described the decision by the authorities of the Kukke Subrahmanya Temple to revive made snana (bath in leftovers) as abominable and uncivilised. Over 3,000 people have gone through the...

-The Indian Express   Harvard University has decided to remove courses taught by Janata Party president Subramanian Swamy at its annual summer school session, terming his views as "reprehensible" in a controversial piece he wrote on Islamic terrorism in India. At a meeting of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, faculty members voted with an "overwhelming majority" to remove two economics courses – 'Quantitative Methods in Economics and Business' and 'Economic Development in...