Sheikh Sajed Ali doesn’t dare leave the Jamshed Ali Bhawan party office in West Midnapore’s Keshpur. It’s the only refuge the sharecropper has been able to find since the Left Front led by the Communist Party of India-Marxist, or CPM, got wiped out in the recent assembly elections by the Trinamool Congress and its allies. Ali is terrified to venture out. He says his family is being asked to pay `2...

There is a photograph of the Second Round Table Conference in London, which shows every person in the room looking at the camera except for Mohandas K Gandhi. The maharajas, the leaders of the Depressed Classes and the Muslim League, the officers of His Majesty’s Government — all have their face turned at the photographer come to capture them. Not Gandhi, who sits in his chair, wrapped in a shawl,...

Like millions of others across India, I have spent the past week repelled by the spectacle of a weak government entering into improbable contortions over the naive and somewhat bizarre demands of Baba Ramdev. And when the “toughness” followed in the early hours of Sunday, it came in a typically cowardly fashion — with police action in the dead of the night against unarmed supporters who did not pose an...

No one’s buying the government’s desperate arguments to keep the prime minister above Lokpal scrutiny Points Of Friction   Government and civil society representatives have sparred on the question of including the prime minister in the proposed Lokpal Bill on seven key grounds: Point: The Prime Minister is accountable only to Parliament, and to the people of India Counterpoint: Does this mean a PM can never face action for criminal liability, however serious the charge,...

-The Economic Times   The only worse thing for a government than a perception of it dragging its feet over fighting corruption is to be seen quailing at the prospect of assorted godmen and gurus launching campaigns over the issue. And the UPA regime attained that craven low with the spectacle of four very senior ministers and bureaucrats waiting at Delhi airport to greet multi-million dollar yoga empire founder Baba Ramdev...