On May 23, the president of the Congress, Sonia Gandhi, laid the foundation stone of a bridge being built across the river Ravi, linking Jammu and Kashmir with Punjab and Himachal Pradesh. Ten days later, she was in Rajasthan, inaugurating the National Rural Livelihoods Mission. For both trips she had to travel far from her place of residence, which — given her position — would have involved careful planning beforehand,...

When the basic structure of the Constitution denies the Prime Minister immunity from prosecution, how could it be argued that the office should not be brought under the scrutiny of the Lokpal? The Indian citizenry is up in arms against corruption at the highest levels of government. Anna Hazare's movement has caught the people's imagination. The former President, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, has pitched in and called upon the youth to start...

The episodes of violence in land acquisition by the government, as witnessed recently in Bhatta-Parsaul in Uttar Pradesh and in other states earlier, occur because patterns of violence are inbuilt into the process. Despite a bill pending in Parliament since 2007, there has been little effort by political parties to evolve a consensus on acquisition of agricultural land for non-agricultural purposes. The law as at present and also the provisions...

'Civil society' is a special kind of political capacity, not a repository of any special virtue—and it is not more inherently valuable than the state The story of Indian democracy sometimes plays like a soap opera. The latest episode—not the uplifting kind—involves a confrontation between the government and a mysterious something called “civil society”. Can this “civil society” cavalcade in to rescue a flailing Indian democracy—that once-proud system now being abused...

The cheapest car in the world proved the costliest for a 34-year-old Left Front CPI-M government in India’s eastern state of West Bengal, as the communists lost the elections here by a wide margin. The outcome is the result of an anti-left movement that began in 2006 following the controversial takeover of farmland to create a manufacturing plant for Tata Motors’ small family vehicle called the ‘Nano’. A sweep by a regional...