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...

The Delhi police have obtained a compact disc purportedly containing a fabricated telephone conversation between the former Law Minister and co-chairman of the joint committee to draft the Lokpal Bill, Shanti Bhushan, and Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh and the former SP general secretary, Amar Singh. It has been sent for forensic examination. The police, who had planned to approach The Indian Express to get the CD, got a copy...

Only around 6% of cases filed against doctors involved in sex-selection practices in the 17 states, which have the most skewed sex ratio, have ended up in convictions till date. According to Union health ministry's latest data — prepared for a crucial meeting of health secretaries of the 17 states on Wednesday — a total of 805 cases have been filed in court against doctors till March 31, ever since the...

Do we, the Indian middle class, see the corruption within us? I was too busy being corrupt to join Anna Hazare’s camp last week. For four days, I heard nothing but stories of our Tahrir Square-like revolution against the corrupt unfurling right under our noses in Delhi’s Jantar Mantar. But it was school admission time and I had some serious palm-greasing, document-fudging, string-pulling, weight-throwing and tout-chasing to do. I had...

Any perceptive analyst of democracy will testify that there is no necessary relationship between democracy and a corruption-proof regime, or development, or political stability. If we were to evaluate democracy from the vantage point of the desired ends we expect it to realise, it would fare rather poorly when compared to authoritarian governments, say the one institutionalised in Singapore by its former prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew. Yew transformed Singapore...