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,...

Differences appeared to have cropped up in the civil society over the demand for inclusion of the Prime Minister and higher judiciary in the Lokpal Bill with Baba Ramdev opposing such a move. The yoga guru, to whom the government deputed the topmost tax official to convince him on the steps taken by government against black money, wondered at a press conference in Sehore how top positions like the Prime Minister...

-The Hindu   The National Campaign for People's Right to Information has expressed its concern at the reported official move to exclude agencies such as the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the National Investigation Agency (NIA), and the National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID) from the Right to Information Act. In a statement signed by Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey, Prashant Bhushan, Venkatesh Nayak and Anjali Bharadwaj, among others, the NCPRI described the proposed exclusion...

The 1985 Lokpal Bill destroyed the raison d'etre of the institution of an ombudsman, but all successive governments copied it. PUBLIC anger was understandably aroused over the gross delay by Parliament in the last 40 years to enact a Lokpal Bill and with the toothless one that the government sponsored. It is not widely known that the delay was aggravated by deception and fraud in 1985. It was, however, emulated by...

To ask a people burdened with systemic bribery to accept bribe-giving as legal is to demand they accept corruption and the existing structures of power and inequity it flows from. Let's get this right. The Chief Economic Adviser to the Ministry of Finance, Government of India, wants a certain class of bribes legalised? And says so in a paper titled “Why, for a Class of Bribes, the Act of Giving a...