-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Tuesday asked for details of members of Parliament alleged to have crime records and the status of trials pending against them following claims that more than one in every three lawmakers in Parliament had criminal antecedents. Justices Ranjan Gogoi and Navin Sinha, who were hearing a batch of petitions seeking a lifetime ban on convicted persons from contesting Assembly or parliamentary elections, asked petitioner...

-NDTV In his maiden appearance after being named Uttar Pradesh chief minister, Yogi Adityanath proclaimed that his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government would maintain a laser-like focus on the twin themes of combating corruption and restoring law and order. "In the past 15 years," Adityanath noted, "UP lagged behind in the race of development as previous governments indulged in corruption, nepotism, and failed on the law order front." Indeed, one of...

-The Telegraph After the third general elections held in 1962, the scholar-statesman, C. Rajagopalachari, wrote a fascinating, if now forgotten, essay on the imperfections of our young democracy. "The Indian electorate", remarked Rajaji, "suffers from well-known defects from which Western democracies are relatively free. The Indian voters are in great measure poor and vulnerable to bribery: even a day's expense for food serves to buy a large number of the poor...

-The Hindu Maximum government, minimum governance: Pranab Bardhan Two prominent American economists have widely different views on India’s demonetisation drive. Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff is of the opinion that the move will help tackle corruption and tax evasion, while Pranab Bardhan, Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, believes it cannot make “much of a dent in the long-term problem of corruption or black money.” Both of them shared their...

-TheWire.in Police across the country continue to use the law to book people for making offensive comments on social media, blissfully unaware of its deletion from the IT Act. Last November, police in Sheopur, Madhya Pradesh arrested 25-year-old Sattar Khan for allegedly making offensive remarks about the RSS chief on social media. Reacting to pressure from angry protestors, the police filed a criminal case against Khan. But months later, the police were...