The worse off the poor become, the healthier our Ministers get. Air India might not be doing as well we'd like it to. But the braveheart who flew it fearlessly into dense clouds of debt is doing okay. Praful Patel (who no longer holds the aviation portfolio) added, on average, over half a million rupees every day to his assets in 28 months between May 2009 and August 2011. This might...

Stories abound in Bhopal of the life and death of Shehla Masood. But among those who knew her, there appears agreement on one point: something was so uncharacteristically passive, so un-Shehla-like, they say, about the dead body slumped in the driving seat of the silver-grey Santro on the morning of August 16, with no evident signs of struggle and a bullet hole in the neck. Some crude clues to the extraordinary...

-The Telegraph   Children are not safe in school if there is a rally in this city. At least 45 children from a government-run New Alipore school, some of them barely 10 years old, were herded into a Matador van and sent to central Calcutta without their parents’ consent. Some of them thought their children had been kidnapped when they arrived at Sahapur Mathuranath Vidyapeeth after hearing from people in the neighbourhood that many...

Anna Hazare's campaign may lead to a new Lokpal Bill, but it has legitimised middle-class vigilantism and other kinds of civil society mobilisation. NOW that Anna Hazare has declared victory, it is time to take stock of one of the most powerful recent mobilisations of people in India, focussed on influencing policy or lawmaking processes. The victory, however, is largely symbolic. The original demand of the movement, carefully built around Hazare's...

Acute dissatisfaction verging on disgust with the behaviour and performance of some Members of Parliament and members of Legislative Assemblies has generated a debate about enacting a legislation for recall of elected members. Under the present law, an MP or an MLA has a fixed term of office for five years. Articles 102 and 191 of the Constitution specify the contingencies in which a person shall be disqualified for being...