-Sri Lanka Guardian   There is now huge debate in India on corruption issues. Anna Hazare , a social activist has launched agitation demanding introduction of separate law to create ombudsman (Lokpal), to put down corruption in the country. There is difference of views between government of India and Anna Hazare on the content of the proposed law. Nandini Voice For The Deprived, a Chennai based NGO , organized a debate competition at...

Barring the very corrupt, everyone would support the ongoing campaign against corruption. But not either Team Anna's specific solution or the means it employs. In fact, there is every reason to oppose and condemn the move to blackmail the government into conceding a very flawed demand. A monolithic, all-powerful body that would hold every functionary of the state including the judiciary to account, and investigate and prosecute them if necessary, while...

In the current hullabaloo about the lok pal bill and the Anna agitation, one question has frequently been raised, both by protagonists of the Congress and the government and by constitutionalists and legal experts: however laudable the goals of Anna and his supporters, aren’t the methods adopted by them illegitimate? Doesn’t a fast unto death amount to blackmail of the legislature? Isn’t it an attempt by the unelected to usurp...

Anna Hazare's agitation in defence of his version of the Lokpal Bill seems to have revived public memories of the 1974-75 Jayaprakash Narayan-led anti-corruption mass agitation, especially among the new generation of technology-driven middle class youth in metropolitan towns of India. But can Anna Hazare's anti-corruption crusade become a benchmark comparable with the historical mass mobilisation movements launched by Gandhi from 1920 to 1947 or the one popularly known as the...

The key to Anna's appeal lies in his status as a detached, almost bewildered outsider in the world of FDI inflows, stock indices and GDP growth numbers. If two years ago, someone had predicted that the next popular leader who would catch the imagination of the middle class and become the spearhead of an unlikely protest movement spanning a large part of urban India would be a 73-year-old largely unknown man,...