-The Indian Express Is corruption among the lower castes an equaliser? Is it a zero-sum game? First we, the upper castes, were the looters, now it is your turn, the lower castes, to loot — and it's okay. After all, according to Ashis Nandy, there is hope for the republic if there is still some scope to loot, and especially if it is by the lower castes. And according to Tarun...

-IPS News Officials at the World Bank are forcefully rejecting a new internal evaluation that is highly critical of the institution’s decade-long forest policy, expressing their “strong disagreement” with some assertions in the report. The assessment, written by the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG), the World Bank Group’s auditor, warns that expectations for poverty reduction as envisioned in the bank’s 2002 Forest Strategy “have not yet been met”. The report is particularly critical...

-Counterpunch.org     “The rearing and guiding of a civilization must depend upon its intellectual class.”     BR Ambedkar, Ranade, Gandhi and Jinnah, 1943, Delhi. I. Arrest. States are clumsy with their enormous power. When it suits the modern state, it uses it immense apparatus to constraint those who make claims upon it or who say things that denigrate this or that section of society. A college professor in West Bengal draws a cartoon of...

-The Hindu In protecting husbands from marital rape and khap panchayats from accountability for sexual wrongs, the government has lost an opportunity to change the way in which our society treats women In its eagerness to demonstrate that it is “doing something” about rape in response to the overwhelming protests over the brutal rape and murder of the 23-year-old Delhi student last December, the government has issued an ordinance that is both...

-The Times of India A fragmented polity and a vitiated public sphere characterise today's India. The question that is making the rounds is whether we have become an intolerant nation. On all the networks, one strident anchor outdoes his or her shrill peer in raising it. Obviously, there can be no simple 'yes' or 'no' to such a question; it all depends on the context in which it is posed. Yes,...