Sheikh Sajed Ali doesn’t dare leave the Jamshed Ali Bhawan party office in West Midnapore’s Keshpur. It’s the only refuge the sharecropper has been able to find since the Left Front led by the Communist Party of India-Marxist, or CPM, got wiped out in the recent assembly elections by the Trinamool Congress and its allies. Ali is terrified to venture out. He says his family is being asked to pay `2...

If you want to kill any idea in the world, get a committee working on it,' quipped Charles F Kettering , the famous American engineer and inventor of the electric starter. Well, the government has done just that! It has appointed an eight-member committee to examine ways to tackle black money. Perhaps that is too cynical! After all, the flurry of activity (the committee is only one of a series...

If nothing else, the Delhi police raid on Baba Ramdev's camp on Sunday has helped clear some confusion. The midnight swoop was unexpected, but we now know that the central government, which treated the yoga guru like an honoured state guest when he first arrived in Delhi, is his enemy. Congress leader Digvijay Singh has described Ramdev as a "thug" and a "fraud". In turn, Ramdev has accused the centre of...

-PTI   A desperate government's efforts failed today to achieve any breakthrough with Baba Ramdev deciding to go ahead with his indefinite fast here from tomorrow amidst indications that a compromise was likely in a day or two. For nearly five hours, two senior union ministers Kapil Sibal and Subodh Kant Sahay negotiated with the yoga guru over his demands on eradication of corruption at a posh hotel, a venue totally different...

Manmohan Singh government's high-risk move in evicting Baba Ramdev from the Capital after a midnight police raid on his camp at Ramlila Maidan here has brought together rival factions of civil society, besides exposing the Centre and Congress leadership to sharp Attacks from political opponents. Just hours after the dramatic police raid on Ramlila Maidan, Anna Hazare's camp announced that they would boycott the meeting of the joint Lokpal panel scheduled...