Two renowned forensic experts have established that the Shanti Bhushan tape where he purportedly asks for money to fix a case was fabricated, vindicating Prashant Bhushan and his colleagues in the India Against Corruption campaign who had maintained that the CD was spliced. Armed with reports from US-based acoustic phonetics expert George Papcun and S R Singh, former director of Central Forensic Science Laboratory who is now with Hyderabad-based Truth Labs,...

The union finance minister welcomed the gesture made by veteran BJP leader L K Advani for assuring the party’s support to the Lokpal Bill when tabled in the Parliament Union finance minister Pranab Mukherjee on Monday said India would endorse the UN convention on Graft which the country signed in 2005. “India will ratify the UN convention on Graft. There is a long legal procedure which is needed to be followed,” the...

The Lokpal (ombudsman) Bill would help fight corruption only at the centre and not in states where the magnitude of Graft is alarming, cautions former Supreme Court judge Justice N. Santosh Hegde amid the escalating hype over the proposed legislation. Hegde, also the ombudsman for Karnataka, is part of the 10-member committee set up by the government to draft the new bill following the hunger strike by reformer Anna Hazare that...

The BJP is still sizing up the fallout of Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption activism, undecided whether it would be able to reap political dividends, if any, from the urban, middle-class “upsurge” across the country. The leadership is expected to exchange notes and work out its strategy once the Assembly polls verdict is out. “The outcome will show whether the movement (that came in the midst of the state polls) had an impact...

A court on Wednesday put on trial the first set of officials and businessmen indicted in the country's biggest corruption case, a multi-billion dollar telecoms scandal that has weakened the government and put off some foreign investors. The Graft scandal is one of several to have emerged in the past few months, tarnishing the reputation of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, whose government has gone on the defensive against an emboldened opposition. While...