The best thing about Indian politicians is that they make you feel you are a better person. Not surprisingly, Indians often derive their moral confidence not through the discomfort of examining their own actions, but from regarding themselves as decent folks looted by corrupt, villainous politicians. This is at the heart of a self-righteous middle-class uprising against political corruption, a television news drama that reached its inevitable climax in Delhi on...

-The Economic Times   The Right to Food Bill, which proposes to give more subsidised grains to the poor, would be introduced only in the winter session of Parliament as consultations with states was taking longer than expected, Food Minister KV Thomas said on Wednesday. The draft bill, approved by the empowered group of ministers, is currently being processed in the law ministry. It was expected to be introduced in the monsoon...

-The Hindu   A corrupt government devoid of moral authority is ill equipped to deal rationally with legitimate public anger. By ordering the illegitimate detention of Anna Hazare before he began his fast in support of stronger anti-corruption provisions in the Lokpal Bill and the arrest of a large number of peaceful protesters in the national capital, the United Progressive Alliance government revealed its ugly, repressive face. No representative government in a...

Its facets include concentration of media ownership and the transformation of news into a commodity. THE last two decades have witnessed a dramatic transformation of India's ‘mediascape' – a term first used by Arjun Appadurai, an academic of Indian origin based in the United States, to describe how visual imagery impacts the world and to describe and situate the role of the mass media in global cultural flows. While there...

A sensational story in Hindustan Times about surgeons in Indore performing hundreds of sex change operations on children turns out to be false and misleading. An investigation.   Last month, a Hindustan Times front page report claiming that Indore doctors were converting hundreds of baby girls into baby boys sent shock waves through the system, with everyone from the Prime Minister's Office to the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights...