A Tamil economist, the late S. Guhan, used to say that Delhi was a capital in search of a country. I was reminded of that remark during the fortnight of May 29 to June 11, 2011. In that fortnight, if one watched the ‘national’ channels or read the ‘national’ newspapers, one would think all of India was involved in one way or the other with the ideas and practices of...

Madhya Pradesh is betting cash incentives will curb population growth and improve the ‘life cycle’ of the girl child, but experts question the efficacy of such policies in addressing deep-rooted social prejudices Visitors trudging down the dusty village road are greeted by a giant billboard featuring a smiling Shivraj Singh Chouhan, the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, hugging two young girls. The tagline in Hindi reads: Gaon ki beti, kisse chhoti...

'Civil society' is a special kind of political capacity, not a repository of any special virtue—and it is not more inherently valuable than the state The story of Indian democracy sometimes plays like a soap opera. The latest episode—not the uplifting kind—involves a confrontation between the government and a mysterious something called “civil society”. Can this “civil society” cavalcade in to rescue a flailing Indian democracy—that once-proud system now being abused...

After questions were raised recently on the ''leakages'' in the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), another concern – non-payment of salaries to social auditors in Karnataka –might well have broad implications for the programme in the State. For the past six months, the social auditors who are responsible for supervising, guiding, rectifying errors in the programme’s implementation, and motivating people to take up more and jobs under the...

This paper was presented at the Regional Workshop on War on Terror and Asian Democracy 17 May 2011, Kim Dae-Jung Convention Centre, South Korea organised by Solidarity for Democratization Movement in Asia (SDMA) Introduction In the discourse on terrorism and counter terrorism, September 11 stands as a watershed because of the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001. Government of India (GoI) also took full advantage of the ‘War on Terror’...