In its wisdom, the state giveth and the state taketh away. When it acquires farmlands claiming eminent domain, there is blood on the streets. However, when it quietly bestows largesse on chosen ones, it is barely noticed. At worst there is a lawsuit. There were a dozen lengthy judgments from the Supreme Court in the past two months on land acquisition disputes — a mark of the times. But the biased...

-The Telegraph   The Left parties have refused to answer government questionnaires on the Lok Pal bill, a stance that arrays them alongside the BJP in trying to corner the Congress-led UPA over corruption. CPM general secretary Prakash Karat has written to finance minister Pranab Mukherjee saying his party cannot give its views on the six questionnaires, to be answered in yes-or-no terms. The format even prompted CPI general secretary A.B. Bardhan to...

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...

In the season of draft Bills, the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council has come out with its draft of the National Food Security Act, 2011, that gives legal backing to the highly leaky PDS system, thereby excluding innovative options like cash transfers, which may have included variants like food stamps and UID-linked smart cards. Despite the PM’s panel objecting to universal legal entitlement, the draft says that “not less than 90%...

-The Telegraph   The talks to draft the Lok Pal bill appeared to have hit a wall after the civil society members stayed away from today’s meeting and left the field open for the government to raise the issue of civility. The government, whose representatives went ahead with the meeting, asked the Anna Hazare-led group not to derail proceedings by “raising extraneous issues” and publicly abusing ministers. “We have been called cheats, frauds,...