Much like the tsunami waves that devastated many coastal areas five years ago, the closing weeks of 2009 saw an ill wind sweeping across many of our democratic institutions, highlighting that beneath the veneer of the nation’s aspirations towards great power status was a crumbling institutional core. To look at the fourth estate first. The preface to the Press Council of India’s “Norms of Journalistic Conduct” has a section that...

Arnold Schwarzenegger, Al Gore, Wangari Maathai, Desmond Tutu and a host of other celebrities descended here on Tuesday for the climate summit, rubbing shoulders with NGOs dressed as angels, penguins and trees. As television crews chased celebrities around the sprawling summit venue — the Bella Centre — and scrums broke out to enter the rooms where they were speaking, the relatively few NGO representatives allowed inside found innovative ways of spreading...