Arundhati Roy, our leading public intellectual, has made a rare clarification. She says she never wrote the phrase “Gandhians with a gun”, used to describe Maoists in an essay she wrote for the Outlook in March. The phrase appeared in the sub-headline and Roy says it was written by the magazine. The Br
As I have been saying over the past few days, the Election Commission is clearly under pressure. They better be. Not only have they stopped making irrational claims about electronic voting machines over the past month, they have begun a clean-up exercise to overcome some of the of EVM security lapses. In a seven-page communiqué to all state CEOs dated May 3, 2010, the Elec
The National Advisory Council has been reconstituted after a gap of four years. Once again Congress president Sonia Gandhi is its chairperson. The NAC was originally set up by a government order in June 2004 to monitor the implementation of the UPA’s Common Minimum Programme (CMP). The functions of the NAC include the formation of policy of the government and assistance in
It is a man’s world after all. We even refer to God as he. Even my liberal parents get a headache if one day I decide to come home late, whereas, my male friends wax eloquent about their after-hours escapades, which mostly are a ‘men-only’. Good girls stay in after dark; it’s not safe, you see. I live in the national capital- a city bordering some of the
The movement of ‘very important persons’ or VIPs on Wednesday -- only days after the Mangalore plane crash -- put to risk three commercial flights, with over 450 passengers on board, when they were diverted from Delhi airport, according to a Times of India report. The three flights had been dangerously short of fuel when they were diverted from Delhi to Jaipur airport withou
All governments, in order to govern their subjects efficiently, convert the population into homogeneous categories and also try to transform people into statistics. These ‘statistics’ and ‘categories’ are tools of governance and the state also imagines them as the basis for planning for development. Since caste is a vital structure of Indian society, policy maker
When a prime minister talks, a nation listens. That’s what happened earlier today when Manmohan Singh addressed his first press conference in four years. But because prime ministers say so little, as did Manmohan this morning, it is what they don’t say that makes better news than what they say. And it is what they mean that makes better sense than what they say. So, h
The 80-minute-long press conference by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh can be summarised in six words: he came, he saw, he prevaricated. Being only the second press conference addressed by the prime minister during his six years in office, it was expected to be eventful, if not path-breaking, coinciding as it did with the completion of the first year in his second stint. As expected, the
I and two colleagues, working for Public Cause Research Foundation (PCRF), a Delhi-based NGO, set ourselves on a search for a well-functioning gram sabha in late 2008. By the standards of ‘local self-governance’, a gram sabha should meet regularly and collectively decide all issues of development and social justice in its jurisdiction, leaving the elected and unelected panch
The centre and states usually have a very stormy relationship. I would want to draw attention of the readers of Governance Now to the different aspects of this relationship. We live in a federal structure of government with three levels; centre, state and the panchayati raj institutions. There are a number of legislative subjects that either belong exclusively to the centre or to the states, or
The more procedures, the less justice. Paraphrasing Cicero only states the fact, though, and does not even begin to unravel the sinister politics at the heart of the matter. The curious case of Mohammad Afzal, or Afzal Guru, is merely cloaked in procedures devised by ingenious governments in India to legitimise their designs to delay, thwart or subvert justice whenever they so choose. So Afzal
To be fair to Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit, who handles the home portfolio, a decision on the mercy petition of Afzal Guru was destined from the start and has been nothing but a political question requiring the attention of her ‘elders’. She doesn’t have any significant role to play here except to do her elders’ bidding. So her reported ignorance of the um
A few hours after Indian newspapers (and the rare television channel which isn’t obsessed with TRPs!) got excited over the new, incredibly gifted, IIT-trained dean of Harvard Business School, the Financial Times posted a sobering thought. “Amidst the euphoria, Indians generally celebrate the success of their overseas compatriots on the global stage, often equating the
Nickeee Cleggg, Nickeee Cleggg, what a wonderful, wonderful name (sung to the tune of Nicky Arnstein from My Fair Lady). Forever written into in history for having changed it so dramatically and finally drawn the curtain on democracy’s mother parliament and her affection for bi-partisan sitting arrangements. They say it is rather like the first kiss, the first olive in the jar or k
“The one who loves my Gujarat is my soul. The one who loves my India is my God.” With these lines from his poem Narendra Modi signed off his blog of March 28, a day after he faced a 10-hour interrogation from the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team (SIT). It was a characteristic Modi intervention. He ably deflected the attention to Amitabh Bachchan an
I had hardly got admitted to the Master’s degree programme in English, when the campus got abuzz with the news of the semester system being introduced in Jammu University. There were many apprehensions in the minds of students, particularly the student leaders. And these often took the form of agitations and dharnas, disrupting the even tenor of the academic activities on the campus. Fina
Hillary Rodham Clinton could not contain her apparent anger when she spoke out against Pakistan in a lexicon only the secretary of state of the world’s lone super power could dare to use to chilling effect. In an interview to a news channel Clinton threatened Pakistan of dire consequences had the Times Square bomb scare been more than just that. "We`ve made it very clear that if, hea
A friend of mine once tried to work out the differences between the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, and the Congress party president, Sonia Gandhi. He said that it was more than a question of persona. A persona stands between mask and face, individual and role. Sonia Gandhi, he claimed, was an ecology. She was also a translator. If Singh represented government and economics, Sonia stood for gov
On May 4th, 2010, Andhra Pradesh government sanctioned Rs 6 lakh to the state information commission as membership fee for the latter to join National Federation of Information Commissions in India (NFICI). Registered as a society over a year ago and headquartered in Hyderabad, NFICI is an association of information commissions (not commissioners) which is meant to be “a permanent
The setting swiftly transports you to the screen classic Sholay. In this landscape dotted with evocative rocky outcrop, you can hear the hair-raising thud of heavy boots punctuated by razor-sharp dialogue, all played out on a stereophonic soundtrack within the recesses of your mind. You shudder at the prospect of a close encounter with a Gabbar Singh, with a Sambha somewhere up there and an arr
