2011

I was on the eleventh day of my fast, tired and weary, with a film floating over my eyes, I began wondering when would every child get enough to eat and go to school. We had replaced the Empire with another and they had tried their utmost to turn us into subservient tools.
Just then an old man appeared. I knew I was hallucinating, but in exhaustion, I said, ‘Go on, speak!’ He offered me a packet. ‘What is it?’ I asked with suspicion. ‘Salt,’ he replied with humility. ‘Salt!’ I spat (…)

A Gandhian leader has won hands down at least for the present. This is an outstanding victory for Gandhi’s India. To deny this is to be blind to the reality that has unfolded and is still unfolding before our very eyes.
By all accounts it is a massive success. Frightened by the growing mass backing for Anna Hazare’s crusade against corruption, epitomised in his tenacious campaign for the Jan Lokpal Bill, the Manmohan Singh Government beat a hasty retreat on August 25 with the PM himself (…)

Kamala Prasad, an outstanding civil servant of post-independent India, a formidable intellect, a prolific writer on current affairs and a perfect gentleman, passed away in Delhi on August 9, 2011. He joined the Indian Administrative Service in 1957 and retired as the Chief Secretary of the Government of Bihar in 1992. In addition to going through all the rungs of the Service, he was primarily involved in policy-making on development issues at the highest administrative level. He was the (…)

Beginning as it did with not only deep skepticism about the legitimacy of the crowds —starting with aspersions that this was a middle-class urban community, triggered and extra-polated by the media, especially TV—the comments of the gatherings in Delhi in particular and elsewhere have begun to see the ‘crowds’ differently. From Left to Right, from journalists to commentators there is an acknowledgement that the crowds have all classes as well as all sects and are truly gripped by the (…)

COMMUNICATION
The article “Duragraha in the name of Satygraha: A Gandhian Perspective” by Alok Bajpai, published in the July 29 issue of Mainstream, is utterly misconceived. It itself seeks to kill the Gandhian spirit. By declaring the Parliament supreme, over the voice of the people’s movement supported by virtually all cross-sections of the society across the country, it forgot the Gandhian dictum that representational democracy (which includes both parliamentary and presidential forms (…)

The mass media has highlighted the decision of the Dar-ul-Uloom, Deoband, to terminate the recent appointment of Maulana G.M. Vastanvi as Mohtamin (Rector) and focused on the Muslim Indian’s continuing rejection of Narendra Modi, the mastermind of the Gujarat Genocide of 2002.
The economic development of Gujarat under Modi is totally irrelevant to the Muslim Gujaratis who have re-built their shattered lives to the extent possible since the Genocide of 2002 with their own efforts without (…)

Just as it is impossible not to taste honey or poison that one may find at the tip of one’s tongue, so it is impossible for one dealing with government funds not to taste, at least a little bit, of the King’s wealth.
Just as it is impossible to know when a fish moving in water is drinking it, so it is impossible to find out when government servants in charge of undertakings misappropriate money. —Kautilya: Arthshastra
The only definition that can be given of morality is this: That which (…)

Over the past decades successive Union governments of various political hues have not even gotten to the stage of tabling a Lokpal Bill, and combined with a rash of monumental scams in the past couple of years, it has pushed the corruption issue on to the front page.
The nation is agog with the face-off between what has come to be known as “Team Anna” led by Anna Hazare and the Congress-led UPA Union government on the subject of corruption, focussed as it is on the Jan Lokpal Bill (…)

It is now clear beyond all doubt: the Congress and the BJP are equally uninterested in fighting corruption.
Actually both are interested in continuing it because both are beneficiaries of corruption. All talk about ending corruption and punishing the corrupt is just talk, meant to fool the public.
The Congress showed its anti-anti-corruption state of mind by subverting the public demand for an effective Lokpal Bill and presenting a draft that was only slightly different from (…)

On August 19 this year was observed the twentieth anniversary of the coup against the then Soviet President and General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, by the hardliners in the Soviet Communist Party, an event that engendered a massive popular backlash in Russia and the entire USSR and expedited the demise of first the CPSU and then the Soviet Union itself, notwithstanding the fact that due to remarkable mass resistance the coup failed by (…)