Governor’s Disgrace
EIGHTEEN hours after Haryana Governor Ganapatrao Devji Tapase committed the most undemocratic faux pas in India’s political history, he was cowering on a sofa in…
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Letter from the Editor
One of the lesser-known areas of media responsibility is its relationship with the law. It is a relationship which is generally little understood, not having…
Book Review: My Years in an Indian Prison
So much is being written about political prisoners in India these days, that the layman might succumb to the temptation of focusing more on the…
Commonwealth chief says African democracy growing
20 March 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, March 20 (Reuter) – Democracy has taken root in most African countries but…
FOCUS-Queen’s India visit hit by row over protocol
15 October 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Oct 15 (Reuters) – Queen Elizabeth’s visit to India was hit by fresh…
India looks back in frustration at queen’s visit
19 October 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Oct 19 (Reuters) – India looked back in frustration on Sunday at a…
READING THE BAR CODES
“UPON MY WORD: India’s prisons are stuck in a time warp” STRANGE HOW time’s machine travels back and forth at warp speed. Two hundred and…
Modi Unlimited
Coasting down the six-lane highway from Ahmedabad to Gandhinagar, wheels barely touching the asphalt, it is tempting to forget that you are in the India…
Gender Gag
Sexual harassment can be crude and overt or very subtle, but you know you are being sexually harassed when you experience it. Those around you…
Scholarship – Political Compulsions
Two experts on Soviet studies, both lecturers in major universities, were informed late last month by the University Grants Commission (UGC) that their applications for…
Gujrat – Hurricane Havoc
It was a visitation of grief and destruction, a cruel twist to the suffering Gujarat was already shrouded in. Meteorologists first noticed the brewing cyclone…
A Battle Supreme
Titled Judiciary: Attacks and Survival, the speech had been long in coming, the speaker delayed, first by an attack of diabetes in March and then…
Mysterious U-Turn
Although it is a blasphemous thought, it has cropped up in many a legal mind during the last few weeks: if bets were placed on…
Political Compulsion
Two experts on Soviet studies, both lecturers in major universities, were informed late last month by the University Grants Commission (UGC) that their applications for…
Prisoners – Fighting for A Cause
The salaried middle classes have time and again fallen prey to the Government’s more capricious economic decisions. But, one group that has suffered the most…
Jagannath Mishra-Cleared By The Court
The India-Rubber man, Jagannath Mishra, had done it again. For months, the Bihar chief minister’s political fate had hung in the balance while the Supreme…
Cheating The Hangman
Convicted killers Billa and Ranga were expected to make headlines last fortnight. Make news, they certainly did, but not the way everybody anticipated. Instead of…
Ends of Justice
So Ham-Handed and desperate for representatives of any stature in Assam has the Congress(I) become that it has jettisoned all concern for decorum and dignity…
Suppressing Dissent?
Every dissenter is in a minority of one, and K. Ashok Rao, 36, deputy manager in Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL), is discovering what it…
Hanging Fire
The Quality of justice seemed to be under tremendous strain last fortnight. At issue was the vexatious question of capital punishment. As usual, the shock…
Death Penalty – Snag In The Rope
Anticlimax has become the boon companion of the Supreme Court. When the court reopened on July 18 after its summer vacation, it was shadowed by…
The Method Man
Gujarat’s Chief Minister tells Chaitanya Kalbag in a wide-ranging interview that policy and process make a heady development cocktail Narendra Modi is not a tall…
The Daisy’s Petals
Will we get a Lokpal? Will we not? The answer is blowin’ in the wind It’s a NAIL-BITER. I predicted in another column that the…
Great Stress Test
It’s good we now have a GST, but its design is another matter Since you all love acronyms for the Good and Simple Tax and…
Hollowing Out
Governments cynically scoop out value from their own companies Privatisation will work only when the government sells more than 50 per cent of a state-owned…
Sell Sell Sell
The government must take courage and embrace privatisation Two numbers speak eloquently about our schizophrenia over privatisation: the Rs 2.11 trillion ($32.5 billion) package announced…
Bhag Piyush Bhag
Can the new Railway minister outrun the challenges? Piyush Goyal is a chartered accountant, lawyer, former investment banker, former Bharatiya Janata Party treasurer, and a…
How to make more with less
Team leader Modi is fishing in a shallow talent pool How much a hurry is prime minister Narendera Modi in? It depends on your horizon.…
Glass Half-Full?
Strong, sustained growth is possible—if we don’t trip ourselves up We can hope that in the run-up to the next general election we will not…
VIRAL FEVER
Start exercise your smartphone thumb, because the next big election will be fought on our mobiles. The latest Internet and Mobile Association of India survey…
RED-LETTER DAYS
This is a year of anniversaries , some unpleasant, some prescient, some momentous. CE 2019 is important not only because of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s…
NaMo the FMCG
If you want to decompress from the 2019 election campaign, and haven’t already donned the colours to be a cheering face in a shouting crowd…
Off the Blocks
For the second time in five years, I was struck by how apposite Rud-yard Kipling’s poem ‘If’ is in relation to Narendra Modi. At one…