Why Parliament Softened its Censure of Team Anna
After all the fire and brimstone in the Lok Sabha on Tuesday against Arvind Kejriwal’s uncharitable comments on “criminal” MPs, parliament adopted a mild censure motion. The NDA’s Sharad Yadav (JD-U)...
View ArticleHow To Beat India’s Oil Crisis
India’s crude oil production rose barely 1% in 2011-12 over the previous year to 7,63,000 barrels per day. Meanwhile, India’s energy needs are exploding. The mismatch between domestic crude production...
View ArticleThe Cost of Misgovernance
The gap may appear small. But for a poor country it could be lethal. India’s trendline annual GDP growth rate has fallen from just under 9% in fiscal 2010 to 6.9% in fiscal 2012. If the deceleration...
View ArticleWhere Does Anna Go From Here?
Anna Hazare’s movement has fizzled out. The Lokpal bill is in cold storage. Anna himself is a rustic old man, out of touch with modern thinking. Right? Wrong – thrice over. The drawing rooms of south...
View ArticleSilence Of The Lamb
When does silence become complicity? Prime Minister Manmohan Singh now stands at the thin edge of vicarious liability. Vicarious liability arises from the doctrine of respondeat superior (the...
View ArticleRich MPs, Poor Voters
The Rae Bareli seat in Uttar Pradesh has been a Gandhi family bastion since 1967 when Indira Gandhi first stood for election from there. Sonia Gandhi adopted the constituency in 2004 and was re-elected...
View ArticleModi or Nitish?
Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and a powerful lobby within the BJP announced today that the NDA’s Prime Ministerial candidate must have “secular” credentials – code for say-no-to-Narendra Modi. Led...
View ArticleEinstein and India's Inert Economy
Every high-school physics student is familiar with Einstein’s famous equation linking energy and mass with a mathematical constant, the speed of light: E=mc2. Einstein used the equation to prove that...
View ArticleTackling India's Power Crisis
While most of India sweltered this extended summer, the people charged with delivering electricity to the country barely broke a sweat. Power outages through June and July averaged over 36,000 MW –...
View ArticleIndian Asphyxiation Service (IAS)
If you tossed a coin to decide who is more corrupt – the average Indian politician or the average Indian bureaucrat – the coin wouldn’t know which side to fall on. As Kaushik Basu, the outgoing Chief...
View ArticleThe Politics of Riots
At 3.25 pm last Saturday, I received a call from my wife. “We are in the middle of a riot,” she said with as much composure as she could muster. A violent mob of young Muslim men was burning buses,...
View ArticleChidambaram’s Chalice
I first interviewed P. Chidambaram when he was Finance Minister in UPA-1. The 40-minute interview in North Block started badly. We were 30 seconds late. The appointment was for 4.00 pm. Knowing...
View ArticleRebooting Congress
The flurry of economic reforms driven by the Prime Minister reflects two realities. One, Congress President Sonia Gandhi has recognised that a distressed economy, allied with corruption and inflation,...
View ArticleReforms: Governance is the Key
On a warm April evening at Mumbai’s Nehru Centre, Dr. Manmohan Singh spoke with unusual passion of India’s “enormous economic potential”. The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government was in...
View ArticleTerror Beyond Kasab: India Can’t Lower Its Guard
Ajmal Kasab was a link in a venal chain that snakes through terrorist training camps on the outskirts of Pakistan’s major cities, ties up with militants in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) and ends in...
View ArticleReinventing a Post-Colonial Congress
The Congress’s three-day brainstorming conclave – chintan shivir – in Jaipur from January 18-20 couldn’t have been better timed. The political crisis in Jharkhand presents new possibilities. Meanwhile,...
View Article
