Passionate About India

The Supreme Court’s recent landmark judgment, which ensures that convicted politicians will now get immediately disqualified from contesting in elections or holding office, marks an end to almost a two decade long tug-of-war between political parties and the Election Commission over the right of electoral candidacy to tainted candidates. While it is surely a landmark judgment and it’s not fair to be critical about everything, yet, the board is split into equal halves in their opinion towards the SC ruling, as pros and cons of the judgment seem to weigh equally. On the one hand, just because a case is hanging against a candidate, it is grossly unfair for the person to be assumed disqualified (due to the hyped up fear of future conviction) – as the allegation could well be fabricated. As it often happens in the political domain, a candidate could be debarred based on false allegation brought about by vested interests to stonewall him from standing in an election. It’s quite easy and...

Normally, it is difficult for me to be cynical like media pundits generally are. But after looking at election results in so many states since 2010, the one sad conclusion that I can draw is that the corruption card is being overstated and over-hyped. it appears as if allies and perception management play a bigger role in deciding elections than actual facts related to corruption and plunder. This should be the biggest lesson that the top BJP leaders must draw from the elections. Compare two states and two parties and see what has actually happened. In Karnataka, the Lokayukta, Justice Santosh Hegde and his office accused the BJP government led by the then Chief Minister B. S. Yeddyurappa of corruption. These charges were related primarily to mining operations in Bellary. Subsequently, Yeddyurappa was forced to step down. At that time, my colleagues told me that senior BJP leaders based in Delhi had a bigger role to play in the ouster of Yeddyurappa than opposition parties! In a s...

India’s scams and corruption are perennially ubiquitous – they keep recurring time and again. There is hardly a month that goes unnoticed without any major scam breaking out. It is not that there isn’t any scam elsewhere, but barring some sub-Saharan and Asian rogue states ruled by the junta, the scale and magnitude of Indian scams have outperformed every other nation by an unprecedented margin of frequency and scale. Typically, a scam exposé starts off with media frenzy and then gets lost into thin air! The typical Indian middle class’ short memories, inevitably brushes the scam off, and then the judiciary typically bails out the accused, and everything is business as usual. Even though media spotlight continues on the case for a while, the same mostly focuses on the economic aspect of it, largely ignoring the enormous social impact. Mostly, the multi-million dollar scams that prop up every now and then have huge negative externalities both at the regional and national level. Let...

Amongst the many critical predicaments that the Indian economy suffers from, corruption has been one of the biggest monsters, and thankfully the most talked about in recent days. Needless to say, corruption has corroded every delivery system and has made it completely dysfunctional. The entire Indian public life is riddled with overriding rates of corruption – from the Adarsh land scam to Commonwealth Games misappropriations to the 2G spectrum scam – the list here has been endless, and the magnitude, obscene. In fact, India’s public life was never clean – the infamous Bofors scandal, Harshad Mehta’s nexus with senior politicians and Ketan Parekh’s stock market manipulation – all had their own perilous impact on the economy! It requires no empirical study or statistical survey to exhibit that we comfortably are the top performers in all corruption related global indices. Take for instance, Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI) where India’s rank has been slippin...

I was too young then to really remember it all; but I have heard from many people that the mass protests generated by the arrest of Anna Hazare are similar to the uprising called Total Revolution led by the late Jaiprakash Narayan in the early 1970s. In fact, it was the Total Revolution and the chaos that followed – and a historic blunder by Indira Gandhi – that led to the imposition of the Emergency in India in 1975. Many people are comparing today’s situation to the Emergency days. The people of India are so fed up and so disgusted with corruption and our rotten and corrupt system that the wave of protests we see is hardly surprising. I have often publicly called India not a democracy but a demonocracy where crooked politicians and their criminal cohorts are openly plundering the nation; well aware that a dysfunctional judicial system will allow them to get away. In almost all cases, they have actually got away and have hence acquired the arrogance and swagger of pirates who know ...

A seventy-three year old unassuming man by the name of Kisan Bapat Baburao Hazare is again set to give sleepless nights to the Government of India. More popularly known as Anna Hazare, this isn’t his first endeavour to take the putrescent establishment head on. He earned his due recognition when he tirelessly fought to develop a model village in the district of Ahmednagar in Maharashtra. As it happens to most in our country, for all the good work, Dr. Hazare was also factitiously arrested in 1998 and was released on account of a huge public uproar. Incidentally, the Government of India also recognized his efforts by bestowing him with the Padma Bhushan. But amongst all his mini revolutions which have advantaged the smaller sections of society, this time Hazare is taking up such an issue which is probably the biggest malaise of our democracy and is a cause which affects every living Indian in some way or the other. Our governments time and again have been most deleteriously corrupt and ...

India needs one more victory. This time against corruption. A seventy-three year old unassuming man by the name of Kisan Bapat Baburao Hazare is again set out to give sleepless nights to the Government of India. More popularly known as Anna Hazare, this isn’t his first endeavour to take the establishment head on. He earned his due recognition when he tirelessly fought to develop a model village in the district of Ahmednagar in Maharashtra. As it happens to most in our country, for all the good work, Dr. Hazare was also arrested in 1998 and was released on account of a huge public uproar. Incidentally, the Government of India also recognized his efforts by bestowing him with the Padma Bhushan. But amongst all his mini revolutions which have advantaged the smaller sections of society, this time Hazare is taking up such an issue which is probably the biggest malaise of our democracy and is a cause which affects every living Indian in some way or the other. Hazare is one amongst those few ...

BUT ALSO DESTROYED THEIR CHANCES OF DIGNIFIED LIVING FOREVER Just like the last time I wrote about one of the landmark developmental initiatives of the UPA government – NREGA – this time I decided to write upon an equally, or rather more significant, developmental initiative: Sarva Siksha Abhiyan; an initiative which holds the promise of transforming the entire socio-economic landscape of the nation, if delivered to its potential! Now, there is a big ’if’ here, as going by precedence, each and every developmental initiative of the government has been full of corruption, coupled with delivery inadequacies. And the same has been a reality with respect to SSA as well. A recent report by British media revealed that millions of pounds of aid for education under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) programme have literally disappeared. The report put this figure at a staggering £340 million, which is around Rs 2,327 crore! To further this report, the Comptroller and Auditor General’s (CAG) invest...

As my fifth consecutive and final editorial related to the Mumbai terror attacks and to what we should be doing, this time I am going to write down four random thoughts that are coming to my mind... I hope by the end of the editorial, you can find some relation between all of them and some meaning out of it. The first thought that drives me infuriatingly mad tonight, as I sit down to write this editorial, is that it will all happen again... and too soon, because we have learnt no lessons. Just today, as I boarded the flight from Kolkata to Delhi, I walked into the airport with my large handbag, and was – to my astonishment – not subjected to any security check of any kind. The sickeningly lax security guards standing at the main entrance did not even check anyone’s identity card, leave alone checking our bags using some metal detector, although a security screening gate is kept right outside the entrance. As I walked in, I felt like throwing shoes – the way the Iraqi journalist did rec...