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In 2014, when the number of Members of Parliament belonging to the Left shrunk to ten from 24 in 2009, some of us (including this writer) believed the Parliamentary Communists and their allies could not become weaker still. We were wrong. Congress has not gained significantly. But the presence of the Left has further diminished with only six seats in the current Lok Sabha. Why did this happen? And what is the way forward for those who still believe there are alternatives to right-wing populism...

In the run-up to the 2019 general elections, a committee set up by the Election Commission of India (ECI) had examined the critical gaps in the regulation of political campaigning. The panel looked at the provisions in Section 126 of the Representation of the People (RP) Act, 1951 – which defines a “silence period” starting 48 hours prior to the conclusion of polling in any particular area, during which all political campaigning is supposed to cease. The committee was supposed to identify...

Strange indeed are the ways of the some of India’s electricity regulatory authorities. An interim order issued by the Appellate Tribunal for Electricity (APTEL) in September 2018 had directed the public sector electricity distribution companies (discoms) in three cities in Rajasthan—Ajmer, Jodhpur and Jaipur—to pay ₹3,591 crore to Adani Power Rajasthan Limited (APRL) that owns and operates a 1,320-megawatt capacity thermal power plant in the state in Kawai town of Baran district. On an appeal by...

Let us assume electronic voting machines (EVMs) cannot be manipulated. Let us assume the number in each and every EVM perfectly matches the number in the corresponding VVPAT (voter verified paper audit trail) machine. Let us assume the election administration in the soon-to-become most-populous country on the planet is impartial and transparent, that all personnel involved in the biggest exercise of its kind in the world’s largest democracy do not influence voters to exercise their franchise in...

New Delhi, India - On April 6, speaking at the University of Delhi, India's Finance Minister Arun Jaitley waxed eloquent about how the world's most-populous democracy would become the third largest economy on the planet by 2030 after the United States and China. By then, the size of India's economy would have more than trebled to $10 trillion from around $2.9 trillion at present, he said. What was noteworthy was that Jaitley's speech hardly dwelt on the performance of the government headed by...

A report in the Caravan published last Friday written by Nileena M S and Aathira Konikkara that created a political storm pertains to diaries allegedly maintained by Bookanakere Siddalingappa Yeddyurappa, leader of the Opposition in the Karnataka legislative assembly and former Chief Minister of the state belonging to the Bharatiya Janata Party. The diaries reportedly indicate pay-offs made by the controversial politician to several members of the BJP’s top brass – besides ₹1,000 crore to the...

A public procurement exercise initiated in September 2017 by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) asked bidders to present ‘proximity payment solutions’ for the United Payments Interface (UPI), an inter-bank mobile payments platform it set up a year earlier. Sixteen months have passed since then. Yet the name of the bidder chosen remains either undecided or has been decided but not yet been disclosed. What has consequently surfaced are several questions relating to the terms and...

On February 4, 2019, Facebook will complete 15 years of existence. The first version of the website was called FaceMash and was set up in November 2003 as an application that let students at Harvard University in the US rate one another based on their “attractiveness”. Two weeks later, the academic community at Harvard was disgusted by what the then 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg had done. He was hauled before the university’s administrative board for using images and information from directories...

If ever there was a prominent Indian politician who epitomised the phrase “bundle of contradictions,” it was none other than George Fernandes, former Union Defence Minister and nine-time member of the Lok Sabha, who passed away on the morning of January 29 at the age of 88, after having been bedridden for a few years with Alzheimer’s disease. The son of a poor Christian from the South Kanara district in the Mangalore region of Karnataka, Fernandes gave up life in a seminary for a chequered...

It was a gold import-export scheme that began when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government was in power and continued six months into the tenure of the Narendra Modi regime. That the scheme was a scam has been widely acknowledged by, among others, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, the constitutional authority responsible for overseeing the country’s public finances. Representatives of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Indian National Congress have...

On 14 December, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court headed by the Chief Justice of India dismissed all petitions calling for a court-monitored investigation into alleged procedural violations committed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi that led to a rise in the price of Rafale fighter jets purchased for the Indian Air Force. Even as government spokespersons and a large section of the media celebrated the apex court’s order for giving a “clean chit” to Modi, the order appears to be deeply...

For those who are opposed to the Narendra Modi government but do not belong to the Indian National Congress, the outcome of the elections to the Assemblies of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh could not have been better. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Prime Minister and the BJP President Amit Shah have been shown their place. For them, the road to the 17th Lok Sabha elections scheduled to take place in April-May 2019 has become perilous. At the same time, Tuesday’s results...

We have argued in this series of five articles that Facebook has not been a politically agnostic platform in India and elsewhere. In this country, it has helped the ruling regime. Given its past record, it is not surprising that serious doubts are being raised about how neutral Facebook will be in the months leading up to the April-May 2019 general elections. In the first article, we examined allegations relating to the complicity of Facebook and WhatsApp in spreading disinformation and hate...

Is Facebook truly a politically agnostic platform? Far from it. Serious doubts have been expressed about how neutral Facebook was in the past and how neutral it will be in the run-up to the April-May 2019 general elections. In the first article in this series of reports, we examined allegations relating to the complicity of Facebook and WhatsApp in disseminating disinformation, hate speech and incendiary information. In the second, we reported how Facebook arrived at the dominant position it is...

Is Facebook truly a neutral and an agnostic platform for all to use? Far from it. After interviewing nearly 50 people over the last five months, we have put together evidence (some of it circumstantial) to indicate that senior employees of Facebook in India have worked, and continue to work, very closely with the country’s ruling regime. Given past experience, the question is how neutral Facebook will be in the run-up to the April-May 2019 general elections. In the first article in this series...

Is Facebook truly an agnostic platform for all to use? After interviewing nearly 50 people over the last five months, we collated evidence (some of it circumstantial) to indicate that senior employees of Facebook India have worked, and continue to work, very closely with the country’s ruling Right-wing, Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. Its close links with the BJP existed well before Narendra Modi became Prime Minister in May 2014 and got strengthened thereafter. Given past experience...

Facebook, the biggest online social media group in the world, is under unprecedented attack following the publication on 14 November of a 5,000-word investigation by the New York Times alleging a host of questionable practices by the digital conglomerate, that includes WhatsApp and Instagram. The company’s share prices have come down and particular investors have called for the resignation of Mark Zuckerberg, the 34-year-old founder and chief executive officer of Facebook and his 49-year-old...

In an unprecedented move that took place before and after midnight on 23-24 October, the Narendra Modi government suspended – in bureaucratic parlance, “sent on leave” – Alok Verma, Director of the Central Bureau of Investigation, supposedly India’s premier police investigating agency. A day earlier, the second-in-command in the agency, Special Director Rakesh Asthana, met a similar fate by being stripped of all his powers and responsibilities, and getting placed on “compulsory wait.” The...

There is an ancient parable from the Indian subcontinent about a group of blind men who touch different parts of an elephant, the side of its body, its trunk, its tail, its ears and its tusks, to arrive at a variety of conclusions about what they have touched. The moral of the parable is that many of us human beings tend to claim superior knowledge on what are supposed to be “absolute” truths based on our partial, incomplete and subjective experiences. Take the case of India’s electricity sector...

A draft report prepared by a high-powered committee appointed by the government of Gujarat has come up with a plan to rescue stranded power projects in the state run by the Adani, Essar and Tata groups. While there have been news reports indicating what the report may recommend, Newsclick has obtained a draft copy of the entire report, which we are placing in the public domain. The three-member committee comprising former Supreme Court judge Justice R K Agrawal, former Deputy Governor of the...

A year after Gauri Lankesh was shot outside her home in Bengaluru, there is every reason to believe that the environment for free expression of views has deteriorated in India. Pressures on civil society and the media to conform to the ruling regime have intensified. Self-censorship is on the rise. Many mainstream media organisations prefer to play safe and have become overly cautious when it comes to criticising those in power, as well as advertisers. Over 43 years after the imposition of the...

Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the first individual who became Prime Minister of India without ever having been a member of the Indian National Congress, was one of the founding members of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (the predecessor party of the Bharatiya Janata Party) when it was formed in 1951. He became a protégé of the first President of the Jana Sangh Shyama Prasad Mookerjee after he had been inducted into the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh by Balasaheb Deoras as a student in the 1930s. The second...

Even as Reliance Jio threatens to devour its competitors, including the leading telecommunications brand, Airtel – which has alleged that the petroleum and petrochemicals-funded, Mukesh Ambani-owned, Reliance Industries Limited has indulged in predatory practices – Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman of Bharti Telecom Limited (or BTL, Airtel’s holding company) has been accused of “oppressing” minority shareholders in a “squeeze-out” manoeuvre. While a BTL spokesperson told NewsClick that the company...

On 31 May, a customs tribunal in Mumbai rejected an investigation conducted by the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) – the investigative wing of the Central Board of Excise and Customs (renamed as the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs) in the Department of Revenue in the government of India’s Union Finance Ministry – into one of a number of instances of alleged over-invoicing of coal imported from Indonesia for use in power plants. The case before a Mumbai bench of the Customs...

The American author Mark Twain had described the last decades of the 19th century as the Gilded Age, a period when on the surface everything appeared to be glittering like gold concealing the filth and ugliness that lay beneath. This was an era that witnessed brazen corruption in public life, a phase when economic growth was fuelled by the corrupt nexus between big business and politics. Among the “robber baron” capitalists who epitomised this phase in the United States were a clutch of...

On 30 July, the Ministry of Finance notified a two-year safeguard duty regime on imports of solar cells and modules. The decision ratified a 16 July recommendation by the Directorate General of Trade Remedies (DGTR) in the Ministry of Commerce and Industry that is ostensibly meant to protect Indian manufacturers of equipment to generate solar energy from incurring losses on account of “dumping” of cheap imports. However, the decision will benefit only a small section of the domestic industry...

The government of India’s Ministry of Commerce and Industry on 16 July proposed that a 25% safeguard duty be imposed on imported solar cells and panels. This proposal is based on a complaint lodged by a group of Indian solar energy equipment manufacturers led by the Adani group’s Mundra Solar PV which owns the largest facility of its kind in the country. The manufacturers have argued that their businesses were facing “heavy losses” due to a surge in cheap imports of solar equipment from China...