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Mayawati, former Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, has come to epitomise empowerment of dalits, the lowest segment of India’s caste hierarchy. What explains her humiliating electoral defeat? Was it her vanity that distanced her from large sections of the country’s most populous state? Will she able to stage a comeback five years down the line? It is early days yet to write the political obituary of the president of the Bahujan Samaj Party. Just as the BSP was the biggest beneficiary of anti...

Over the last two decades, roughly coinciding with the period of economic liberalization, there has been a dramatic transformation of India’s ‘mediascape’ – a term first used by Arjun Appadurai, an academic of Indian origin based in the US, to describe the way the visual imagery impacts the world and to describe and situate the role of the mass media in global cultural flows. With the advent of new communication technologies and the burgeoning of urban middle classes whose consumerist...

Never before in the history of independent India have so many once-influential politicians, businesspersons and bureaucrats spent – in certain cases, still spending - time behind bars on corruption charges. Yet the current United Progressive Alliance government is widely perceived as being packed with people with flexible ethics. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s personal integrity has never been questioned, but he is also perceived as the head of a government, who chose to turn a blind eye to the...

PRESS COUNCIL of India Chairman Justice (retd) Markandey Katju has rightly taken up the issue of journalists being attacked in Maharashtra. This has been going on for far too long. But to use this occasion to threaten to dismiss the state government is an extreme position to take. It’s one thing to say that the PCI urges Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan to take action against those responsible for the attacks on journalists. It’s one thing to express unhappiness at the chief minister for not...

On 3 January, the Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Industries (RIL) – India’s biggest privately-owned corporate entity with a turnover of Rs 2,58,651 crore in the financial year that ended on 31 March 2011 – announced that it was entering into a complex, multilayered financial arrangement that involved selling its interests in the Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh-based Eenadu group founded by Ramoji Rao to the Network18 group headed by Raghav Bahl and also funding the latter through a rights issue of shares...

The Supreme Court’s stinging judgement against the government in the 2G spectrum scam case is an extremely significant attempt by the country’s highest court to curb the corrupt nexus between business and politics and will further damage the UPA’s already battered credibility. The court’s decision will not merely have far-reaching consequences on India’s political economy, it has highlighted the huge price that Manmohan Singh himself and the government he heads are now having to pay for turning...

He will turn 42 on June 19 this year. At this age, his father had spent more than a year as prime minister of the world’s largest democracy. His son and daughter were in their teens. Is Rahul Gandhi’s mother worried that he is not yet married? Almost all Italy-born Roman Catholic women and Indian mothers would be. Does he have a steady girlfriend? Is Veronique still around in his life? Cut the trivia! The more important question is whether he is ready to assume bigger responsibilities. There is...

It was quietly done, without any publicity. A group of senior bureaucrats, presumably at the behest of their political masters, recently chose to reinterpret rules governing the sale of assets in Special Economic Zones (SEZs) in a manner which will greatly benefit foreign investors by enabling them to acquire real estate. While the recent decision to allow FDI in retail will allow foreign parties to own urban real estate as part of the business, the SEZ decision will enable further transfers of...

SONIA GANDHI’s story represents the greatest transformational journey made by any world leader in the past four decades. Circumstance and tragedy, rather than ambition, paved her path to power.” So read the first two sentences of the inside-cover blurb of this book written by London-based journalist Rani Singh. With a foreword by Mikhail Gorbachev and fulsome praise from Henry Kissinger on the back cover, the volume raises high expectations that are, unfortunately, largely belied. The book has...

THE MINISTRY of Information and Broadcasting recently issued a show-cause notice to news channels Sahara Samay and P7 after they telecast a video purportedly showing sexual intimacy between sacked Rajasthan minister Mahipal Maderna and government nurse Bhanwari Devi. The channels have been asked to explain why action should not be taken against them after they aired parts of the CD. The channels have been virtually directed to stop further broadcast of the video on grounds of depiction of...