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During a discussion on his recently-published book "2014: The Election That Changed India”, senior journalist and television anchor Rajdeep Sardesai was very critical of the working of the Indian media, not only in the run-up to the general election but also because of the unquestioning attitude of many journalists who praise Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The discussion, organised by the book's publisher, Penguin Books India, in collaboration with the Maulana Mohamed Ali 'Jauhar' (MMAJ) Academy...

An unprecedented dispute between India's largest public sector company, the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, and the country's biggest private company, Reliance Industries Limited, over allegations of theft of natural gas worth nearly $5 billion or Rs 30,000 crore (Rs 300 billion) from the Krishna-Godavari (KG) basin levelled by the former against the latter, is likely to be resolved in coming months. An 'independent' foreign firm will examine the veracity of claims and counter-claims that have...

It’s an all-out war now between Didi and Dada. The chief minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee, had the temerity to question: Who is Amit Shah? The reply came on Sunday, at a public rally in the heart of Kolkata. The president of the Bharatiya Janata Party retorted that he, a small BJP worker, would lead his party to drive the Trinamool Congress out of Bengal. Rhetoric aside, the political tussle between the two portends ill for the state that has seen relatively harmonious Hindu-Muslim...

Prime Minister Narendra Modi may be patting himself on the back because President Barack Obama has agreed to India’s position on food stockholding norms in World Trade Organisation (WTO). However, New Delhi seems to be bending over backwards to accommodate the American government and giant multinational corporations (MNCs) in the pharmaceutical industry, which will work to the detriment of our country’s interests. In less than six months, the Modi government has taken several steps that play...

Book: Off The Record: Untold Stories From a Reporter’s Diary Author: Ajith Pillai Publisher: Hachette Price: Rs 395 Whenever a journalist meets someone who is not part of the media, she or he is invariably accosted and asked to provide tidbits of information that are not supposed to be in the public domain. Journalists are expected to be repositories of facts that they cannot write or speak openly about, vignettes about the foibles and frailties of the high and the mighty, the rich and the...

The room is rather spacious, much bigger than the size of an entire flat occupied by a typical upper middle-class Indian family. Is there something about the biggest room located at the western end of the northern of the two blocks of symmetrical buildings on opposite sides of the great axis of Rajpath that makes its occupants speak more or less the same language irrespective of their political affiliation? After finance minister Arun Jaitley presented his maiden Union Budget on July 10, few had...

As had been anticipated, on October 18, the Cabinet Committee of Economic Affairs chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi decided to decontrol the prices of diesel, the most widely-used petroleum product in the country. Riding on an unexpected fall in world prices of crude oil, the government was able to simultaneously announce a sharp fall in consumer prices of diesel by Rs 3.37 per litre (in Delhi). But the decision to take the price of diesel outside the administrative control of the...

In the picture above, published in the Indian media on 22 May, Narendra Modi is leaving the western state of Gujarat, where he had been chief minister for 12 years, to be sworn in as prime minister of India. As he waves to people seeing him off at the airport in the city of Ahmedabad, the logo of the private aircraft carrying him is clearly visible: Adani. Gautam Adani, 52, one of India's richest men, is a businessman who is not shy of displaying his proximity to India's most powerful person...

The victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the Haryana and Maharashtra Assembly elections indicates that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his trusted lieutenant, party president Amit Shah, will now move full steam ahead to marginalise regional political parties while seeking to establish the party’s presence across all parts of the country. On his way towards a Congress-mukt Bharat, Mr Modi has set his sights on making the BJP the tallest pole in the polity for some time to come. His task has...

How did Vinod Rai metamorphose from just another nondescript bureaucrat, albeit an upright one, to a crusader against corruption who acquired iconic status? One reason is related to the fact that he became a constitutional authority, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India. T.N. Seshan, who was reportedly a pliant bureaucrat, starting roaring like a lion after he became the head of the Election Commission. Mr Rai’s present persona is a product of circumstances, a consequence of the...

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has started a preliminary enquiry into allegations that the former chairman of the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (Irda), J Hari Narayan unduly favoured Reliance General Insurance Company more than five years ago. The investigating agency is inquiring into whether there was any mala fide intent in a decision taken in July 2009 by Narayan to reduce from Rs 17,500 crore to Rs 20 lakh the potential penalty that could have been levied on the...

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has started a preliminary enquiry into allegations that the former chairman of the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (Irda), J Hari Narayan unduly favoured Reliance General Insurance Company more than five years ago. The investigating agency is inquiring into whether there was any mala fide intent in a decision taken in July 2009 by Narayan to reduce from Rs 17,500 crore to Rs 20 lakh the potential penalty that could have been levied on the...

The September 24 decision of the Supreme Court of India to cancel the allotments of all but four out of the 218 coal blocks that had been granted by the Union government between 1993 and 2010, mainly to private companies, will have far-reaching consequences for the Indian economy. While it cannot be doubted that there could be some short-term glitches in the supplies of domestically-mined coal which, in turn, could increase imports of coal if electricity generation is not to be adversely...

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is making waves meeting the high and mighty from across the planet. But back at home, many in the party to which he belongs and which is headed by his confidante Amit Shah is no longer exuding the confidence they had even three months ago because of the unexpected outcome of the by-elections in different states. Indians want to hold their heads high in the comity of nations. But in a country where at least one out of four individuals is desperately poor and large...

The Polyester Prince is the title of a biography of Dhirubhai Ambani, founder of the Reliance group of companies, India’s biggest private corporate conglomerate, written by Australian journalist Hamish McDonald in 1998. Among other things, the book highlighted how, during the 1980s, the government changed rules relating to imports of raw materials used in the manufacture of polyester fibre to help the group at the expense of its competitors. Dhirubhai’s arch-rival used to be Nusli Wadia, who...

On August 15, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana, a financial inclusion scheme that will ensure that at least one member of each and every family in India not only has a bank account with a debit card, but is also provided an overdraft facility of Rs 5,000, a life insurance policy of Rs 30,000 and accident insurance cover of Rs 1,00,000. On August 28, the day the scheme was launched, the government announced that 15 million new bank accounts had been opened...

On August 15, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY), a financial inclusion scheme that will ensure that at least one member of each and every family in India not only has a bank account with a debit card, but is also provided an overdraft facility of Rs5,000, a life insurance policy of Rs30,000 and accident insurance cover of Rs1,00,000. On August 28, the day the scheme was launched, the government announced that 15 million new bank accounts had been...

Given the strong language used by the Chief Justice of India Rajendra Mal Lodha in his August 25 judgment on the coal blocks allotment scandal, popularly called Coalgate, few will be surprised if many of the 218 blocks allotted in an illegal manner are soon cancelled. Whereas this may cause a temporary disruption in the working of critical infrastructure sectors of the Indian economy, it will also send out a powerful signal to politicians and their cronies from the world of business that the...

It is sometimes said that not even God can predict the price of oil. As a humble mortal, that too a practising atheist, one must confess at the outset that the dip in the international prices of crude oil has taken me and many others completely by surprise. Iraq is in a turmoil, almost on the verge of imploding. The situation is similar in Syria except that the civil war in that country has been going on for more than three years. Gaza is burning. The political crisis in Libya shows no signs of...

In the second decade of the 15th century, after the French ruler Charles VI was succeeded by his son bearing his name, a phrase was coined: "The king is dead, long live the king". The phrase literally meant that the transfer of sovereignty occurs simultaneously from the moment of death of an earlier monarch. Over the years, the phrase came to signify superficial change: the more things change, the more they remain the same. On 15 August, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that he had decided...

Here's a classic case of how the attachment of proceeds of crime can be delayed and how attempts by revenue authorities to recover laundered money can be frustrated. Here's a story about the working of the judiciary and corporate India. What follows is a tale about a once-notorious company, Satyam Computers, now in a respectable new avatar, Tech Mahindra. The company has so far succeeded in ensuring that a not-exactly-piffling amount of Rs 822 crore (Rs 8.22 billion) -- described as proceeds of...

The more things change, the more they remain the same. The hypocrisy of the two largest political parties in the country, the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Indian National Congress, stand thoroughly exposed because of the manner in which their representatives have been wrangling over the issue of increasing the cap on foreign investment in Indian insurance companies from 26 per cent at present to 49 per cent. At one level, representatives of the two political parties are indulging in...

Besides controlling food inflation, the most challenging task before Narendra Modi is to create jobs for millions of young men and women, some of whom were responsible for his resounding victory in the elections. It is one thing to promise jobs and another to actually create them. The really difficult part of creating employment opportunities is to ensure that those who are moving out of agriculture and settling down in urban areas are able to find jobs in the manufacturing industry. The growth...

Even as allegations and counter-allegations are traded in and out of courts of law by the promoters and shareholders of Bengal Aerotropolis Projects Limited, the situation on the ground does not raise much hope that the airport-cum-metropolis project will be completed on time. A visit to the project site indicated that many of the facilities promised remain to be built. Roads from the highway to the site have not been built while high-tension electricity lines near the airport terminal and...

It's a unique project boasting of a number of 'firsts'. Coming up at Andal near Durgapur in West Bengal is India's first aerotropolis, a tongue-twister meaning airport-cum-metropolis. What has been showcased as a grandiose scheme that would assist in the economic revival of the state, the project being set up by Bengal Aerotropolis Projects Limited (BAPL) is currently mired in controversies galore. The project has been delayed due to resistance to acquiring land from local people. What is worse...

There is considerable speculation about when the Planning Commission will be reconstituted and who will occupy the largest room in Yojana Bhavan. There are many in the government, possibly including Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself, who are of the view that the Planning Commission is some sort of an anachronistic vestige of India’s discredited socialist past and should be scrapped. However, this is unlikely to happen. One important reason why the Planning Commission is not going to be wound...

As one writes this column in the second week of July, the turmoil in West Asia seems to be intensifying. As if the civil strife in Syria that has been going on for two years and the more recent conflict in Iraq were not bad enough, the armed confrontation between Israel and Palestine portends ill for this part of the world. The United States is no longer importing oil in large quantities after its own supplies of shale gas went up. But China and India have become more dependent than ever before...

If there were some who were expecting Finance Minister Arun Jaitley's maiden Budget to unveil a series of proposals that would curb inflationary pressures in the economy, they are certainly going to be disappointed. Far from reducing inflation, some of the assumptions made in the Budget imply that the government is not at all expecting prices to come down. On the contrary, there is every reason to expect that inflation will persist, and stubbornly so. Here's why. Diesel prices are expected to...

Finance minister Arun Jaitley’s maiden Budget clearly indicates that there is little or nothing to differentiate between the economic policies of the BJP and the Congress. The only difference is that the BJP government has a clear majority in the Lok Sabha whereas the Congress led a coalition government and was, therefore, unable to go in for large-scale divestment of shares in PSUs. The UPA government was also unable to increase the cap on FDI in insurance and defence manufacturing because of...

Finance minister Arun Jaitley’s maiden Budget clearly indicates that there is little or nothing to differentiate between the economic policies of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress. The only difference is that the BJP government has a clear majority in the Lok Sabha whereas the Congress led a coalition government and was, therefore, unable to go in for large-scale divestment of shares in public sector undertakings. The UPA government was also unable to increase the cap on foreign direct...

The first budget of the newly-elected Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government seeks to raise revenues by divesting shares of government-owned enterprises and has raised limits on foreign investment in companies providing insurance services and electronic commerce, as well as those engaged in manufacturing defence equipment. While the budget presented on Thursday by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, who is holding this portfolio for the first time, did not contain any big-bang proposals or...

The turmoil in Iraq has the potential to upset all plans that are being drawn up by the Narendra Modi government to revive the Indian economy. Global prices of crude oil have already risen and could go up further. If that happens, the Indian economy will be impacted badly simply because the country currently imports around 80 per cent of its total requirements of oil. With domestic prices of petroleum products creeping up and with a deficient monsoon, the government will not be able to contain...

Despite the fact that India has a vast and varied mass media, freedom of expression has been constrained and restricted from time to time on account of various considerations. Such considerations include intolerance on the part of religious hardliners or fundamentalist groups, pressures exerted by politicians and political parties, as well as the influence of corporate captains who control advertising expenditure which funds the media. Despite the diversity of the media in India, this sector...

As finance minister Arun Jaitley prepares to present his first Union Budget on July 10, there are two big question marks hanging over his head like a Damocles sword. The problem is that neither he nor any of us have precise answers to these questions. Depending on what the answers are, the Budget could be described as “soft”, “hard”, “conservative”, “forward looking” or just a “holding operation” for the next eight months. The first question: How deficient is the monsoon going to be? The second...

A distinctive feature of the recently concluded 16th general elections in India was the manner in which large sections of the mass media extended wholehearted support to the candidature of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who led the rightwing, Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to power, by winning more than a majority of seats in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament in the world’s largest democracy. The media, in turn, was greatly benefitted by an unprecedented advertising...

In this section, Yadav analyses the twists and turns in the media’s relationship with the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). He also dwells on his personal experiences with particular journalists when he contested the 2014 Lok Sabha elections from Gurgaon in Haryana, and the phenomenon of "paid news" as it played out in the election. Paranjoy Guha Thakurta (PGT): During the India Against Corruption movement led by Anna Hazare, it was evident that much of the media was favourably inclined towards your group...

An academic-turned-politician, Dr Yogendra Yadav is an important ideologue of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). He has also made his mark as an astute analyst of Indian politics. However, his first foray into electoral politics was disastrous: he contested the 2014 Lok Sabha elections from Gurgaon in Haryana and ended up fourth, losing his deposit. Yadav, by his own description, is "interested in the promise, practice, and prospects of modern politics". A senior fellow at the Centre for the Study of...

The decision by Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) to wrest full managerial and editorial control over the Network18 group was not unexpected given the fact that two and half years ago, RIL, the country’s biggest privately-owned company, had invested heavily in Network18, India’s biggest media organisation after its virtual amalgamation with the Eenadu group. The country’s richest man, Mukesh D Ambani, is now, formally, also India’s biggest media baron. However, what took some by surprise was the...

The report of the Intelligence Bureau on the “impact” that non-government organisations have on India’s “development” is a case of extreme paranoia on the part of a section of the country’s establishment. This section believes that those who are opposed to their notions of development — which include the proliferation of nuclear energy and widespread use of genetically modified organisms in agriculture — are not just anti-national but also acting at the behest of foreign powers who do not want...

Now that India's richest man Mukesh D Ambani is formally the head of the country's biggest media conglomerate, it is but natural that questions will be raised as to what this development means for freedom of expression in the world's largest democracy. It can be contended that the recent takeover of the Network18 group by Reliance Industries Limited, India's largest privately-owned corporate entity, does not forebode well for the media. The space for disseminating a diverse range of views could...

In the excitement of the elections and a new Prime Minister assuming power, a most unusual battle between two of the biggest companies in the country all but escaped the attention of large sections of the media. The biggest corporate entity in the public sector, the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) has in a court of law accused the biggest private sector company, Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), of pilfering 18 billion cubic metres of natural gas worth as much as `30,000 crore since 2009...

Why did Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) issue a notice of arbitration to the government seeking an early decision to increase the administered price of natural gas? The company, India’s largest in the private sector, claimed on 10 May that it had “no other option but to pursue this course of action” since RIL – together with its partners, British Petroleum and Niko Resources of Canada – was “unable to sanction planned investments of close to $4 billion” during this year. It can, however, be...

This columnist has to start by saying sorry. One failed to read the chai leaves, the writing on the wall. Many of us who pretend to understand the complex polity of this country knew even before the elections began that the Bharatiya Janata Party under Narendra Modi would gain handsomely and that the Congress would lose a lot of ground. But some of us — this writer included — failed to anticipate the sheer scale of the saffron tsunami and the depths to which India’s one-time “grand old party”...

India, the world's largest democracy has swung to the right, and decisively so. What was predicted as a surge of saffron - the colour favoured by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led by Narendra Modi - has turned out to be a veritable tsunami in favour of the Hindu nationalist party and the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) coalition it leads. India's incoming prime minister, who has been chief minister of the industrially-prosperous state of Gujarat since 2001, has raised aspirations which...

About 814 million voters in the world's largest democracy will elect a new government amid India's economy slowing down considerably. The outcome of the parliamentary elections will be known on May 16 and there is every likelihood that the coming summer will be long and hot for the people, in more than just a metaphorical sense. One of the biggest concerns of the electorate is high food prices. For the first time in the history of India, inflation has stubbornly refused to slow down despite...