Congress leader Abhishek Singhvi admitted on live TV that the repealed FCRA 1976 was amended retrospectively to save BJP and Congress from prosecution. The current saga of the FCRA (Foreign Contributions (Regulation) Act), the latest episode of which happened on April 11, 2018, started in January 2013. It is revealing to look at developments in […]
It has become an article of faith with Prime Minister Narendra Modi that elections must be held concurrently to the Lok Sabha and the State assemblies – ostensibly to achieve the twin-objectives of minimising the expenses involved and eliminating the disruption caused to governance and development goals by frequent elections. The idea of a single […]
The spate of withdrawal of pending criminal cases against politicians in UP, Rajasthan, MP and Kerala in recent months points at the overpowering stranglehold of the political establishment on all the organs of governance. “No legislature in India, including its parliament and all the state assemblies, has any member with a criminal case pending against […]
The proposed amendment to the already repealed FCRA 1976, tucked away in the last page of the Finance Bill, is akin to trying to conduct a heart or liver transplant on a person who has been dead for seven years. “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action,” Ian Fleming is reported […]
Political parties are often able to exercise supreme power with impunity, even while blatantly defying statutory authorities. A dictionary defines ‘sovereignty’ as “the quality or the state of being sovereign, or of having supreme power or authority; supreme or independent power or authority in government as possessed or claimed by a state or community”. So […]
The new scheme to buy electoral bonds seeks to ‘cleanse the system of political funding’, but without revealing the names of donors. The day that everyone interested in political and electoral funding had been waiting for since February 2, 2017, finally arrived on January 2. It took the finance minister and all the bureaucrats under […]
The Modernisation of Police Forces (MPF) scheme, recently approved by the Cabinet Committee on Security, has no mention of the men and women who form the police force. ‘For revamp & upgrade: Rs 25,000-crore package for police reforms‘ and ‘Government clears Rs 25,000-crore scheme to modernise police force in 3 years’ are just two of the many such […]
It wasn’t merely independence from subjugation by a foreign power that India achieved 70 years ago. With an independent democracy, its citizens also won the right to shape their own destiny. Seventy years later, where does that freedom – the freedom to move forward on the path of democracy – stand? Seventy years ago, India […]
The Election Commission of India has taken a logical and commendable stand in two of its depositions before the department-related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Personnel, Public Grievances, Law and Justice. In one it has said that the “introduction of electoral bonds a retrograde step” and in the other it has said that it does “not support state […]
Contrary to the finance minister’s assurance in the Budget speech, amendments to the Finance Bill ensuring anonymity to the donor as well as the receiver will only add opacity to political donations. The current government must be commended on its consistency and persistence, though in a perverse way. Finance minister Arun Jaitley’s Budget speech had a separate […]