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August 2011

Right-Wing Gains From The Jan Lokpal Campaign: The politics of Anna’s fast

No government in India has bent over backwards to please a civil society campaign as much as the Manmohan Singh government, in respect of the Jan Lokpal (ombudsman) Bill, drafted by a small group of people, including Anna Hazare, nominated by an NGO called India against Corruption (IAC). And no single individual’s act has recently attracted as much popular support as Mr Hazare’s fast for passing the Bill on terms dictated by him by an impossibly short deadline.

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Shining & starving

Under neoliberalism, income and regional disparities have got bloated to a point where the country's rich and the poor live in two separate worlds.

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Corruption and the Lokpal issue

Corruption doesn’t occur primarily, as Team Anna holds, because there’s a “lack of an independent, empowered, … anti-corruption institution”. The real reasons include a neoliberal policy regime that encourages privatisation of common property resources through sweetheart deals and a politician-bureaucrat-businessman nexus; the rise of greedy entrepreneurs; an increasingly compromised civil service; poorly monitored public service delivery; and a dysfunctional justice delivery system.

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Wages of Social Rifts & Neoliberalism: Meaning of the English riots

England’s worst rioting in decades has ended, but not without leaving London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Nottingham and other cities scarred and large numbers of people shellshocked at the intensity of the violent confrontation between the police and angry youth. The rioting, in particular, the looting of supermarkets and shops, has provoked angry condemnations.

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Green challenges

Jairam Ramesh’s removal as environment minister creates many uncertainties at a critical moment for domestic environment policy and for the deadlocked global climate talks. Can Jayanthi Natarajan quell them?

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