Kannan Srinivasan in New York Even as colonialism & formal empire were abandoned, two key policies enabled the continued transfer of global wealth to the West. By the first, the US allowed Britain to effectively default <https://thewire.in/banking/how-india-paid-to-create-the-london-of-today> on its wartime debt to India (including Pakistan) & Egypt of money owed for exports to the United… Read More The Current Hegemony (criminality as policy)
Thirty years after the end of apartheid, corruption is rife, crime is high and the economy is a mess. The party of Mandela admits it ‘made mistakes’. But will the people forgive them? Steve Bloomfield in Johannesburg In the heart of Soweto, the birthplace of South African democracy has been burned, looted and stripped for parts.… Read More ‘We didn’t fight for this’: ANC’s grip on power in peril in South Africa election
The watchdog must reclaim its autonomy and backbone to safeguard democracy’s “soft guardrails”. VAISHNA ROY Newt Gingrich, the Republican politician from the US mostly credited with beginning the right-wing dominance of the House of Representatives, once told his partymen to stop using “Boy Scout words”. “You are fighting a war,” he said. “It is a… Read More The fall of the Election Commission
Corporate business financing of politics in India goes back decades. The court ruling on the electoral bonds scheme is not going to end this business-politics nexus. We can only hope that the nexus can be nudged in the direction of greater transparency so that voters can make more informed choices. JAGDEEP S. CHHOKARThe recent judgement of the… Read More Corporate Business and the Financing of Political Parties
How the BJP is snatching away voters’ free choice By Sagarika Ghose While India votes in the General Elections of 2024, residents of two cities will be denied a free and fair vote. These are cities that supposedly showcase the “India dream”—Surat in Gujarat and Indore in Madhya Pradesh. Both are bustling business-oriented towns, places… Read More India’s general elections: Surat, Indore and Gandhinagar
By Colin Gonsalves * After having read the 72nd report of the Department Related Parliamentary Standing Committee on alleged irregularities in the conduct of studies using HPV vaccines by PATH in India, it was startling to see Bill Gates bobbing his head up and down and smiling ingratiatingly on prime time television while the Prime Minister lectured him in… Read More What’s Bill Gates up to? Have ‘irregularities’ found in funding HPV vaccine trials faded?
Bharat Bhushan Even as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) talks up its promise of “Viksit Bharat” (Developed India), it increasingly looks like a party of turncoats. The BJP has tended to drop 20 to 30 per cent of sitting legislators in every election to counter anti-incumbency. But why is it filling these vacancies with defectors from the… Read More The BJP and political turncoats
http://www.reporters-collective.in Check out Electoral Bonds Tracker page On Thursday, as SBI reluctantly parted with unique codes that link electoral bond donors to its recipients, it laid bare the secret give-and-take relationship between the corporate world and the political parties. The Reporters’ Collective bushwhacked through hundreds of corporate documents to make sense of the donations. Though officially… Read More Art of extracting money from loss-making firms, and more electoral bond stories
Electoral Bonds Tracker चुनावी चंदे का भांडा फोड़ A cursory glance at the data reflects a pervasive decay of democratic ethics of the political party in power… The quid pro quo trends appear to be coming out now despite the limited information shared in the data. Remember, the BJP is the largest beneficiary of the… Read More Electoral Bonds: Is India’s Democracy on Sale? / Ravish Kumar: चुनावी चंदे का भांडा फोड़
बीजेपी का संपर्कवाद संविधानवाद पर हावी हो गया है। विपक्ष में परिवारवाद और बीजेपी का संपर्कवाद। आप देख नहीं पा रहे हैं लेकिन आपकी नाक के नीचे संस्थाओं के घाव का मवाद सड़कों पर बहने लगा है। अरुण गोयल का चुनाव आयोग से इस्तीफ़ा | Arun Goel resigns from the EC NB: A theme that… Read More Ravish Kumar: अरुण गोयल का चुनाव आयोग से इस्तीफ़ा | Arun Goel resigns from the Election Commission
After the truth-shower 