Parliament
Easy to talk war on TV, but knee-jerk is not the answer
Not since Mumbai’s 26/11 has the nation been so united in its horror and anger at a terrorist attack as by the brutality at Pulwama. The sheer scale of the loss and the macabre images of destruction at the Pampore-Letapore section of the Srinagar-Jammu highway have so seared India’s collective consciousness that it simply cannot […..]
Modi govt has no overarching role: Chidambaram
P Chidambaram is Congress Rajya Sabha MP from Maharashtra, former Union finance minister and the author of Fearless in Opposition. He spoke to Nalin Mehta and Sanjeev Singh on the controversy over PM Narendra Modi’s ‘raincoat’ comment on Manmohan Singh in Parliament and the government’s economic policies: Your party and you have been quite vocal […..]
Missing in action: Parliament is logjammed but real democratic problem is in state legislatures which meet much less
Explaining the need for promulgating ordinances for reforms in insurance and coal block allocations, finance minister Arun Jaitley blamed the stand-off in Rajya Sabha, arguing that the country cannot wait if one of the houses of Parliament “waits indefinitely”. At a time when the opposition dominated Upper House has become a fail-safe vantage point for […..]
Who cares if Sachin Tendulkar doesn’t talk
The last time a government was really worried about the attendance of a nominated Rajya Sabha MP was when Pramod Mahajan as Minister of Parliamentary Affairs pulled out all stops to get Lata Mangeshkar to fly down from Mumbai and cast her vote during the special combined sitting of Parliament convened by the Vajpayee government […..]
DYNASTIES APART
For generations of Indians used to bemoaning the dynastic culture in our politics, this year’s Republican primaries in the United States are eye-opening in more ways than one. In an election where every candidate seems to be vying with each other to look crazier than the other, for the Tea Party vote, one rather under-reported […..]
THE FALL OF ROME
In the foyer of the magnificent Musee D’Orsay in Paris hangs a telling painting by the nineteenth century French artist Thomas Couture. Titled ‘The Romans during the decadence’, the canvass depicts a mass orgy in a guilded Roman assembly hall, its citizens sprawled all over in various stages of drunkenness and post-coital repose as the […..]
