Self-inflicted Wounds

When the Supreme Court directed the Government of India to establish a National Disaster Mitigation Fund in May 2016, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley observed that India’s judiciary was destroying its institution structure “step by step, brick by brick”. Who is responsible for this judicial activism is a matter of debate,…

Is IPR moral?

Consider this scenario. A dominant world power forces all other countries to sign a treaty acknowledging that its IPR will be respected. It then creates laws allowing its citizens to register food grain grown in other nations as original inventions in its own country. The world power now uses the…

Commercially Sustainable Bankruptcy

Here is another of those Incredible India Ironies. We want you to ‘Make in India’, but if your business model fails, we want you flogged, crucified, drawn and quartered. From the purely entrepreneurial standpoint, India is a harsh medieval society where there exists no practical distinction between business bankruptcy, personal…

Sky High Crucifixion

Vijay Mallya’s public crucifixion reached a new high on April 7 2016 when 17 lending banks declined to accept his settlement offer, putting the Supreme Court in the unenviable position of asking him to make a full disclose of all assets held by him, his wife, and his children too.…

Sedition is the new Arranged Marriage

When Karl Marx observed in 1852 that history repeated itself, first as tragedy and then as farce, he could have been taking about our sedition law! Consider the absurdity of the situation we face today. Back in college, when my friends and I ranted from time to time about some…

Decriminalising Defamation

When the inimitable Subramanian Swamy added his name to a gallery of eminent Indian politicians who have been sued for criminal defamation, he could at least demand that he be taken seriously because he had suffered the mandatory rite of passage! I am not being facetious. An allegation you make…

Justice for All

ABOUT: Some of India’s landmark legislations such as MGNREGA, insurance for all, direct benefit transfer, education for all and health for all, have been instruments of bringing social equilibrium. But with crores of cases pending in Courts across the country, delayed justice continues to deny justice to the common man. How could…

My Human and other Animal Rights

Is this just the dawn of acche din or are Indians beginning to have too much of a sense of entitlement? Why do we think we deserve highways like America, public behaviour like Japan or politicians like Scandinavia? Indeed, why is it our birth right to have a house, a…

Transforming the Judicial Club

It is with a great sense of privilege, not exasperation, that I find myself witness to the great ideological battles being waged in India today. In an attempt to radically re-engineer a society that changes slowly, progressive forces are fighting to transform our patriarchal carpet bagging ‘sometimes democracy’ into a…

Persecuting victims: Justice for the emotionally overblown

Long before Tarun Tejpal’s legendary libido unfairly dented her credibility; Tehelka’s Shoma Chaudhury devastatingly demolished CBI’s case against Arushi Talwar’s parents back in June 2013. Avirook Sen’s recent book on the subject expands substantially on her critique without necessarily unearthing a great deal of new data. What neither Chaudhury nor…