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The Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act is a funny old piece of legislation. It appeared in India in 1976 as a law to prevent external interference in India’s electoral process and democracy. It prohibited the receiving of foreign money by political parties and their candidates, journalists...

While senior bureaucrats often get re-employed with the government after they retire, it is certainly rare for a retired babu to be reappointed as secretary to the government, to the same post he retired from two years earlier. But the Modi sarkar has many firsts...

From the election point of view, farmers are too important a segment for any political party in the country to ignore. No political party in India worth its salt can afford to antagonise this segment. This being the case, why is that the BJP-led NDA...

When Indian elephants meet African elephants, they recognise that they are both elephants. So do Indian tigers meeting Siberian ones. But I have great difficulty recognising that I am of the same species as a person who attends a wild foods festival in New Zealand...

The Covid-19 pandemic’s massive spread has created an extraordinary and extremely difficult situation for all segments of society, worldwide. This could be more so for the business community at large, which runs the show on the back of funds borrowed from banks as loans that...

What is touted as a major agriculture reform legislation, when it came, is facing limited resistance from the unorganized farming community. The Union government, in passing the three agriculture-related Bills, has tried to play a game similar to the earlier move it made in reforms...

Media freedom is back into strong focus with the Supreme Court saying the government must frame guidelines for functioning of the electronic media that went overboard in their obsession with TRP ratings bordering on sensationalism and even communalism. The government swiftly threw the ball back...

It is not seen in that way, especially in our part of the world, but the criminal justice system is deliberately designed to protect the rights of the accused. And this is the correct way of seeing it. Why? Because in a criminal case there...

The appointment of three IAS officers to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) will add heft to the already most-powerful PMO. The officers are Raghuraj Rajendran of the Madhya Pradesh cadre as director, Amrapali Kata of the Andhra Pradesh cadre as deputy secretary and Mangesh Ghildiyal...

Our state government, like its counterparts in India, arranged to bring back migrant workers from across the country in the aftermath of the Covid-19 outbreak. The Railways, on its part, rushed in with special trains and ferried lakhs of workers from Gujarat, Kerala, Tamil Nadu...