When I first met Kanshi Ram as a rookie journalist, he had just founded the Bahujan Samaj Party. It was election time in the 1980s and he had no hope in hell of winning even a single seat, despite his sharp focus on Dalit welfare in the country. Read more

Now that Team Anna is contemplating forming a political party, I wonder why Anna Hazare had to go as far as New Delhi to look for a clean government. Read more

Someone asked me the other day: do you think any action will be initiated against the ministers named in the land scam in Maharashtra by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG)? Read more

It has taken ten long years, but Narendra Modi finally gets his comeuppance. And I am glad it comes out of the Gujarat high court rather than through cases shifted out of his home state which lends the judgment on the Lokayukta rather more credibility than it would otherwise have had. Read more

I do not know how much truth there is to this story. But G R Khairnar, former deputy municipal commissioner of the Birhanmumbai Municpal Corporation (BMC) in the 1990s, famous for having taken on among the mightiest of chief ministers, Sharad Pawar, and credited with having brought about his (and the Congress’s) downfall in Maharashtra in 1995 has described Anna Hazare as a “coward’’ and a “murderer’’. Read more

I was shocked the other day to hear Mani Shankar Aiyar of the Congress describe Anna Hazare as a Frankenstein’s monster. Read more

A close friend of mine was, once upon a time, political adviser to former prime minister VP Singh. I met him first in the 1980s and had always seen him in the staple of netagiri – khadi kurtas and Aligarhi pyjamas. Read more

I was amused to see Team Anna draw flak this week from two leaders quite on the opposite sides of the spectrum: Sonia Gandhi and Nitish Kumar. While Sonia, whose speech was read out in absentia at a rally in Uttarakhand, seemed quite impatient with the frequent noises being made by the team members, Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar was simply – and justifiably – peeved at the tendency of the team members to think only they are right and everybody else who has his or her own mind is corrupt. Read more

So who’s afraid of Anna Hazare?

No one except, perhaps, the Congress, I must say. And if at all the Hissar byelection results go in favour of the party, then perhaps no more after that. Read more

Now what did I say about Anna Hazare? That he is a loose canon? That he always makes statements and then retracts them? That he adopts positions and then goes back on them? That he never fails to leave his backers with a sense of being let down? Read more