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The relationship between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Mukesh Ambani, the richest Indian and Chairman of Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), appears to be souring. Some observers are reading a lot into certain recent actions of the income tax (IT) Department, while some others argue that what has taken place is a mere tax dispute that may soon get resolved. According to a report in Business Standard (linked here), the IT department plans to approach the Supreme Court after its objections to...

Why have so many young people across India come out on to the streets to protest the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) and the attempt by the Narendra Modi government to put together a countrywide National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the National Population Register (NPR)? Is it simply because the CAA and the NRC are perceived to be discriminatory against a particular religious community that comprises one-seventh of the country’s population, namely, Muslims, and that this is the first time...

In December 2012, Adani Realty, the real estate wing of the Adani group, announced the establishment of a joint venture (JV) with the Delhi-based M2K group. The JV, called Adani M2K projects, was set up to develop a housing project named, Oyster Grande, in Gurugram, Haryana, involving an investment of around Rs 1,000 crore. The M2K group, headed by Mahesh Bhagchandka, has a presence in biotechnology, infrastructure, real estate, multiplexes, aviation and defence equipment. It made headlines in...

The Bharatiya Janata Party is exuding confidence that it will be able to win the floor test in the legislative assembly of Maharashtra, presumably on 30 November, after a Speaker from the party has been elected. How easy or how difficult will this task be? This is a difficult question to answer at present. The BJP has access to huge financial resources to “persuade” MLAs to switch sides, make them suddenly absent themselves from the assembly or even, in extreme situations, allow themselves to be...

On November 1, the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI), the investigative arm of India’s customs authorities, filed an affidavit before the Delhi High Court clarifying the status of its investigations into alleged over-invoicing of imports by a number of companies. The imports – which included a range of capital goods and raw materials like coal that were brought into the country by companies operating in core infrastructure sectors, such as power generation and transmission, ports and...

On October 17, the Bombay High Court ruled in favour of a company in the Adani Group by passing an order quashing the issuance of letters rogatory (LRs) to various foreign government bodies by the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI), the investigative arm of India’s Customs authorities. The LRs—that are formal requests for information issued by Indian courts on behalf of the country’s law-enforcing and investigative agencies to courts in foreign jurisdictions to facilitate the gathering of...

Why is the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological parent of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), so keen on appropriating the legacy of the “father of the nation” Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi? The answer is very simple: the Sangh Parivar or the family of organisations owing allegiance to the RSS, the BJP and its allies in the National Democratic Alliance coalition, the right-wing supporters of Hindutva and the ardent advocates of a Hindu Rashtra, just do not have in their midst a tall...

For several years, a clutch of companies in the Mukesh Ambani-headed Reliance group have been under the scanner of a slow-moving multi-agency investigation by the government of India. At the centre of one of the main strands of the investigation is the D-6 natural gas block in the Krishna-Godavari basin off the coast of Eastern India that Reliance Industries Limited – the Reliance group’s flagship company – operates together with British Petroleum, and a cross-country pipeline that carries gas...

The decision of a bench of the Delhi High Court of comprising Justices D N Patel and C Hari Shankar on Friday September 27, to issue notices to different government bodies – the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) and its wings, the Serious Fraud Investigation Office (SFIO) and the Registrar of Companies (RoC), the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and the National Housing Bank (NHB) – to investigate the allegations levelled in a public interest...

On September 17, the regulator of the country’s financial markets, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) passed an interim order barring Gautam Thapar, former Chairman of Crompton Greaves (CG) Power and Industrial Solutions Limited from participating in capital market transactions. Similar restrictions were imposed on two former Directors of CG Power, Madhav Acharya and B Hariharan, and the company’s former Chief Financial Officer (CFO), V R Venkatesh. This move has come less than...

Since the arrest of former Union Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram in the INX Media case by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on August 21, and even earlier, there has been widespread coverage in the news media about this controversial media organisation. Chidambaram is in judicial custody and lodged in Delhi’s Tihar Jail. In May 2017, the CBI had registered an FIR on the alleged irregularities committed by persons associated with the INX Media group while receiving funds to the...

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has stated that India aspires to generate 100 gigawatt (GW) of solar energy by 2022. He wants the country to become a “ hub” for the manufacture of solar power batteries. Given the recent flip-flops in the government’s tax policies, this goal is unlikely to be easily achieved. An analysis by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), a New Delhi-based think-tank, has concluded that the decision of the Ministry of Finance to impose a safeguard duty on...

The Narendra Modi government’s decision to allow 100% foreign direct investment (FDI) in coal mining has been opposed by the Left on the ground it would enable multinational mining companies to “plunder” the country’s mineral resources. Those supporting the move, however, argue that foreign investment in coal mining is needed because the public sector Coal India Limited (CIL) is “over-stretched” and will not be able to increase domestic production substantially to curtail imports. At the same...

On August 16, senior advocate Dushyant Dave wrote to the judges of the Supreme Court of India alleging that two cases involving companies in the Adani group “in complete contravention of the settled practice of the Supreme Court as also its established procedure...were listed, taken up and heard without any justification...causing grave injury to public interest and public revenue.” Dave alleged that “it is disturbing that the Supreme Court of India should take up regular matters of a large...

New Delhi, India - A few days after Jammu and Kashmir's (J&K) special status was eradicated, Prime Minister Narendra Modi claimed that the now-abolished Article 370 of India's constitution - the provision that had guaranteed special rights to Muslim-majority J&K – had also hampered its economic development. "There must be investment and job opportunities in Jammu and Kashmir," Modi told CNN-News 18. "No one goes there to invest." Article 370 had bestowed numerous special rights on J&K, including...

Seventy two hours of music with 400,000 people in attendance. Woodstock Music & Art Fair opened in a lush farm in New York on August 15, 1969. Half a century later, it has became the most important festival of its kind for the manner in which it mixed music and politics. An allegory on the loss of innocence of an entire generation of popular musicians in the West, Don McLean’s song American Pie, written and sung for the first time in 1971, had these lines: “Oh, and there we were all in one place...

In 2014, when the number of Members of Parliament belonging to the Left shrunk to ten from 24 in 2009, some of us (including this writer) believed the Parliamentary Communists and their allies could not become weaker still. We were wrong. Congress has not gained significantly. But the presence of the Left has further diminished with only six seats in the current Lok Sabha. Why did this happen? And what is the way forward for those who still believe there are alternatives to right-wing populism...

In the run-up to the 2019 general elections, a committee set up by the Election Commission of India (ECI) had examined the critical gaps in the regulation of political campaigning. The panel looked at the provisions in Section 126 of the Representation of the People (RP) Act, 1951 – which defines a “silence period” starting 48 hours prior to the conclusion of polling in any particular area, during which all political campaigning is supposed to cease. The committee was supposed to identify...

Strange indeed are the ways of the some of India’s electricity regulatory authorities. An interim order issued by the Appellate Tribunal for Electricity (APTEL) in September 2018 had directed the public sector electricity distribution companies (discoms) in three cities in Rajasthan—Ajmer, Jodhpur and Jaipur—to pay ₹3,591 crore to Adani Power Rajasthan Limited (APRL) that owns and operates a 1,320-megawatt capacity thermal power plant in the state in Kawai town of Baran district. On an appeal by...

Let us assume electronic voting machines (EVMs) cannot be manipulated. Let us assume the number in each and every EVM perfectly matches the number in the corresponding VVPAT (voter verified paper audit trail) machine. Let us assume the election administration in the soon-to-become most-populous country on the planet is impartial and transparent, that all personnel involved in the biggest exercise of its kind in the world’s largest democracy do not influence voters to exercise their franchise in...

New Delhi, India - On April 6, speaking at the University of Delhi, India's Finance Minister Arun Jaitley waxed eloquent about how the world's most-populous democracy would become the third largest economy on the planet by 2030 after the United States and China. By then, the size of India's economy would have more than trebled to $10 trillion from around $2.9 trillion at present, he said. What was noteworthy was that Jaitley's speech hardly dwelt on the performance of the government headed by...

A report in the Caravan published last Friday written by Nileena M S and Aathira Konikkara that created a political storm pertains to diaries allegedly maintained by Bookanakere Siddalingappa Yeddyurappa, leader of the Opposition in the Karnataka legislative assembly and former Chief Minister of the state belonging to the Bharatiya Janata Party. The diaries reportedly indicate pay-offs made by the controversial politician to several members of the BJP’s top brass – besides ₹1,000 crore to the...

A public procurement exercise initiated in September 2017 by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) asked bidders to present ‘proximity payment solutions’ for the United Payments Interface (UPI), an inter-bank mobile payments platform it set up a year earlier. Sixteen months have passed since then. Yet the name of the bidder chosen remains either undecided or has been decided but not yet been disclosed. What has consequently surfaced are several questions relating to the terms and...

On February 4, 2019, Facebook will complete 15 years of existence. The first version of the website was called FaceMash and was set up in November 2003 as an application that let students at Harvard University in the US rate one another based on their “attractiveness”. Two weeks later, the academic community at Harvard was disgusted by what the then 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg had done. He was hauled before the university’s administrative board for using images and information from directories...

If ever there was a prominent Indian politician who epitomised the phrase “bundle of contradictions,” it was none other than George Fernandes, former Union Defence Minister and nine-time member of the Lok Sabha, who passed away on the morning of January 29 at the age of 88, after having been bedridden for a few years with Alzheimer’s disease. The son of a poor Christian from the South Kanara district in the Mangalore region of Karnataka, Fernandes gave up life in a seminary for a chequered...

It was a gold import-export scheme that began when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government was in power and continued six months into the tenure of the Narendra Modi regime. That the scheme was a scam has been widely acknowledged by, among others, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, the constitutional authority responsible for overseeing the country’s public finances. Representatives of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Indian National Congress have...