My Columns: Without Fear and Favour

Land Acquisition Act: Pros and Cons of Amendments By  Deepak Parvatiyar January 9, 2015 On December 29, the Narendra Modi government took the ordinance route to enforce changes in the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in the Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013. This was the third time in about a week that the government had promulgated ordinances to push its development agenda. The earlier two such ordinances being for increasing the cap from present 26 per cent to 49 per cent on foreign investment in the insurance sector; and for facilitating auctioning of coal mining licenses. Promulgating Ordinances is not a preferred practice in a Parliamentary Democracy The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government at the Centre has moved on to issue seven ordinances within a fortnight to circumvent the Parliamentary logjam during the winter session. It may be mentioned that such executive orders are generally meant to become l...

Sunanda Pushkar case: Political Implications for Congress By  Deepak Parvatiyar January 8, 2015 Much to the discomfort of the Congress, Sunanda Puskhar – the deceased wife of high profile Congress Member of Parliament and former minister Shashi Tharoor – has risen from the ashes. On January 7 this year, the Delhi Police called Pushkar’s death as murder and filed a First Information Report against unknown persons in this connection. Pushkar had died under mysterious condition in a Delhi five star hotel exactly a year ago, when Tharoor was a minister. What gave an ominous twist to her death was just a day before her death on January 17, last year, she had accused in an angry Twitter exchange, a Pakistani journalist of having an affair with her husband Tharoor. The Department of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences has revealed that Pushkar’s death was caused by “poison” and not by an “overdose of Alprax,” as was mentioned in...