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With precious days of Parliament wasted in shrieking and yelling, rushing to the well of House—not once or twice but session after session—time has come to evolve a system of deterrent measures. Members are supposed to appreciate the weight of the responsibility placed on them by their voters. It is expected of them to present their arguments with passions and, if need be, with force and eloquence, in the debates that form the substance of discussion and dissent within parliament.

And it has started again. At this moment people of India are seething in anger over the brutalisation and rape of a five-year-old child in Delhi. People are back on the streets demanding accountability from police and politicians and a robust system to check increasing violence against women. Unfortunately, some political parties, while discussing the matter in Parliament, have already gone back to their usual rhetoric of clamouring for death penalty as a deterrent against sexual crimes. Rather than addressing the structural issues attached to the crisis, this kind of demand offers a simplistic view of a complex matter.

BHOPAL: While the Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan is busy announcing a series of sops at the cost of the exchequer to woo the electorate, some unpredictable developments over the last week or so have severely tarnished his image.

This may, in a way, be the mother of all scams. The government allowed the country’s gold importers to draw down close to an astronomical sum of US$ 200 billion from the Reserve Bank of India’s foreign exchange reserves between 2009 and 2013 to bring in hundreds of tonnes of gold, the value of which has now eroded by almost $ 60 billion or Rs. 3.3 trillion, making it the biggest and sharpest national loss of wealth. The government chose to stay nearly unconcerned through the four-year-long bull run in the New York commodity exchange (Comex) and about gold-crazy Indians continuously drawing and depleting RBI’s foreign exchange reserves.

New Delhi: India has always accorded special importance to its relationship with the Arab world, said the Speaker of the Lok Sabha (Lower House of Indian Parliament) Meira Kumar when a group of 16 parliamentary officials from seven Arab countries met her here on Friday.

President Pranab Mukherjee, while addressing the joint session of Parliament in February this year rightly emphasised the responsibility of lawmakers observing, “As I speak to you, I am aware that an aspirational India is emerging, an India that demands more opportunities, greater choices, better infrastructure, and enhanced safety and security.”

New Delhi : India is likely to get its role in promoting trade and investment in Afghanistan redefined at the third Heart of Asia Ministerial Conference beginning on Friday in Almaty in Kazakhstan.

In a paradoxical situation, the UPA-II government is gearing up to pilot the Food Security Bill in the Parliament, while also being it engaged in grabbing prime farmland for gifting to corporate houses for reaping super profits.

For political theorists the world over, who are insulated from the smudgy party politics, the outcome of the first general election in Pakistan — when an elected government is to hand over the baton to a newly elected one — is of immense importance. How strong the libertarian content in the kinetics of democratic order is in Pakistan after the end of military hegemony will be at least partially reflected in the election results and observers around the globe have their eyes on the event as a result.

Karnataka, the first of five states to go to polls this year ahead of the Lok Sabha election 2014,looks like returning a faction-ridden Congress with a bare majority to power, ousting a notoriously unpopular BJP government, the first-ever of the saffron party, south of the Vindhyas.