The Black Money Bill-During the Budget Session, Parliament passed the Black Money (Undisclosed Foreign Income and Assets) and Imposition of Tax Bill, 2015
-30% tax on undisclosed income or the value of an undisclosed asset held abroad by a resident assessee, starting from assessment year 2016–17 (tax year 2015–16)
-tough penalties and jail terms on Indian residents’ unaccounted incomes and wealth holding in foreign locations that have avoided the taxman’s scrutiny
- it applies only to illegal money held or earned abroad, though there is the promise of a separate bill for unaccounted/unreported incomes held in different forms within the country.
-Implementing the law, of course, requires identifying undisclosed income stashed or invested in a foreign location. That, as past experience reveals, is neither easy nor rigorously pursued
-the Black Money Bill seems to be just another headline-grabbing effort at making a show that the NDA government is keeping to its campaign promise of bringing back black money held abroad by Indians
-it is not the weakness of the law that results in the accumulation of the black money, but the failure of the monitoring and prosecuting mechanism to prevent the generation of illegal incomes and identify tax evasion even on legally earned incomes
-In fact, the way the tax laws and the system are structured, merely unearthing what is black and making it white would not, in itself, make much difference to the nature and the outcome of India’s development trajectory.

Ambedkar Periyar Study Circle-On 22 May, the Dean of Students of IITM announced that the Ambedkar Periyar Study Circle (APSC) had been “derecognised.
-provoking much-needed debate on the rights of students to discuss contemporary political and social issues on their campuses
-The sequence of events also speaks to the increasing interference by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) in the running of autonomous institutions like the IITs, the Indian Institutes of Management, and others. Ever since the Modi government took office last year, there has been a steady effort to erode the autonomy of many such institutions
-While the stand-off between the APSC and the IITM authorities appears to be a limited problem, it could be viewed as the first of more such attempts to control the space for politics within educational establishments. Historically, the world over, student communities have been the crucibles of revolutionary thought and action. India has been no exception.
-Efforts by the state or educational establishments to squash these eruptions have only consolidated them. So the IITM episode might just be the first act in a longer play
-In the meantime, one has to note the irony of an institute of modern science and technology encouraging a study circle like the Vivekananda Study Circle that promotes religious dogma while curbing the APSC that provokes debate on caste and class and promotes a scientific temper. And the other irony of politicians of all hues rushing around singing the praises of a man they did not honour in his lifetime while young people, who recognise the wisdom of Ambedkar being told they are out of line.

Mid-day Meals and Food Politics-After the beef ban in Maharashtra, the “politics of food” has now gone one step further. The Madhya Pradesh (MP) Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan has refused to “allow” eggs in the state’s anganwadis under the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) programme. The main objective of the ICDS programme is to improve nutrition among pregnant women, lactating mothers and preschool children. As of now, nine states provide eggs in their anganwadis
-Should personal preferences decide state policy? Chouhan’s principal secretary was quoted as saying that vegetarianism is a “sentimental” issue with the Chief Minister. The Digambar Jain Mahasamiti in the state told the media that it had met Chouhan to block the inclusion of eggs in the meal because, it claimed, the “sensitivity of children dies” when they eat non-vegetarian food.
-In fact, the Right to Food Campaign has pointed out that the upper-caste groups who oppose eggs in nutrition schemes are not the ones who would ever avail of these schemes but nonetheless continue to influence government policies based on their own beliefs. More importantly, while schemes like the mid-day meal are meant to be community-oriented in nature, the “beneficiaries” are not part of the decisions ostensibly made on their behalf.
-To the argument that states which do not serve eggs in mid-day meals will consider serving milk and bananas to make up for the protein quotient, nutritionists have pointed out that boiled eggs are easier to serve than milk and are more protein-rich
-this programme, which catered to 10.45 crore children in 11.58 lakh schools in 2013–14, has also been the site of much manipulation, corruption and irregularities. From attempts by large multinational corporations to lobby for the contract to provide “dry” meal packets (as opposed to the cooked meal) to reports of contractors attempting to take over the provision of meals from local women’s self-help groups to the virtual dominance by morally righteous vegetarianism-promoting groups over the menu, the focus has rarely been on the children for whom it is meant.
-The mid-day meal national programme and the anganwadi scheme together look after the nutritional needs of crores of Indian children. The former has also been responsible for raising the enrolment in schools, especially of girls. For many of the children, the meals provided by these schemes are their only protection from hunger
-The need of the hour then is to work at removing the shortcomings like lack of overall monitoring, supervision of cooking, freeing teachers from menial tasks like buying provisions for the meal and ensuring that the village education council and the school management committee (which ensure community participation) do their jobs diligently. These schemes are far too important for the future of India to subject them to personal, caste and religious preferences which are not shared by the beneficiaries.

Whither Justice?-The Preamble of the Constitution of India, containing among other things “justice, social, economic and political”—surely the most important assurance to common people—paradoxically, is getting distanced at an accelerated pace as we traverse the “developmental” avenue. This first page of the Constitution has become a bitter satire on the Indian people, and Part IV of it, “the directive principles of state policy,” that further emphasise how the rulers should rule this country, a dead document except for its provision for “the holy cow.”
-The majority, the poor, constitutionally the owners of this country, crave for justice while the rich commit crime and roam scot-free as VVIPs. The entire judicial process stands hijacked by the moneybags as admitted by the highest court of the land:
We are sorry to say that the court’s time is being used by senior advocates and big criminals....We can say on oath that only 5% of the time is being used for common citizens, whose appeals are waiting for 20 or 30 years.
-The big-ticket lawbreakers engage high-profile advocates who manage to get them bail even before they are arrested or immediately thereafter, and then stretch the period as long as possible, as in the case ofSalman. By the time a verdict is delivered, many of the witnesses would be dead or made to die, and whatever incriminating evidence existed is diluted or destroyed beyond retrieval . The least said about the investigating agency, the police, in this context, the better.
- Contrast this with the case of G N Saibaba, a wheelchair-bound professor in a college of Delhi University with 90% physical disability, who until a few years ago only crawled on his hands and perhaps cannot even survive without assistance, is being denied bail repeatedly despite public concern for his failing health.
-The Constitution guarantees freedom of faith and speech and the Supreme Court explicitly averred that mere acquaintance with persons of a banned organisation or just sympathy to the latter’s cause was no crime. It was no crime even to be a member of a banned organisation unless the person participated in the unlawful activities of the organisation. The police have not provided even a shred of evidence that Saibaba was involved in any unlawful activity of the Maoists. What does it mean when such a person gets arrested under the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) and gets incarcerated in a solitary anda cell of the notorious Nagpur Jail? What does it mean when the judiciary, which routinely grants bail to Salman and his ilk, but persistently denies it to Saibaba who takes up the cudgels on behalf of the oppressed? Does the court think that the latter can flee and escape trial if he is granted bail?
-Amma's case: On 11 May, the Karnataka High Court turned down the conviction of J Jayalalithaa by the special court in the infamous “disproportionate assets case” filed by Subramanian Swamy in June 1996. The trial went on for 18 years and was transferred from Chennai to Bengaluru. The Karnataka High Court while deciding on their appeal acquitted all of them of all the charges. Now Jayalalithaa can formally take over the chief ministership of the state. But it took 18 years for the court to say so and just a year for the higher court to reverse it.
-The logic of the judgment is linked to the political need of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Jayalalithaa, with 37 members of Parliament in the Lok Sabha and 11 in the Rajya Sabha, is an invaluable ally for the BJP, for which she needed to be exonerated of the corruption charges first. When done, it was none other than Narendra Modi who made one of the first congratulatory calls to her. The BJP is desperate to overcome its weakness in the Rajya Sabha, as seen in its attempts at wooing Mulayam Singh Yadav in Uttar Pradesh and befriending Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal. In the given circumstances, the judge could make some hodgepodge of a calculation to de-stigmatise her, assuming that it would not be challenged. Subramanian Swamy made it clear that he would not do it. Even if the Congress government in the state does it, the case would take a long time to conclude.
-Indian democracy, we are tutored, stands on three equal and independent legs—the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary—which represent the constitutional mechanism of checks and balances. This theoretical dictum of independence has been problematic in theory itself because the government that is formed by the majority legislative party represents a merger of the legislature and the executive; it assumes the executive power and directly controls the bureaucracy while continuing to exercise its legislative functions. Over the years, in the political paradigm created by the first-past-the-post type of electoral system, and a blurring of substantive distinctions among parties, the bureaucracy learns to carry the writ of the legislature (politicians).
-The present Parliament has created the National Judicial Appointments Commission (NJAC) by the Constitution (Ninety-Ninth Amendment) Act, 2014 which came into force on 13 April 2015. The NJAC replaced the previous collegium system for appointment and transfer of judges. While in theory, the NJAC appeared quite all right, it has actually created an avenue for political meddling and potentially marred the independence of judiciary. The NJAC has yet to make its appearance, but its influence is being smelt through the judgments that appear to benefit the political party at the helm.