A Little Wit. A Little Wisdom. Lots of India.
… when you think about the number people dead & those traumatized by the 1993 Bomb Blasts, 11 convicts handed with Death Penalties and others sentenced to Life Imprisonment – with just couple of years in prison (minus the 16 months off the 6 years), Dutt seems to have walked off very lightly.
Sakshi comments on the 6-year prison sentence handed out to Sanjay Dutt .
In India, you cannot register a political party if you refuse to swear allegiance to socialism. S.V Raju who has been trying to register an Indian Liberals Party for the last 5 years, explains his predicament.
Update: Patrix writes.
Many people opposing the idea of a quasi-libertarian party say that it is not politically feasible. Well, in that case let us give those interested in such a party a chance and let the voters decide. After all, as the free market proponent would say, let the market decide if such a party has any takers. But we’ll never know unless they are given an opportunity.
In a finely argued piece, Vivek Reddy shows how imposting quotas in private unaided educational institutions is constitutionally invalid.
the 104th Amendment violates the essence of the equality clause in the Constitution. The Supreme Court in a number of cases right from Keshavananda Bharati decision in 1973 to the Indra Sawhney-II decision in 2000 has affirmed that equality is part of the basic structure of the Constitution. If the stated theme of the 104th Amendment was to impose the obligation of social justice on private unaided educational institutions, there is no justification for excluding it when it comes to minority unaided educational institutions. The irrelevance of the objective of giving preferential treatment comes out in sharp contrast when it comes to professional education, which has little nexus with the minority status. Why should a Christian or a Muslim professional educational college be exempt from admitting students from a backward class into engineering or a medical course when the same obligation is imposed on other colleges?
Over at the group blog Law and Other Things, there’s an interesting back-and-forth going on about the recent (interim) order from a two-judge Bench staying the implementation of OBC reservation in Centrally funded universities/institutions. V. Venkatesan and Vivek Reddy are the participants, and they examine the order from many different legal angles. Here are the links (with presumably more to come):
Patents in the health care realm are a complex issue. Confused’s long post does a good job of making it less… er… confusing.
But, should there be a debate on patents at all? The answer is an unequivocal yes, there is little doubt that without patents, drug prices would fall drastically affecting the bottom line of pharmaceutical companies. Normally, this should be of no concern to us and lis best left to market forces, however patents are a public policy tool, it is essential that they are debated and their efficiency examined.
Vivek offers a couple of serious objections to the view that the ‘right to die’ (he’s not considering ‘euthanasia’ in this post) is “implicit in the Right to Live (and the Right to Freedom of Expression)”. Here’s the first objection:
1. Every Fundamental Right imposes a Duty on the State. The State has an obligation to safeguard your FRs. Now, imagine a person X attempting suicide and a person Y saving him/her. If the right to die is made a Fundamental Right, X can sue Y (and possibly the State) for violation of his/her FRs. In fact, you could then argue that there should be a law against saving people from committing suicide. Makes sense?
This is how it started:
On 5th Feb, the Cauvery verdict was announced. A local KMF retailer in my neighbourhood overcharges each time there is a hint of trouble in the city. At 8:30 in the evening, my wife went to buy milk from this chap. As usual he was demanding more money than the MRP. She brought to his notice that overcharging is illegal under the Packaged Commodities Rules (PCR), which state that any trader charging more than the MRP mentioned on the package can be prosecuted. Upon hearing this, he turned extremely abusive and verbally assaulted her. He insulted her, threatened her with physical and sexual harm and physically intimidated her. A crowd gathered but nary a person came to her rescue and to restrain the milkman. …
Hawkeye and his wife decide to pursue this case — which has aspects of both consumer rights, and sexual harassment — through all the official channels available to them all of us: the police, the Karnataka Milk Federation, the Consumer forums … He has been updating his blog (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), and I wish him all the luck — and courage, too — to see this thing through.
Known Turf on children, dead children, missing children and numbers.
When somebody asked me about my politics (was I right, left, liberal, anarchist?), without thinking much about why, I responded by saying, “My politics is children”.
Part of this was rooted in the fact that I’d been trying to write about child protection for nearly three months, and was at the moment trying to determine whether it was 17 skulls and 22 dismembered skeletons they’re found in that drain in my city’s backyard, or was it 18, or was it 38?
In his musings on law and order justice, Ramesh covers several things. This excerpt is about his jury duty:
It was an interesting mix of people in the jury. Boulder County, which is where I used to reside, is one of the most educated counties in the country and perhaps that is why three of the six of us happened to be Ph. Ds. There was a VP of Sun Microsystems and the basketball Head Coach of the University of Colorado, Mr. Riccardo Patton was another juror. (quite an interesting man and he talked more than me!!) The lone remaining juror was a student.
