Truth vs Hype

The Food Security Bill's passage in Parliament set off seismic levels of panic in the stock markets. The government, on the other hand, believes it's a political gamechanger. This week, we take a hard impartial look at whether either side is justified in the claims being made about the risks and benefits of the Food Bill. And will it, as the government claims, become a tool to end hunger? Or will it foster mega corruption and sink an already fragile economy?

On Independence Day, in a village in Bihar, a group of Dalits were brutally attacked by their upper caste neighbours. One Dalit was killed and more than 30 others injured. The provocation: the Dalits built a temple of their icon Sant Ravidas at the entrance of the village. The upper castes wanted to hoist the national flag exactly at the same spot, but the Dalits refused, saying it is their land. It is an incident that came as shock to the rest of Bihar, which thought it had moved past its horrific legacy of caste atrocities. But while this episode may not mark a return to that terrible past, it brings out how Bihar's experiments with progressive politics have created new kinds of caste tensions, that simmer beneath the surface and occasionally, like on 15th August, come to the boil.

Robert Vadra is back in the headlines after a report by Haryana IAS officer, Ashok Khemka, found multiple violations in land deals by Sonia Gandhi's son in law. Those in defence of Mr Vadra claim there was nothing illegal about these deals. But a closer look at these transactions suggest that they walk a fine line between illegality and outright cronyism, where property traders, Congress politicians, state governments and business houses do extraordinary favours to Vadra to ensure that he becomes a multi-millionaire without spending a penny.

The battle for Telangana has become a battle for Hyderabad. Those demanding a separate state say they want to end the dominance of the contractor - politicians from the rest of Andhra Pradesh who have made crores from India's cyber city, and control the politics of the state.But given the high stakes involved, there is concern that leaders of the new Telangana are less worried about social justice to a deprived region, and more with getting their share of boomtown Hyderabad.

After playing cat-and-mouse with Mulayam Singh Yadav for six years, the UPA looks all set to close the CBI's investigation into potential corruption by the Samajwadi Party chief and his family. This week, from Lucknow to the Yadav heartland of Etawah, we investigate how the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is turning its back on its own findings - that the first family of Uttar Pradesh politics may have amassed crores of assets, way beyond their earnings.

As soon as the Supreme Court lifted the ban on Mumbai's dance bars, politicians in Maharashtra protested, saying that the bars should remain shut because they are a source of moral corruption and pose a law and order menace. But this maybe outright hyprocrisy given that politicians and police officials patronised dance bars or directly owned them. In fact, as we discover this week, the real reason why the bars were shut down was may be because of a multi-crore payoff that went wrong.

Earlier this month, a young Dalit boy Ilavarasan, was found dead on the railway tracks. Initially, his family suspected he was murdered for daring to marry a girl of the higher, Vanniyar caste. The police now claim to have enough evidence to suggest that he committed suicide. But this makes his death no less a tragedy, nor does it exempt those who have used the Ilavarasan story for political gains, even if it came at the cost of suicides, riots, and the sharpening of caste tensions.

Gopinath Munde's public declaration that he had spent Rs. 8 crores during his 2009 election campaign has sparked a controversy. Some politicians tried to spin this as an act of courage, of someone brave enough to expose the worst kept secret of Indian elections - that virtually every MLA and MP spends more than their limits. But its too soon to congratulate Munde and his ilk, because as we discover, every single political party has fought tooth and nail to block any attempts to disclose where they get their money from and how they spend it.

The CBI's 1500 page chargesheet in the Ishrat Jahan encounter only confirms what several investigators had already found: that it was not the case of a group of LeT, on their way to a terror strike. Instead 4 people, already in custody were moved into place wearing blindfolds and executed. But the chargesheet raises as many questions as it answers of the forces at play behind the encounter, which many say holds the key to unraveling the motive behind the killings.

Nine years down the line, the encounter of Ishrat Jahan and three others still carries explosive potential. The police claimed they had plans to target Narendra Modi, a claim demolished by repeated investigating agencies. Now the CBI's probe into the conspiracy behind the killings, accessed by NDTV suggest that the top leadership of the Gujarat government might have been in the know of the encounter.Even more damaging are the CBI's revelations on the role of the Intelligence Bureau in stage managing this and another encounter, that of a young man called Sadiq Jamal, a year prior to Ishrat's encounter. But given the intense pressure on the CBI, will it be able to move forward on unearthing why so many were killed in cold blood, invoking a false threat to Narendra Modi?