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Thank you, Justice Verma
Justice J. S. Verma's call for legal enforcement of judicial accountability in his interview to this newspaper should be taken up with the utmost seriousness and urgency. Within days of retiring as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Justice Verma has chosen to speak out about corruption in the judiciary and the failure of existing mechanisms to establish norms of conduct or bring errant judges to book.
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And a new authoritarianism
Recent mass killings of Shias, reportedly by cadres of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, in Lahore have caught the world's attention as symptomatic of the increasingly violent religious fissures in Pakistani civil society. This is only one facet of the internal turmoil over the last year and a half. The evolving situation negates the general expectation about democracy stabilising the political situation and gradually resolving the socio-political contradictions imposed by long military rule.
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The civilian way of disarming the chief
The appointment of the three-star Adjutant General (AG) is crucial in a peacetime army. In the British and American armies he is a four-star general. He's responsible for the morale, welfare, discipline, human rights and ceremonial functions of the army and supports field commanders in exercising their command responsibility over these motivational battle-winning assets.
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"Judicial activism has ushered in hope"
A man of principles Justice J.S. Verma moved out of his 3, Janpath residence to his apartment in Ghaziabad less than 24 hours after he demitted office . "I have certain principles and I have lived by them all my life," he says. At one level, it's easy to explain this as honesty -- cynics may call it quaint, even old-fashioned. Justice Verma speaks to the The Indian Express in an exclusive interview on his judicial philosophy.
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Divine duel in Havana
It's so magical a moment that even Gabriel Garcia Marquez is there, with his reporter's notepad. Two patriarchs in their autumnal splendour, die-hard apostles of two clashing faiths, both John Paul II and Fidel Castro are engaged in the most defining transcendental missions of this century. It seems even Marquez, whose pages are crowded with oversized images of men, is modest enough to realise that only the craft of reporting, not the art of fiction, can capture the papal visit to Cuba.
The word of Wazira
I was born and bred in Peshawar, the capital of the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan. We lived in a large mansion in Mohalla Lahorian at a stone's throw from Dhakki Nalbandi off Kabuligate. I have nostalgic memories of the landmarks: the National High School, Panj Teerth, Shahi Bagh, Cunningham Park and Peshawar radio station near the Civil Courts.
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