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Showing posts from August, 2010

Five Unfinished Tasks of Bharat that is India

In the sixty third year of British Parliament’s Indian Independence Act dated 18th July 1947 that enacted an Act “to make provision for the setting up in India of two independent Dominions, to substitute…certain provisions of the Government of India Act 1935”, it is germane to recollect as to how British Parliament gained this role on June 23rd, 253 years ago at Plassey, a small village and mango grove between Calcutta and Murshidabad "by promoting treason and forgery" to promote its business interests. British rule in India had "an unsavory beginning and something of that bitter taste has clung to it ever since" notes Jawaharlal Nehru, in The Discovery of India (1946). But he could do nothing to put the treason and forgery of 1757 and 1857 on trial and ensure accountability for the perpetrators of violence during partition. It was Indian Independence Act of the British legislature that said, “from the fifteenth day of August, nineteen hundred and forty-seven, two i

Two reports on paid news

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Note: MediaVigil had released the original report of the Press Council's sub-committee on Paid News on May 21, 2010 as Press Council's Sub-committee Report on Paid News Scam. Gopal Krishna Two reports on paid news The Press Council subcommittee’s original report on Paid News, and the sanitised one that the Council membership finally accepted offer an interesting contrast. THE HOOT presents both. Aug 11, 2010 On the 30th of July the Press Council put out a press release which was something of an anticlimax. It announced the release of the Council's report on Paid News, something that had been in the works since a sub-committee was appointed in July 2009. The two members of this sub-committee, Kalimekolan Sreenivas Reddy and Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, together with the Press Council of India Chairman Justice G.N. Ray, the Council's Secretary, Smt Vibha Bhargava and other members, met a wide cross-section of stake-holders in New Delhi, Mumbai and Hyderabad and also perused