The last planeload carrying participants from the COP 11 meeting of the international Convention on Biodiversity has flown out of Hyderabad, much to the relief of its citizens who were all inconvenienced for two weeks by the razzmatazz. One wonders if the 111th Conference of the Parties, when it occurs sometime in the future, will continue to parade the same sort of brave resolutions masking firmly-held governmental and corporate resolve not to implement any. (Letters)

Amartya Sen’s felicitous metaphor which celebrated an aspect of an open middle class Indian society has been harshly disproved by no less a person than the mild-mannered Manmohan Singh when he followed the practice of Indira Gandhi in seeing a “foreign hand” behind democratic opposition. Even when the prime minister trumpeted that United States (US) and Scandinavian non-governmental organisations were behind the Koodan kulam people’s agitation against a nuclear facility, a seminar was held in Delhi

Perhaps, if, instead of implementing a new generation of Rowlatt Acts, the government had tried providing education, public health, jobs, development and fair play to all the different poor minority communities over which it exercises power, there might have been little violence to tackle, and those communities participating democratically might have fully cooperated with the law and order machine