Letter of the Week AwardWe write to be read. When you write in, we read you to know what you think about what we publish. The ‘newspaper-active reader relationship’ is of enormous significance for a serious publication. A good letter, especially a good letter that critiques us, is of immense value. It is to recognise this and to encourage quality reader intervention that TheIndian Express is instituting the ‘Letter of the Week’ award. Beginning with the issue dated March 31, we will announce and publish every Saturday the reader intervention our editors deem most substantive, well-thought-out, sharp and cogent. Selection will be from letters received that week. The winner receives books worth Rs 1,000 and his letter gets pride of the place in the letters column as well as on our website. Defeat analysis• THE article on the convenient and lazy analysis of the recent electoral debacle of the Congress in Punjab is valuable (‘Farming excuses over the Punjab defeat’, IE, March 21). There is a general tendency among politicians to blame the electoral reverses on the economic reforms and neglect of the rural India in the reform process. While all right-thinking Indians would be interested in seeing India develop as a super power (with growth and inclusivity), it would be a tragedy if the growth process is retarded on account of shallow and improper analysis resulting in panic reactions at the top decision-making levels. This is not the first time in the history of economic reforms in India that the process of one-step forward and two-steps backward is likely to be repeated once again. I hope the government has a machinery for proper analysis and evaluation of the economic data at the working level, apart from having a talented leadership at the top, to draw the right conclusions from events of the day. — K. Arunm, MumbaiTake on reform • WHILE writing about the efforts towards an efficient, refined judiciary, (‘Court reform has no takers’, IE, March 21)R.C. Lahoti, the hon’ble retired CJI, forgot to mention another pressing aspect of reform that the judges can initiate, making use of some of the special powers given to the apex court. In criminal cases the courts have to depend on the investigation done by the state police; and you name an evil and it is present in every section of state police machineries. It is the biggest boulder on the smooth road of delivering neat justice. Were we to revive the justice delivery system, we would have to make the investigating agencies as independent as judiciary itself. The Supreme Court should act on its own and pass an appropriate order advising the government to act in that line. That would help infuse faith in our judiciary, too.— Naval Langa, AhmedabadGandhi mismatch• RAHUL Gandhi has set a cat among the Congress pigeons with his delightfully naïve statement that ‘Had anyone from the Gandhi family been active in 1992, the Babri Masjid would not have fallen!’ (IE, March 20). No doubt some Congress spokesperson will soon clarify that Rahul actually meant the Mahatma when he used the term ‘Gandhi’. — R.P. Subramanian , Delhi
