On a late Tuesday night in Uttar Pradesh, the quiet machinery of rural administration was rattled by the sound of a First Information Report. The FIR named Ram Singh, a lekhpal, or village revenue accountant, from the Shrikant Ka Purwa-Sarai Sagar area, and it accused him of something that rarely reaches criminal courts: submitting a false report to the Allahabad High Court. According to Additional Superintendent of Police (East) Alok Kumar, the case was registered after the court itself exposed the report as unreliable. This was not a case of a stolen vehicle or a street brawl, but a matter…

Resignation letters rarely tell the whole story. They are polite, final, and weighted with all the things that cannot be said in public. That was the strange, heavy mood surrounding Andrew Bayly when he stood down from his ministerial duties after a claim he insists was false. Bayly had spent years in Parliament working his way up from the backbenches, building a reputation as one of the more energetic and enthusiastic members of the National Party. He had held significant economic portfolios, crisscrossed the country talking to business owners, and seemed to genuinely enjoy the unglamorous work of policy detail.…