Stories abound in Bhopal of the life and death of Shehla Masood. But among those who knew her, there appears agreement on one point: something was so uncharacteristically passive, so un-Shehla-like, they say, about the dead body slumped in the driving seat of the silver-grey Santro on the morning of August 16, with no evident signs of struggle and a bullet hole in the neck. Some crude clues to the extraordinary...
More »SEARCH RESULT
The idea of corruption by Latha Jishnu
Anna Hazare and his followers have a skewed notion of corruption. Would they ever see the Bhopal Gas Tragedy as the symptom of the problem? The government’s initial contempt and arrogance for Anna Hazare’s protest turned into craven pandering as his hordes made a carnival of it in Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan. One was troubled by the fate of other protesters who have received short shrift—the small, the struggling and much suffering...
More »Should the RTI Act Trump Supreme Court Rules? by Nikita Mehta
The Delhi High Court on Monday stayed an order that would have allowed Indians to seek information from the Supreme Court under the country’s Right-to-Information act, rather than under existing court rules, after the top court appealed the ruling. Earlier this month, the Central Information Commission, which oversees the implementation of India’s transparency law, ruled that people seeking information from the court were entitled to use the four-year-old statute if they...
More »SC dismisses CBI petition, rejects harsher punishment for Bhopal Gas Tragedy accused by Dhananjay Mahapatra
The Supreme Court turned down on Wednesday a government demand to re-open the case into the 1984 Bhopal Gas Tragedy and hand harsher sentences to seven men convicted of negligence. The court dismissed CBI's curative petition seeking restoration of stringent charges against Bhopal tragedy accused saying it was filed 14 years after the 1996 judgment, which was only a prima facie view of evidence that had come on record till that...
More »Just a face-saving exercise: survivors by Mahim Pratap Singh
Even as the Supreme Court will hear on Wednesday two curative petitions filed by the CBI and the Union government in the Bhopal Gas Tragedy case, survivors have pointed out infirmities in the petition filed by the Centre. “It is just a face-saving exercise by the Government of India against the international criticism it faced last year,” says Abdul Jabbar of the Bhopal Gas Peedith Mahila Udyog Sangathan. “The petition overlooks incidents...
More »