While the police force has for long been promising transparency in its working without doing much about it, the common man has taken it upon himself to "expose cases of police highhandedness and excesses". A video of a family being roughed up by cops 19 days ago - recorded by a bystander - has helped mobilize massive support for the victims, and on Monday 17 associations and 15 village panchayats...

Holding that procedural safeguards for protection of personal liberty must be strictly followed, the Supreme Court has quashed the preventive detention of four persons under the Conservation of Foreign Exchange and Prevention of Smuggling Activities Act. A Bench of Justices A.K. Ganguly and J.S. Khehar, quoting a catena of decisions, held that in preventive detention cases, representations from the detenus must be disposed of expeditiously and every day's delay must be...

Police officers of Chhattisgarh would have us believe that people fall inside bathrooms at police stations deliberately to break their own heads or backs and later blame it on custodial torture. They say that’s what happened with Soni Sori, an ashramshala teacher from Jabeli village in the Maoist-affected Dantewada district of Chhattisgarh, on October 10. In pain, drifting in and out of consciousness, benumbed by the ‘good cop, bad cop’...

It has been a long and difficult road to justice for the tribal residents of this village in Tamil Nadu's Dharmapuri district The injustice done to the tribal people of India is a shameful chapter in our country's history. The tribals were called ‘rakshas' (demons), ‘asuras', and what not. They were slaughtered in large numbers, and the survivors and their descendants were degraded, humiliated, and all kinds of atrocities inflicted on...

Why were two tribals and the Essar group framed by the Chhattisgarh police? Why are Soni Sori and Linga Kodopi being systematically silenced? This chilling story of one family reveals more about India's Naxal crisis than any official document can. AS I sit to write this, at 12.20 pm on 4 October 2011, an SMS pops up on my phone: “Soni Sori has been arrested by the Delhi Crime Branch.” The...