Six months before India's human rights gets reviewed at the United Nations, the Working Group on Human Rights (WGHR) in India released a report painting a dismal picture of its rights record. The U.N. Human Rights Council examines the rights record of its members on a rotational basis every four years through a peer review process, the Universal Periodic Review (UPR). Reports by the civil society, U.N. agencies and the country...

If the story earlier was that the number of Maoist-affected districts was increasing, that no longer seems to be true On the third anniversary of the attack on Mumbai, today, the success to celebrate on the internal security front may be far removed from Mumbai, and located in the jungles of the tribal heartland of eastern India. The killing on Thursday of Kishenji, ranked third in the hierarchy of the Maoists,...

The return of peace and normalcy in Kashmir is a reality. And to ensure a durable and lasting peace, a humane approach to handle the law and order situation may be required. In a vibrant, democratic country, authoritarian ways of suppressing people’s voices prove to be counterproductive. It may be recalled that the law and order situation in Kashmir worsened in the aftermath of unfair and rigged assembly elections of 1987,...

-EPW   With laws like the AFSPA, when will truth and justice prevail in Jammu and Kashmir? Like all Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) chief ministers after the dreadful years of president’s rule from 1990 to 1996, Omar Abdullah too stands discredited, especially in the wake of the 2010 uprising of the “stone pelters” which was later brutally suppres­sed. A widely held opinion in the Kashmir Valley is that the chief minister, whether of...

When Chief Minister Omar Abdullah announced the withdrawal of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act from certain areas areas in Jammu and Kashmir, it was a political move with many objectives. The government, however, had to put the plan on hold. Though the Home Ministry has been in favour of a withdrawal, the plan came under severe criticism from the Army, which argued that a withdrawal, even if partial, would hamper...