If you are a resident of Madhya Pradesh, Muslim and poor, nowhere close to the class of nawabs who can pay for murg musallam or mutton raan, watch your pot! The BJP government, led by Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, has just armed itself with a big danda ostensibly to protect the holy cow and its progeny. But, make no mistake, it’s a stick to beat you with. To save your...
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Why ‘force first' will not work by DN Sahaya
Union Minister for Rural Development Jairam Ramesh, in an article on left-wing extremism (“From Tirupati to Pashupati?” The Hindu , October 14, 2011), observed candidly: “It is not the naxals who have created the ground conditions ripe for their ideology — it is the singular failure of successive governments both in the States and the Centre.” There lay the main cause of the festering sore of naxalism, often characterised as left-wing...
More »India's rights record dismal: report by Sandeep Dikshit
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...
More »NREGA Lines Pockets. Not of the Poor by Abhishek Bhalla
JANGU, 40, a Dalit labourer in Paraspur village in Gonda district, 120 km NorthEast of Lucknow, displays his job card in complete disbelief. “My job card was made three years ago and shows three payments. But I was never given any work, so how was the payment made?” he asks, puzzled. The first entry shows a payment of Rs 1,400 but he received a paltry Rs 100. He never went...
More »Earthquake rocks Assam, Manipur and Nagaland
-IANS An earthquake measuring 5.9 on the Richter scale rocked India's NorthEast, Myanmar and Bangladesh on Monday, triggering panic among people. The tremor was felt at 8.47am in most parts of Assam, Nagaland, and Manipur, besides in Bangladesh and Myanmar. The epicentre was located at 24.947°N, 95.226°E in Myanmar, about 130 km east of Manipur capital Imphal, the website of US Geological Survey said. Seven NorthEastern states - Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Tripura, Nagaland, Arunachal...
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