-The Hindu The national bar against hate crime has been lowered, but resolute corrective action is possible Once again, the first weeks of the Narendra Modi administration have been marked by hate crimes — two Muslim men beaten by mobs in Jharkhand and Mumbai, demanding they shout ‘Jai Shri Ram’, one so mercilessly that he died. Another man, a tribal, lynched in Tripura on suspicion of being a cattle thief. Most recently,...

-Hindustan Times Minority affairs minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi presented the data in the Lok Sabha in reply to a question posed by Trinamool Congress member Prasun Banerjee The rate of unemployment among Christian men in rural as well as urban areas is higher than those from other religions across the country, the Centre informed Parliament on Thursday. Minority affairs minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi presented the data in the Lok Sabha in reply to...

-Frontline.in A large proportion of voters who are left out of the electoral rolls despite having valid voter ID cards are Muslims and Dalits. Abdul Rahmat, 28, from Kolkata was shocked and confused when his application for enrolment in the electoral rolls was rejected with the comment “not an Indian citizen”. Born in Jalpaiguri, West Bengal, he had moved to the city a decade ago and held a white-collar job with...

-TheWire.in As modern jobs evade the state, rural millennials continue a pattern of out-migration that leaves hundreds of villages abandoned, or populated only by the elderly. For Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a third ‘M’, beyond Muslims and minorities, exists that can no longer wait to receive his attention. This is the epic-scale migration out of India’s mountain states, and I don’t mean Jammu and Kashmir. Uttarakhand became the 27th state of the...

-The Hindu There needs to be robust infrastructure for official statistics so that governments do not suppress inconvenient truths Over the past two weeks, headlines have focussed on declining employment between 2011-12 and 2016-17; loss of jobs under the National Democratic Alliance government, particularly post-demonetisation; and the government’s refusal to release a report using the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) documenting this decline, leading to resignations of two members of the National...