Row over cartoon demeans the Dalit movement in general and Ambedkar in particular The intellectual-rational capacity of the current brand of Congress leadership has always been in doubt. In the latest episode of fast-track community appeasement by banning a controversial Nehru-Ambedkar cartoon in an NCERT textbook, the ruling elites of our country hit a new low in their political opportunism. Kapil Sibal is, in general, not a popular figure among Dalits,...

Maoists wreaked their vengeance on tribals in a village in Chhattisgarh’s undivided Dantewada district, bordering Andhra Pradesh, by allegedly molesting women, assaulting elders, and torching houses for not handing over to them a local Salwa Judum (disbanded anti- Naxal vigilante force) leader, officials said on Wednesday. The brutality by the armed rebels, who numbered around 60-70, on the Dorla tribe population of Maraiguda in the newly created Sukma district (carved out...

What is it that makes the Indian middle class treat their domestic help with such derision and abuse? In her nine years as a nurse working with rescued domestic workers in Delhi, Mariamma K. thought she had seen the worst. That was until 2010, when she and her colleagues went to rescue a 17-year-old girl from a home in west Delhi. Sangeeta was found with bite marks all over her body....

Maoist leader Kishan is dead but he has left behind a “ghost village” that even the new Bengal government has been unable to breathe back to life. The story of Salpatra, a village of mostly Muslim families near Jhargram town, is not one of usual black-and-white administrative inaction but of how acts of unspeakable brutality and an element of political mistrust can keep empty an entire village not more than 150km...

Police officers who have stood up for the truth are made to pay for it. IF there is anyone who can nail the perpetrators of the anti-Muslim riots of 2002 in Gujarat, it is the State's police officers. Witness to the worst communal violence seen in recent times, these officers have first-hand knowledge of the complicity of politicians in the riots and the degree of brutality and negligence of duty that...