A court judgment delivered earlier this year holds important lessons for those engaged in investigating and fighting terrorism. Questioning the methods of terror investigation is always a challenge because it is so easily seen as defending the enemies of the nation. The exercise is monumentally difficult after a benumbing bomb attack — especially if it has been judged to be the work of a home-grown Islamist organisation. The raging anger at this...

The National Commission for Minorities (NCM) has decided to press criminal charges against Janata Party president and columnist Subramanian Swamy for an incendiary article he wrote against Muslims in the Daily News and Analysis . In the article, written against the backdrop of the July 13 Mumbai blasts, Dr. Swamy had asked for India to be declared a Hindu Rashtra and sought severe punitive measures against Muslims, including their disenfranchisement if...

The draft Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence Bill 2011, proposed by the NAC, has attracted welcome debate. Any legislative measure, intended to correct a historical wrong, should indeed be subject to the closest scrutiny to improve and strengthen it. For if we get this right it can help realise, far better than we have so far, the constitutional guarantees of equality before the law. This bill is built on India’s...

Those of us interested in gender equality tend to be obsessed with the politically and economically important areas in which we need this equality — education, employment, health, political representation. But equality in these important but grim attributes leaves out many things that actually make life more enjoyable and thus more worth living. Women deserve more from gender equality than better housekeeping and management skills. In most societies, men are much...

Conditional cash transfers are necessary but not sufficient for improving health. Good government-funded health care is essential, as are schemes which address social determinants of health. The march of capitalism, with its reduced emphasis on public spending, while improving many national economies has also widened the gap between the rich and the poor. For millions of Indians, hunger is routine, malnutrition rife, employment insecure, health care expensive and livelihoods are under...