Anand Patwardhan’s paean to Dalits, that took 14 years to compose, probes even as it praises, says Saroj Giri THERE IS an entrenched tendency to represent Dalits fighting for rights and reservations as just (another) competitive bloc vying for self-interest and power. It leads to a pernicious inversion: ‘Dalit rights’ dividing the nation along caste lines. Victim as perpetrator! Anand Patwardhan’s film Jai Bhim Comrade takes us beyond the grid of...

-The Times of India Trinamool Congress men beat a 38-year-old woman, confined her near a temple, tore off her clothes and forced her to walk half-naked to her home at Kanaidighi village in Bengal's East Midnapore district. After the torture and humiliation in the presence of her 16-year-old son and daughter on Sunday, the woman consumed poison and was admitted to Contai subdivisional hospital. Police put up a barricade around the hospital...

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...

-Rediff.com    In this ongoing series we bring you 30 stories of struggle, survival and success to inspire you. This son of a rickshaw puller, who graduated in Mathematics chose entirely new subjects in Civils because he could not afford coaching. Here is his story On the pot-holed lanes of India's holy city Varanasi, Narayan Jaiswal used to pedal his rickety rickshaw to make a living and send his children to school in nearby...

 When Mamata Banerjee defeated the Communist Party of India (Marxist) last May after 34 years of power in West Bengal, her victory was portrayed by optimists as the beginning of a Kolkata Spring. Free of the communists’ rural thugs and urban heelers, the story went, the state would finally enter the 21st century. One year after Banerjee’s landslide, however, the new boss is looking a lot like the old one —...