IN 2005, Gohana in Sonepat district of Haryana witnessed the torching of several Dalit homes by members of upper castes. Now Mirchpur, a village 58 kilometres away and located deep inside Hisar district, has met a similar fate. On April 21, as many as 18 homes belonging to Dalits from the Valmiki community here were set on fire by upper-caste youth over an alleged slight on the part of the...

An argument between a Dalit and a Jat over the former’s dog led to near-unbridled violence in a village in Hisar district which was tense throughout Thursday after an 18-year-old physically challenged Dalit girl and her father were burnt alive on Wednesday. The Dalits refused to cremate the bodies, demanding a CBI probe and compensation, apart from sacking of the Jat tehsildar of Mirchpur village where the violence began. Angry...

THEY DARED TO DO THEIR DUTY: THEY HAVE BEEN KILLED AND HARASSED FOR IT. PERHAPS THERE is a reason why Sanjiv Chaturvedi’s journey begins in the small dusty town of Kurukshetra, for his story is as epic a battle between good and evil, his journey as much a pursuit of dharma. Only, he is the sole Pandava on this battlefront, and he is the one who called the war. It was...

THE LAUNCH of free market liberalisation in 1991 triggered widespread prosperity for the Indian middle classes, making them the showpiece of India’s muchfêted economic boom. But little has ever changed for the bulk of the country’s poor, hundreds of millions of who continue to barely scrape through from day to day, doomed to extreme poverty and, consequently, malnutrition, disease and death. For decades, many among these millions have survived, however...