In 1953, the authors of India's first-ever crime survey presented a grim picture of the state of the new country's police forces. “There has been,” authors of Crime in Indiareported, “no improvement in the methods of investigation or in the application of science to this work. No facilities exist in any of the rural police stations and even in most of the urban police stations for scientific investigation.” From the National Crime...

At the age of 18, he had allegedly planted as many as 28 bombs in Delhi and NCR, that too single-handedly in all but one instance. Mohammad Amir Khan had, therefore, been implicated in 19 cases, charged with serious offences such as murder and waging war against the government. Yet, after spending 14 years in jail, he was released last month after being acquitted in all but two cases. Though the...

-The Times of India   Days after the arrest of RSS worker Kamal Chouhan in connection with the Samjhauta Express blast case, the home ministry on Thursday said "more arrests will be made leading to the solving" of a number of terror cases including Malegaon, Modassa and Ajmer Shariff blasts. The ministry said six terror cases were being reinvestigated and one of them (Modassa in Gujarat) was on the verge of being solved....

Iqbal Masud, the civil servant and critic, supported the ban on The Satanic Verses in 1989. His reason was simple: if the book remained on sale in India, Muslims would march in protest, policemen would fire upon them, some of them would die, and no book, said Masud, was worth the life of a single protester. There were, he allowed, legitimate arguments to be made about incitement, about mobs marching against...

Can Information Technology Act deal with the dynamics of the Net? THIS is one series of court cases the nation is following keenly. Within one week, in December last year, a criminal and a civil complaint were filed against 20-odd online giants like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo for hosting anti-religious and anti-social content on their websites. While the judge hearing the civil case ordered immediate removal and blockade of all...