Amid the billowing controversies surrounding the Lokpal Bill drafting committee, senior Congress leader Digvijay Singh Saturday backed a demand for a Dalit representative on the panel while central minister Salman Khurshid ruled out any changes in the committee. Singh backed Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati's demand for a Dalit representative on the 10-member government-civil society committee, though he has been her bitter critic. "The demand is just," Singh said, adding nothing...

Misleading data cited in a seminar paper on the situation of the Minority community in the State tend to detract from the Left Front government's exceptional record on this count. Abusaleh Shariff, the Chief Economist of the National Council of Applied Economic Research, who was the Member-Secretary of the Sachar Committee, presented a paper on the socio-economic development of Muslims in West Bengal, at a seminar organised by the Institute of...

Veteran social activist Anna Hazare on Saturday broke his fast after over 90 hours of spearheading the campaign against corruption After a last-minute twist almost derailed a peace deal between Anna Hazare and the government, the Gandhian on Friday announced that he would call off his fast on Saturday morning with official negotiators accepting all his conditions. Hasare first helped supporters break their fast before ending it himself. Thousands were waiting for...

For 55-year-old Mohimuddin of Goroimari, which falls in the Chaygaon Assembly constituency in lower Assam's Kamrup district, the protection of minorities from undue harassment in the name of identification of foreigners was the prime issue until a few years ago. This time round, he is more worried about the backwardness of his village coupled with price hike. A poor peasant with seven mouths to feed, Mohimuddin says the prime demand of...

More than 105 people in India were sentenced to death in 2010, but no one was executed during the year, human rights watchdog Amnesty International has claimed. Releasing Amnesty International's (AI) annual global Death Penalty Statistics, its Secretary General Salil Shetty said Minority of states that “continue to systematically use the death penalty were responsible for thousands of executions in 2010, defying the global anti-death penalty trend.” Noting that Asia and the...