-The Hindu   Top civil society bodies are challenging the government's ‘counter-affidavit' in the Paid News case which seeks to gut the Election Commission's powers In a major twist to the Ashok Chavan vs. Madhav Kinhalkar legal battle (more notorious as the "Paid News" scandal), leading civil society organisations and eminent individuals have approached the Supreme Court to implead themselves into the case. Their intervention application, moved by advocate Prashant Bhushan, minces no words...

-The Hindu The Supreme Court's verdict last week quashing the President's rejection of a mercy petition by Mahendra Nath Das, who was to hang for a gruesome murder, shows a salutary approach to the question of whether a prolonged delay in disposing pleas for clemency should not be a ground for commuting death sentences to life terms. The court took note of the 12-year delay prior to the rejection of Das's...

-The Hindu   The educational and economic development of Dalits is seen by the backward castes as a challenge to the social order, as recent incidents in Tamil Nadu show On the evening of November 7, 2012, a crowd numbering over 1000 people burst into three Dalit settlements in Dharmapuri, north-western Tamil Nadu, and laid them waste. Over a period of several hours, they looted, smashed and burned. Trees had been felled on...

-The Statesman GUWAHATI, 7 MAY: Asian Centre for Human Rights (ACHR), a New Delhi-based rights body, has come out strongly against the Delhi University (DU) for its decision to introduce compulsory Hindi and other Modern Indian Languages (MIL) in its courses without assessing the ground reality and urged the University Grants Commission to intervene with the famed university "to halt the four year undergraduate programme and not to introduce compulsory MILs...

-The Times of India To the Government of India, Members of the Judiciary, and All Citizens, One of the most disastrous consequences of the strife in the tribal areas of central India is that thousands of adivasi men and women remain imprisoned as under-trials, often many years after being arrested, accused of 'Naxalite/ Maoist' offences. The facts speak for themselves. In Chhattisgarh, over two thousand adivasis are currently in jail, charged with 'Naxalite/Maoist'...