-Outlook The faecal matter hits the rotary blades, politically-but we're still staring at a sanitation disaster "Indians defecate everywhere. They defecate mostly besides the railway tracks. But they also defecate on the beaches; they defecate on the hills; they defecate on the river banks; they defecate on the streets; they never look for cover." -V.S. Naipaul An Area of Darkness, 1964 Not...

-The Hindu When a death sentence is given to satisfy the "collective conscience of the community," it raises troubling questions about the fairness of the trial The verdict of death for the bestial gang rape in Delhi last December is based on Supreme Court judgments, which stipulate that capital punishment will be imposed in "the rarest of rare" cases, where the community's "collective conscience is so shocked that it will expect the...

-The Hindu ‘Victims of communal carnage still struggling, socially and financially' Forbesganj/Bhagalpur: Bhajanpur village is a few kilometres off Bihar's showcase ‘four-lane,' as drivers call the highway, a far cry from the State's back-breaking roads of the past, near Forbesganj town. Residents tell us that those affected by the kaand incident, of two years ago, live a little ahead, in the Ansari basti. A bumpy ride across the village leads to Ale Rasool...

-The Times of India It's often argued that criminalization of politics merely reflects the increasing criminalization of society. However, an analysis of data on Lok Sabha members facing criminal charges and official figures on crime in India show that the proportion of people facing such charges is way higher among Lok Sabha MPs than in the population as a whole. In fact, for a range of serious charges, the rate among...

-PTI NEW DELHI: Perhaps for the first time, the home ministry has identified the religion of victims of communal violence, saying 107 people lost their lives in riots this year, of whom 66 were Muslims and 41 were Hindus. A document released by the home ministry said there were 479 riots in the country, including in Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh, till September 15 in which 107 people lost their lives. UP recorded the...