Two days after a mob of 300 Trinamool workers and supporters stormed a Police Station in the heart of Kolkata, assaulted policemen and vandalised government and private vehicles, the police have filed a preliminary report of the rioting — and indicted their own men. The mob, comprising members of two clubs in Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s south Kolkata neighbourhood, fought street battles with policemen from Bhowanipore Police Station who had asked...

-The Indian Express   West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has not adapted well from a life in opposition to being the head of her state’s government. Yet even by her standards, and those of the hollowed-out administrative machinery of the state now in her care, her recent actions have been shocking. On Monday, a religious procession passed through a section of south Kolkata dotted by hospitals, including one for cancer patients...

When Chief Minister Omar Abdullah announced the withdrawal of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act from certain areas areas in Jammu and Kashmir, it was a political move with many objectives. The government, however, had to put the plan on hold. Though the Home Ministry has been in favour of a withdrawal, the plan came under severe criticism from the Army, which argued that a withdrawal, even if partial, would hamper...

Accused No 1 Noor-ul-Huda, 26 Labourer, Arrested on October 22, 2006 A month after the Malegaon blasts in September 2006, two policemen walked up to the house of Noor-ul-Huda at Jaffer Nagar on a Ramzan evening. They took Noor with them, telling his father they would send him back in 10 minutes. “Five years have passed. How long is their 10 minutes?” asks Noor’s father Shumshuz Zoha. This wasn’t the first time Noor...

Communal violence had erupted in the area over a piece of disputed land Despite the initiation of an artificial “peace process” in the aftermath of September's horrific violence, the people in this nondescript town, which grabbed the headlines for the wrong reasons, seem to have lost confidence in the neutrality of the administration. Victims are yet to come to terms with the mishandling of the situation and, what they claim, the...