-Live Mint Despite being declared unconstitutional by SC, ‘khaps' continue to hold sway in parallel with the state machinery Rohtak/Bhiwani: Ravinder Gehlawat and his wife Shilpa had been married for less than four months when they were marched out of their village-Dharana in Jhajjar district of Haryana-by men of the local community and warned never to return. Their fate was sealed on 24 April 2009 when the local khap panchayat, which translates...
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The problem with porn -Mrinal Pande
-The Indian Express Can pornography be given free play when the state remains an integral expression of male power? There are many things we need to know that we wish we did not have to. The existence of domestic violence against women and children is one of them. The use of pornography as a tool for learning and justifying such brutal behaviour, is another. We have lived in denial of links between...
More »Security forces can be tried in criminal courts too, says SC -Utkarsh Anand
-The Indian Express Stating that all security forces personnel accused of crimes against civilians will not necessarily be tried only by their courts, the Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that criminal courts can also have jurisdiction in such cases. Setting aside the orders of a lower court and high court in Jammu and Kashmir, a bench led by Justice C K Prasad Thursday ordered that the trial of two BSF personnel, accused...
More »Social Justice
KEY TRENDS • According to National Sample Survey report no. 583: Persons with Disabilities in India, the percentage of persons with disability who received aid/help from Government was 21.8 percent, 1.8 percent received aid/help from organisation other than Government and another 76.4 percent did not receive aid/ help *8 • As per National Family Health Survey-4 (NFHS-4), the Under-five Mortality Rate (U5MR) was 57.2 per 1,000 live births (for the non-STs it was 38.5)...
More »Nobody’s children
-The Hindustan Times Far from the neatly trimmed lawns of India Gate that so often reverberate with cries for justice, far also from the corridors of power where ministries recently squabbled over the right age for consensual sex, lie 197 districts - yes 197, read the figure again - where children are regularly abused. In these districts -- all ridden by conflict -- words like illegal detention, arbitrary arrests, sexual violence, torture...
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