-PTI The apex court asked the CBI director to constitute a team of officers to investigate the cases of extra-judicial killing in Manipur. The Supreme Court on Friday directed a probe by the CBI into the alleged extra-judicial killings by the Army, the Assam Rifles and the Manipur Police in the insurgency—hit State. A Bench of Justices M.B. Lokur and U.U. Lalit asked the CBI director to appoint a team of officers to...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: A group of retired bureaucrats have written an open letter ruing the "rising authoritarianism and majoritarianism" that is choking dissent, and urging public authorities to take "corrective action" to "reclaim and defend the spirit of the Constitution". "Argumentation and discussion about different perspectives - the lifeblood not only of institutions of learning but of democracy itself -are being throttled," the letter says. "Disagreement and dissent are considered seditious...

-The Indian Express Proposed law on Ganga will not be enacted ‘in a hurry’, draft not complete: Uma Bharati. PROGRESS ON drafting a new law to protect the Ganga from pollution has run into a hurdle due to lack of consensus over what could be considered an offence and who should be held guilty of polluting the river. Water Resources Minister Uma Bharati told The Indian Express that the proposed Ganga law...

-Frontline.in The British government, on the basis of an 1891 report on the subhuman living conditions of “Pariahs” by James H.A. Tremenheere, Acting Collector of Chengleput, assigned 12 lakh acres of land for distribution to the “depressed classes” of the Madras Presidency to empower them socially and economically. But more than 100 years later, much of this land is in the possession of non-Dalits, and the struggle to reclaim them has...

-The Hindu Business Line From a severely critical stand against Aadhaar in 2014, the Modi-led BJP in power has made a sharp U-turn to bulldoze its way into having every Indian scanned, tagged and labelled. A timeline of the country’s chequered date with the unique identification project You’ve probably read the WhatsApp joke about a post-Aadhaar scenario in 2020 India. A man orders pizza over phone. He is asked for his Aadhaar...