Maoist leader Kishan is dead but he has left behind a “ghost village” that even the new Bengal government has been unable to breathe back to life. The story of Salpatra, a village of mostly Muslim families near Jhargram town, is not one of usual black-and-white administrative inaction but of how acts of unspeakable brutality and an element of political mistrust can keep empty an entire village not more than 150km...

-Economic and Political Weekly   Mamata Banerjee cynically casts aspersions on a rape victim to further her political agenda. When rape becomes a political power game, every woman, not just a rape survivor, has reason to be afraid. What this suggests is that, for people in the political battlefield, the seriousness of this violent crime and the increasing incidence of rape in our towns and villages are of no concern. This has become...

Kanak Dixit: We have with us Aruna Roy, from Devdungri village in Rajasthan, who has, among other things, been able to take the Right to Information (RTI) from janasunuwais, or public hearings at the village level, all the way to national legislation that encompasses all of India. It is a movement that is truly global in scale. Aruna, a question that has been troubling me quite a bit in the context...

At the intensive care unit of the state-run All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) hospital in New Delhi, a two-year-old battered baby girl is fighting to survive. The doctors attending to her have waged a six-week battle to keep her alive, but they are quickly losing hope that she will ever live a normal life after the torture she endured at such a tender age. When she was first brought to...

Amnesty International on Thursday said that ten years after the Gujarat riots “an overwhelming majority” of the victims were still awaiting justice and urged the authorities to ensure adequate compensation to all those who lost their homes. Those who were still living in transit camps should not be evicted, it said. “The majority of the perpetrators of the Gujarat violence walk free, assuming that they will not be punished by the State...