Naxalites are India's worst human rights offenders, says a new report on ToRture in India. But Maoist supporters maintain that the Naxals are fighting for survival. A report on ToRture in India has made the startling revelation. The Asian Centre for Human Rights says that the Maoists are the worst violaToRs when it comes to ToRture. For the first time ever, a top human rights group in India has accepted...

The Cabinet on Thursday cleared the long-pending Prevention of ToRture Bill for introduction in Parliament with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh strongly backing the proposed law despite some misgivings that such a law could demoralize security forces after the Dantewada killings. Though enacting the law is a step towards ratification of the UN convention against other cruel, inhuman punishment and degrading treatment, and has been pending for some time now, the...

The state must ensure that individual freedoms not only exist, but that everyone has the ability to experience them The ongoing theories of justice in mainstream political philosophy are very strongly dependent today on a way of thinking largely initiated by Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century, with an overwhelming concentration on a hypothetical “social contract” that the people of a sovereign state can be imagined to have endorsed. This presumed...

The PDS in Orissa does not stand for public distribution system, rather, a `perpetual dishonesty structure’ orchestrated by the Government agencies with politicians as bandleader. This is the impression of the recently submitted report of the Justice Wadhwa Committee appointed by the Apex Court to look into the functioning of PDS in Orissa. A clinical inquiry by the committee reveals how murky the system is. The malady afflicts right from the identification of...

The lesson from the rest of the world is that seat reservation for women to merely increase their representation in the legislature will not do; they need to be empowered in the real sense.  During the debate in Parliament and outside over the Women's Reservation Bill, many people have referred to quota “success sToRies” worldwide — proposing that India could gain from the experience of about 40 other countries that...