As the government scrambles to contain the political damage from the Ambedkar cartoon, one may be tempted to believe that somebody surreptitiously slipped Shankar's satirical work in the NCERT textbook. Or that the HRD ministry was caught unawares by the political heresy.  However, the fact is that the books were released by NCERT after having been thoroughly vetted by a National Monitoring Committee appointed by the ministry which includes several civil...

The amendment to the Marriage Laws Bill needs to be redrafted to ensure, among other things, greater economic rights for divorced women. SINCE the 1950s, successive amendments to different personal laws on marriage and divorce have mainly focussed on enlarging the grounds for divorce. In the 1960s and 1970s, cruelty and desertion and thereafter mutual consent were added as grounds for divorce in the Hindu Marriage Act (HMA) and the...

Jatav residents of Ramgarh in U.P. resist attempts by members of a powerful community to grab their land by violent means. IN what could be considered one of the worst incidents of vendetta against Dalits in the National Capital Region (NCR), members of the Dalit Jatav community were beaten up brutally by some members of the dominant Gujjar community in Ramgarh village in the Greater Noida area of Uttar Pradesh...

Justice Markandey Katju's prescription for a regulated media regime is a misplaced step that can actually de-democratise the fourth estate. IT is open season on the political class and the news media. But then, again, it's more like a chase of one's own tail. A self-righteous, delusional, Anna-Baba NGO-ised fringe sets out to stigmatise politics and Members of Parliament; the news media salivate at the prospect and rush to provide...

Move to form body with 50 governments to oversee Internet governance The raging controversy over excessive state regulation of the Internet based on the IT Rules 2011 is now likely to be dwarfed by discussions in Geneva later this week on India's proposal to the United Nations General Assembly for government control of the Internet. Led by the Commission on Science and Technology for Development, the Geneva meet is a multi-stakeholder discussion...