The gruesome murder of NREGA activist Niyamat Ansari has shocked the progressive civil society and political groups in the country. According to reports (one, two), Niyamat Ansari had exposed a case of corruption in NREGA and an FIR was lodged against a former BDO and another Panchayat Sevak of Manika block, Latehar (Jharkhand). On 2nd March 2011, Niyamat Ansari was picked from his house and beaten to death. The reports...

The chief of the army's central command surveyed Abhujmaadh forests from the air and then landed in Raipur to allay anxieties over a potential conflict escalation in the Maoist controlled forest in Chhattisgarh's Narayanpur district where the army plans to train its troops. "We will exercise maximum restraint. This is our country, they are our people," said Lieutenant General Vijay Ahluwalia, emphasising that the army would be deployed solely for the...

During protests against the WTO (World Trade Organization) meetings in Cancún, Mexico in September 2003, Lee Kyung Hae, a South Korean farmer and La Via Campesina member, martyred himself by plunging a knife into his heart while standing atop the barricades at Kilometer Zero. Around his neck was a sign that read, "WTO Kills Farmers." At that time, activists around the world were rallying under the umbrella of the global justice...

If home minister P Chidambaram’s recent letter to West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee is any indication, it has taken the Union home ministry seven years to realise that arming civilians to fight Naxalites is a bad idea. How much longer will it take for them to realise that the current paramilitary-based approach in Chhattisgarh is similarly bound to fail? From 2003 onwards, the home ministry has followed a policy of...

Indian civil society was dismayed and horror-struck when human rights activist Dr Binayak Sen, who has spent over three decades caring for the poor in tribal areas of central India, was sentenced to life imprisonment for ‘sedition’ along with two others, Piyush Guha and Narayan Sanyal by a Raipur Sessions Court judge.  Protests are taking place everywhere in the country and the members of India’s vibrant civil society, peoples’ movements,...