Delhi Police may claim to be a "clean force" but figures tell a different story. Replying to a question in Parliament, the minister of state in the ministry of home affairs (MHA), Mullappallay Ramachandran, on Tuesday said 500 officers of Delhi Police had been arrested for various crimes in the past three years. Though the minister claimed number of crimes committed by police personnel is not rising, he refused to...

ON February 12, Meham town in Rohtak district, Haryana, saw a citizens’ convention that was unusual in more than one sense. First, it was being held from the ramparts of the Meham Chaubisi Chabootara, a platform reserved for members of the Meham panchayat (a conglomeration of 24 villages, better known as the Meham Chaubisi). Second, the meeting was not dominated by any one caste. Third, it was a congregation of...

Killed, aborted or neglected, at least 100m girls have disappeared—and the number is rising IMAGINE you are one half of a young couple expecting your first child in a fast-growing, poor country. You are part of the new middle class; your income is rising; you want a small family. But traditional mores hold sway around you, most important in the preference for sons over daughters. Perhaps hard physical labour is still...

A three-hour drive from Delhi a medieval drama is playing out. A khap — or caste — panchayat in Haryana’s Bhiwani district has asked a man and his family to leave the village because he has married a woman of the same “gotra”. The family sought police protection after the panchayat threatened a social boycott and pronounced a ban on the sale of their land, saying that it would be...

When the government passed the Right to Information (RTI) Act in 2005, it should have added a statutory warning: exercising this right may be extremely injurious to health. Shashidhar Mishra of Begusarai, who was Murdered by unknown assailants last Sunday, is the second RTI activist to be killed in a month for perhaps knowing too much. Attacks on RTI activists have emerged as a disturbing trend of late, especially in...