West Bengal: The murder of two CPI(M) leaders in Bardhaman district points to an increase in political violence in the State. THE brutal murder of Pradip Tah, a former legislator belonging to the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or the CPI(M), and Kamal Gayen, another senior leader of the party, in broad daylight, allegedly by Trinamool Congress supporters, in West Bengal's Bardhaman district on February 22 once again points to an...

A bidi-smoking petty contractor who suddenly bought two Boleros and a former newspaper hawker who zipped about Chhattisgarh’s jungles in a Toyota may hold the key to a question bugging the custodians of national security. What the police want to know is: are business houses paying off the Maoists to be able to operate deep inside central India’s mineral-rich guerrilla zones? Chhattisgarh police say that when contractor B.K. Lala’s bank account suddenly...

In 1953, the authors of India's first-ever crime survey presented a grim picture of the state of the new country's police forces. “There has been,” authors of Crime in Indiareported, “no improvement in the methods of investigation or in the application of science to this work. No facilities exist in any of the rural police stations and even in most of the urban police stations for scientific investigation.” From the National Crime...

Despite sustained campaigns and legalchanges, convictions have declined steadily From the near-illegible notes scrawled by investigators at the Prasad Nagar police station, we know this: ever since 2005, the young woman who walked in through their doors last month had been stalked by her brother-in-law, given flowers and chocolate and beatings. There was the time, a bottle of rat-poison in his hand, he threatened to kill himself if she did not declare...

-The Telegraph Arrested Urdu journalist Mohammad Ahmad Kazmi’s son Shauzab today said his father is being tortured by police. “Police are torturing him mentally to extract confessional statements from him. My father is innocent and all allegations against him are baseless,” the 21-year-old MBA student told a news conference. “I met him today and he is very scared. He told me police are creating lot of pressure on him to confess something which...