In a dark anteroom of the Presidency University canteen here, a handful of students huddled around a screen on Wednesday watching Jashn-e-Azadi , Sanjay Kak's 2007 documentary on Kashmir that was not allowed to be screened at the Symbiosis College of Arts and Commerce in Pune earlier this week.  While the walls of the canteen are littered with graffiti — political and otherwise — not a single poster was put up...

Even as Supreme Court says murderers in uniform not protected by AFSPA, Delhi rejects findings of police investigations against Army In the past four years alone, the Home Ministry has rejected at least 42 requests to sanction the prosecution of military personnel found by the police to have engaged in crimes such as murder, homicide and rape in Kashmir, data obtained by The Hindu reveal. Last week, two Supreme Court judges said...

West Bengal: An agrarian crisis looms over the State as farmers commit suicide in spite of a bumper crop. THE topic of suicide figured repeatedly in Safar Molla's conversations with his neighbours a few days before his death. The 18-year-old marginal farmer from Kaltikuri village in Bardhaman district's Bhatar block talked about it quite casually, in fact even jocularly. Everybody in the village knew he was up to his neck in...

The Sangh Parivar is systematically following its “Indianisation reforms” in schools run by its affiliates. THE attempts of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS)-led Sangh Parivar at “saffronising” education attracted widespread attention between 1998 and 2004 when the Hindutva combine's political arm, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), held the reins of power at the Centre. During that period, especially between 1998 and 2002, the BJP's Human Resource Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi...

-The Telegraph   A routine road trip from Ranchi to Dhanbad was enough for an aghast senior functionary of National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) to pull up Jharkhand for illegal mining and exploitation of tribals at the hands of the coal mafia. A source told The Telegraph that NHRC secretary-general Rajiv Sharma had visited the state in January. “On a drive from Ranchi to Dhanbad, he saw tribal children pushing coal-laden cycles uphill. It...