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...

-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...

Even as speculation that Communist Party of India (Maoist) Polit Bureau member Koteswara Rao, alias Kishenji, was killed in a fake encounter refuses to die down, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee attempted to clear the air on Friday. “Kishenji's death was not something that we did knowingly. It was an incident that occurred,” Ms. Banerjee told journalists at the State Secretariat. Speaking to journalists after the surrender of leading Maoist leader Suchitra...

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has urged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to immediately order an impartial probe into the role of the Chhattisgarh police in the case of alleged torture of tribal teacher Soni Sori, now detained in the Raipur jail on charges of helping Maoists. It wants proper medical facilities provided to the 35-year-old mother, who was tortured so badly that “...two foreign body [sic] recovered of size 2.5 x 1.5...

Maoist leader Kishan is dead but he has left behind a “ghost village” that even the new Bengal government has been unable to breathe back to life. The story of Salpatra, a village of mostly Muslim families near Jhargram town, is not one of usual black-and-white administrative inaction but of how acts of unspeakable brutality and an element of political mistrust can keep empty an entire village not more than 150km...