A late-night crackdown by the police and paramilitary forces on anti-mega dam protesters in Lakhimpur district triggered raging protests at several places in Assam on Monday. The police arrested more than 200 protesters, who since December 16 had been blocking vehicles transporting equipment and construction materials, through National Highway 52, for the NHPC's 2,000-MW Lower Subonsiri hydroelectric project at Gerukamukh in Arunachal Pradesh. To protest the police action, five organisations, including the...
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In the year and now by Ramachandra Guha
The Republic of India has a billion (and more) citizens who, at any given time, are involved in a thousand (and more) controversies. Knowing which controversy is the most significant is always hard, and often impossible, to judge. Even so, we can be fairly certain that 2011 will go down in Indian history as the year of the Great Lokpal Debate, just as 1962 was the year of the war...
More »Final report on Godhra Violence by March 31: Gujarat government by Manas Dasgupta
-The Hindu The G. T. Nanavati–Akshay Mehta judicial inquiry commission probing the Godhra train carnage and the post-Godhra communal riots in Gujarat in 2002 is expected to submit its final report by March 31 next year — 10 years after its formation. This information was given by the State government to a Division Bench of the Gujarat High Court comprising Acting Chief Justice Bhaskar Bhattacharya and Justice J. B. Pardiwala here on...
More »Politicians I funded are after me now: Sarkhel
-The Times of India Bapi Sarkhel, in the eye of a storm since the December 14 Violence near Poscoproject site in Jagatsinghpur, said on Thursday certain politicians seeking his arrest had benefited from him in the past, but turned against him as they saw him as a threat. Police has booked him on charges of fomenting trouble in the proposed Posco steel plant site and attacking anti-land acquisition villagers in the...
More »Why ‘force first' will not work by DN Sahaya
Union Minister for Rural Development Jairam Ramesh, in an article on left-wing extremism (“From Tirupati to Pashupati?” The Hindu , October 14, 2011), observed candidly: “It is not the naxals who have created the ground conditions ripe for their ideology — it is the singular failure of successive governments both in the States and the Centre.” There lay the main cause of the festering sore of naxalism, often characterised as left-wing...
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