"When I asked my son if he was tortured, he said, 'They were hardly going to treat me with love...They used to make us memorize the police version of the case. We were not allowed to sleep until we could recite that version.' " These words by Nisar Ahmed are an excerpt from the106-page report released yesterday, by Human Right Watch titled, "The 'Anti-Nationals': Arbitrary Detention and Torture of Terrorism...

If home minister P Chidambaram’s recent letter to West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee is any indication, it has taken the Union home ministry seven years to realise that arming civilians to fight Naxalites is a bad idea. How much longer will it take for them to realise that the current paramilitary-based approach in Chhattisgarh is similarly bound to fail? From 2003 onwards, the home ministry has followed a policy of...

Many poverty-hit tribals in Chhattisgarh are asking why they shouldn't become Maoists and take up arms, pointing to the latest incident in which two civilians were branded rebels and shot dead by police. The traumatised residents of the Koleng area of Bastar district are at a loss over the killings of their co-villagers by police early this week and say the two had simply gone to collect rations for others from...

Union home minister P Chidambaram remark blaming the spiralling crime graph in the capital on migrant population comes at a time when in most cases, local people are involved and new gangs are emerging in Delhi's crime scene. A look at the statistics available with Delhi Police gives an entirely different picture than what was portrayed by the home minister. More than 83% of people involved in crime this year were...

Bhikhalal Jethva, father of slain RTI activist Amit Jethva who was shot dead in July, today filed a petition in the Gujarat High Court demanding a probe by CBI or any other independent agency into the death of his son. Bhikhalal, in his petition, has alleged that since BJP MP from Junagadh Dinu Solanki was behind the killing of Jethva and independent and impartial investigation was not being done by the...