-Live Mint India, with its myriad ethnic and religious groups, has more legal speech restrictions than other democratic nations Freedom of speech is impossible to agree about. While hardly anyone will dispute that freedom of expression is essential for a democratic society and an effective free market, almost no one will be able to agree about exactly where to draw the line. In one corner, fighting for unbridled expression in various degrees, you...

-The Economic Times "Sedition" is a legal construct from less enlightened times, when the sovereign power claimed a divine sanction and subjects were expected to live in awe and fear. So what is republican India doing, in its seventh decade, in bringing a charge of sedition against a self-publishing cartoonist with a propensity for scatology and lurid imagery? A convulsive attack of folly that the agencies of the Indian state have...

-The Hindustan Times As news filtered in of extended life sentences for 31 persons for the brutal slaughter 10 years ago in Naroda Patiya, a working-class suburb of Ahmedabad, my eyes clouded over. I remembered my first meetings with the traumatised survivors of the massacre in the crowded relief camps in the city, a full decade earlier. I was heartsick and stunned by their stories of incredible cruelty. I wondered if...

-The Indian Express Firebrand leader who rose swiftly till downfall She rose swiftly through the ranks, having made her mark as a firebrand leader who had saffron politics as part of her legacy. Mayaben Surendrabhai Kodnani, convicted of murder, conspiracy and spreading communal hatred, is the daughter of a staunch RSS worker who had suffered the pains of Partition, moving from Tharparkar in Sind province to Deesa in Gujarat. Kodnani, the first sitting...

-The Hindu The conviction by a Gujarat court of BJP legislator Maya Kodnani and Bajrang Dal leader Babu Bajrangi along with 30 others for their role in the Naroda Patia massacre is the strongest judicial affirmation yet that large-scale communal violence is almost always a product of pre-meditated political planning and calculation. An estimated 95 Muslims, many of them hapless women and children, were hacked to death in Naroda, a minority...