The Jammu and Kashmir government has for the first time shown willingness to amend or replace the Public Safety Act, which allows detention without trial for up to two years. The move follows human rights watchdog Amnesty International’s scathing criticism of the government for the law’s extensive use in the state in the past two decades. An Amnesty report, titled “A lawless law”, says that up to 20,000 people, including children, were...

An officer of the 32{+n}{+d} battalion of the Provincial Armed Constabulary has filed cases of rioting, attacking government servants on duty, abducting a PAC sub-inspector, snatching a light machine gun from the PAC, and other counts, against about 200 unidentified farmers of Bhatta village. The report has been filed after about two dozen farmers clashed with a PAC unit, late on Monday morning, and the PAC opened fire, injuring four...

So what caused the French Revolution? Food prices did. A hailstorm destroyed French crops, food prices rose 88 per cent in one year, and hungry Parisians turned on their rulers. Ditto with the Tian-an-men showdown exactly 200 years later, in 1989: consumer prices rose 21 per cent in a country that had known virtually no inflation under Communist rule. The Suharto regime got overthrown in Indonesia in 1998 after food...

The Centre has asked Maharashtra to “drop” its case against Ilina Sen, the wife of jailed rights activist Binayak Sen, a central government official said today. Ilina was booked for allegedly not informing police about foreign delegates’ participation at a conference organised by the Indian Association for Women’s Studies (IAWS) and the Mahatma Gandhi Antarrashtriya Vishwavidyalaya (MGAV) at Wardha in January. The ATS Nagpur unit had noted in an FIR that Form...

The class bias in government policy is clear in the decision to release a small amount of foodgrain in the open market to tackle inflation. MOST people would agree that there is a strong element of speculation underlying the current inflation and that forward trading contributes to it. Yet the government, though it has banned forward trading in certain commodities under public pressure, is curiously reluctant to see this point....