In what is considered a major success for the police, Sadanala Ramakrishna alias RK, stated to be the head of the central technical committee of the CPI (Maoist), was arrested here on Wednesday. A mechanical engineer from Karimnagar district of Andhra Pradesh, he is believed to have been entrusted with carrying out Maoist activities in West Bengal after the death in November of the outfit's polit bureau member Kishenji. Four other...

Karnataka chief minister has 287 people, including principal secretary, advisors and dalayats (who do menial jobs), to assist him and together they take home Rs 70 lakh as salary every month. This excludes security personnel who guard chief minister D V Sadananda Gowda round the clock. An RTI query revealed there are 237 personnel for the CM at Vidhana Soudha, 21 people assist him at his home office 'Krishna' and 29...

The mask is off. Team Anna and his lieutenants are batting for the BJP On 30 October last year, when Mohan Bhagwat claimed that Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement was actually supported by the RSS, the remark conveyed palpable nervousness and attracted criticism from Team Anna. Three months later, as Team Anna launches its voters’ awareness campaign in UP, there is not even an attempt to keep its secular mask intact. The mask,...

Iqbal Masud, the civil servant and critic, supported the ban on The Satanic Verses in 1989. His reason was simple: if the book remained on sale in India, Muslims would march in protest, policemen would fire upon them, some of them would die, and no book, said Masud, was worth the life of a single protester. There were, he allowed, legitimate arguments to be made about incitement, about mobs marching against...

There can be little quarrel with the argument that India requires a comprehensive policy to prevent sex selection as put forward by National Advisory Council members Farah Naqvi and A.K. Shiva Kumar in The Hindu (“India & the sex selection conundrum,” January 24, 2012). That the use of sex selection technologies to abort female foetuses is linked to the increasing devaluation and disempowerment of women is well known. It is...