-The Hindu   Adding a new twist to the farmers' protest in which three persons were killed on Tuesday near Pune, Maharashtra Home Minister R.R. Patil told the Legislative Assembly on Wednesday that first there was private firing from an Indigo or Indica car and that person fled after injuring a local. The injured person filed a police complaint and pieces of the bullet were found and sent for examination, he...

The Centre today took the extraordinary step of advising media to be “responsible” and not to “demonise” a different point of view, reflecting an assessment that the prevailing sense of drift was severely affecting legislative and administrative processes. Three senior cabinet ministers — Salman Khurshid (law), Kapil Sibal (telecom) and Ambika Soni (information and broadcasting) — appealed to the media to put things in perspective instead of sensationalising every issue without...

After the brutal murder of Azad, is there any hope for well-meaning routine calls for “dialogue” and “peace talks”? What can the "civil society" do as a serious, real intervention? It is reported that the decades-old talks with Naga insurgent groups has made some progress recently (See “Differences ‘narrowed’,” Times of India, July 19, 2011). One reason why talks have a chance in these cases is that separatism comes in...

-The Hindustan Times   Uttar Pradesh has earned the dubious distinction of witnessing the highest number of fake encounters, with nearly 120 people being allegedly killed by police in such incidents in the past three years. In the first six months of this year, six persons were killed in the state in alleged encounters and their families have approached the National Human Rights Commission for justice. In 2010-11, NHRC received complaints that 40...

DESPITE WHAT our reel-life heroes have shown us, perhaps it’s only possible to fight one villain at a time. Still, in his last few days on the job, Karnataka Lokayukta Santosh Hegde tried to battle two evils, with two reports that presented damning evidence of corruption in the BJP government. The first report, on illegal mining, had enough firepower to systematically dig holes in the state government. The second report,...