Three men went missing in Indian-administered Kashmir in April. Nothing extraordinary about that, but some time later their bodies were discovered near the Line of Control (LoC), which separates Indian- and Pakistani-administered Kashmir - a fate which militants trying to cross the border often meet. But during investigations, the police discovered that the men had been killed in a staged gun battle in a frontier area. The probe also revealed that a senior...

Justice N Santosh Hegde, till this week the lok ayukta of Karnataka, a former Supreme Court judge and the son of the famous late Justice K S Hegde, who resigned from the Supreme Court of India in protest against his supersession by former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, contributing to events that culminated in her imposition of national Emergency, has spoken for millions of concerned citizens across the country by quitting...

In a small hamlet in Andhra Pradesh’s Ghatkesar district, 20km from Hyderabad, Indus Academy is one of four schools offering private education for the poor. Run by Career Launcher India Ltd’s foundation, its three single-storey buildings house around 40 children in the age group of 4-10. The walls of the school are festooned with bright-coloured pictures, and the school boasts a laptop, a television, a DVD player and plentiful study...

One year after anti-Maoist operations began in this district, it is a story of mixed success. While normal life has been restored, with offices, shops and schools having re-opened, vehicles back on the roads and farmers back in the fields, an eerie calm prevails. Villagers still complain of late-night gunfights and sudden police raids keeping them up through most nights. They are haunted by fears of discovering a bullet-riddled body...

Can more knowledge about our society, about the individuals and groups who constitute it, be a bad thing? I’ve been wondering about this lately, in the context of two government initiatives to gather more knowledge about us Indians, as caste groups and as individuals. Both of these information-gathering exercises—the proposal for a “caste census”, which has generated a stormy argument, and the merely desultory discussion over the planned Unique Identification...