After the Supreme Court ordered the release of human rights activist Binayak Sen on bail, Sen's counsel and senior advocate Ram Jethmalani said the trial court was guided by the colonial concept of sedition and its judgment violated at least two Supreme Court judgments enunciating what constituted sedition. The bench picked up from where Jethmalani left. When Chhattisgarh's counsel and senior advocate U U Lalit attempted to justify the sedition charge...

It is not often that a social security programme the size of Mahatma Gandhi NREGS - New Delhi has spent Rs 40,000 crore on it in 2010/11 alone - faces an existential moment. But, April 2011 will present one such crossroad: the end of the term of a bureaucrat widely acknowledged as the prime mover behind the five-year old scheme. Brought in six years ago to the Centre from her parent...

The Supreme Court will on Friday granted bail to civil rights activist Binayak Sen, who has been sentenced to life imprisonment on charges of sedition and for having links with the Naxalites. Earlier, Sen, 61, has challenged a Chhattisgarh high court order that rejected his bail plea on February 10. He sought bail contending that the trial court had erred in convicting him without substantial evidence. Sen had filed a petition in the...

India's Supreme Court has granted bail to leading public health specialist and human rights activist, Dr Binayak Sen. In December a court in the central state of Chhattisgarh sentenced to life in prison for helping Maoist rebels. The lower court had found him guilty of carrying messages and setting up bank accounts for the rebels, who are active in large parts of India. Rights groups in India and abroad had called on the...

Gandhi resorted to some 30 fasts, of which one-third were directed at himself, for ‘atonement’ or self-purification, one-third were directed against the raj and one-third at India’s social mores. A more honest trinity cannot be imagined. The latter two kinds of fasts were meant to make an impact on the ‘other side’; they were part-fasts and part- hunger strikes, part anashan and part bhukh-hartal, though he derived from each a sense...