-The Indian Express While crimes against Dalits are increasing, the state has time and again let them down, with little action against the perpetrators. Atrocities against Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) are a regular feature of the caste-based Indian society and distressingly, of late, they have begun increasing. What is ironical is that only recently, the country commemorated the 125th birth anniversary of B .R. Ambedkar, the icon of the...

-PTI Vigilante groups target Dalits as they are "soft targets" while refraining from confronting those involved in cow slaughter: fact finding team. Ahmedabad: A fact finding team which visited Gujarat’s Una town in connection with the brutal assault of Dalits, has claimed to have found a new trend among ‘cow vigilantes’ to show bravado by making a particular Dalit community as their “soft target”. The incident of beating up of seven Dalit youths...

-The Times of India MUMBAI: The Sheena Bora murder case, in which her mother Indrani Mukerjea is an accused, is not an isolated incident involving a woman in a serious crime. Last year, as many as 579 women were arrested for murder in Maharashtra. Although way below the number of men arrested for the same crime in the same period (5,187), it is the highest for any state. The crime report for 2014...

-Live Mint India needs a law to check the menace of communal and caste violence. The arguments against it are spurious Among free India's gravest failures-along with its inability to end hunger, pervasive poverty and discrimination-is the continued targeting of people with violence and arson only because of their faith or caste. This periodic blood-letting, mass sexual assault and arson leaves a trail of great suffering of innocents, and repeated assaults...

-The Telegraph Thiruvananthapuram: The Centre's move to implement an ecology panel's report on conservation of the Western Ghats has provoked a call for a 48-hour civil disobedience agitation by the Catholic Church in Kerala, starting Sunday midnight. The Church claims the K. Kasturirangan report, notified on Wednesday, will hit the livelihoods of farmers living in the "high ranges" - foothill areas bordering the forests - and force them to relocate. Green activists deny...