-The Hindu Newspaper establishments in insurgency-afflicted Manipur resemble war offices, with heavily armed police guarding them. In addition to the State forces, the managements have engaged on a permanent basis private security men to guard the main gates and the offices. Editors and high profile journalists are avoiding public appearances and almost all of them have changed their mobile numbers clandestinely. They talk over telephone only when the caller’s identity is...

-The Hindu Real intent of auditor’s work is to end crony capitalism On a day Parliament was forced to shut down over Opposition calls for the resignation of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in the wake of the Comptroller and Auditor General’s incriminating report on coal blocks allocation, the CAG itself held firm against increasingly ferocious Attacks by the United Progressive Alliance.   An official close to the CAG and the preparation of the controversial...

-The Business Standard Beni Prasad Verma is wrong. Food inflation hurts more than 70% of Indian farmers  Poor Beni Prasad Verma! In Lucknow on Monday, Mr Verma, who is the Union minister for steel, spoke not on steel, but on inflation — and kicked up a row that his government, already under stress, could have easily done without. Mr Verma argued that higher prices for agricultural goods meant more gains for India’s...

-The Indian Express The exodus to the Northeast, perhaps the biggest mass displacement in peacetime, reads like the dark side of the Arab Spring or the reverse of a flash mob. The social and SMS media, which accumulate forces for positive change, were leveraged to spread rumours and disperse minorities by the fictitious threat of violence. And the response is totally inadequate. Social media shifted the balance of power from governments and...

-The Hindustan Times The country is once again dangerously adrift in a stormy sea of competitive hate politics. The signs are both ominous and familiar — the systematic creation of hatred against people because of their ethnicity or religion; rumours and hate propaganda choking the internet; the public moral justification of violence against targeted communities on grounds of ‘larger’ alleged wrongs; and weak-kneed State action against people and organisations which preach...