-The Telegraph The National Commission for Women has acted on less than a fourth of the cases registered with it since 2007 and been able to close less than one in eight. Answering a question in Parliament last month, women and child development minister Krishna Tirath said the commission had received 86,364 complaints in the past five years but acted on only around 20,000. “So far, around 20,000 cases have been acted upon,...

-The Hindu The conviction by a Gujarat court of BJP legislator Maya Kodnani and Bajrang Dal leader Babu Bajrangi along with 30 others for their role in the Naroda Patia massacre is the strongest judicial affirmation yet that large-scale communal violence is almost always a product of pre-meditated political planning and calculation. An estimated 95 Muslims, many of them hapless women and children, were hacked to death in Naroda, a minority...

-The Hindu Advocate-General asked to file affidavit in this regard by September 7 The Karnataka High Court on Monday sought the view of the State government on measures that could be taken for preventing the misuse of Section 498A of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) in dowry harassment case. Observing that this provision of the IPC is being misused in many cases, a Division Bench comprising Justice K. Bhaktavatsala and Justice B.S. Indrakala...

-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 Hindustan Times The Mamata Banerjee government in West Bengal now has to pay for the cartoon row, literally. On Monday, the state human rights commission ordered it to pay a compensation of Rs. 50,000 each to Professor Ambikesh Mahapatra and his neighbour, who were arrested for circulating a cartoon that poked fun at Banerjee over the sacking of then railway minister Dinesh Trivedi. The arrests saw the government being dubbed "undemocratic", which...