Nothing illustrates the threat that the FIR raj poses to personal liberty more starkly than the arbitrary manner in which two complaints in the cartoon case were pursued. One complaint was filed against Jadavpur University professor Ambikesh Mahapatra by a Trinamul supporter, accusing him of emailing “obscene” content about the chief minister. The second was lodged by Mahapatra, accusing four persons with Trinamul links of assaulting him. The strikingly divergent police response...
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The spectre of FIR raj
-The Telegraph The manner in which a professor and a retired engineer were arrested and locked up for over 16 hours in Calcutta has blown the lid off a tactic increasingly being employed in Bengal to intimidate or settle scores with dissenters. The weapon of mass-scale harassment is an oft-mentioned but little-understood piece of paper called the FIR or first information report. The method is scary — a word that cropped up several...
More »A tribal force or a forced tribulation-Arvind Sovani
The announcement of an anti-Naxal tribal battalion in Gadchiroli by Maharashtra home minister is little more than a knee-jerk reaction THREE DAYS after a bus carrying 40 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel was blown up by Naxals in Gadchiroli, Maharashtra, the state home minister announced the setting up of a new anti-Naxal tribal force — a “tribal battalion” recruited by the state reserve police force. Is this new force Maharashtra’s...
More »RTI Act effective tool to improve community policing: Experts
-The Times of India In an open house organised at the Ahmedabad Management Association (AMA), the police and citizens came face to face on the issue of transparency in police stations and the need for proactive disclosures under RTI Act. This meet was jointly organised by Society for Women Action And Training Initiative (SWATI) and Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) on Thursday. The meet agreed that the RTI Act can become an...
More »The public needs both gavel and pen-Siddharth Varadarajan
The Judiciary is the third branch of government. As with the Executive and Legislature, the public has a right to see and know and understand the functioning of this branch. That is why India, like every other democracy, has embraced the concept of open court proceedings and trials, except in those situations where, for security or other compelling reasons, in camera hearings are required. In the Mirajkar case ( Naresh Shridhar...
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