-The Hindu A committed team of Dalit activists and academicians are working to establish a presence on social media New Delhi: Long time social media refusenik, the Bahujan Samaj Party, is embracing Twitter and Facebook ahead of the 2017 UP Assembly elections but with a difference. By focussing on issues the party supremo Mayawati has been lampooned for, concerted efforts are being made by academics from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) with help...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Sureme Court today sought responses from the Centre and six states on a public interest petition seeking a ban on cow vigilante groups across the country. These states are Gujarat -where cow vigilantes' public flogging of four Dalit men in July sparked a countrywide furore - Maharashtra, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh. Maharashtra-based social activists and Congress sympathisers Tehseen Poonawala and his brother Shehzad Poonawala had moved...

-Livemint.com We don’t know enough about the socio-economic status of different caste groups, and our political class doesn’t want us to know Over the past couple of years, one Indian state after another has been on the boil because of caste-based agitations. The latest state to be engulfed in caste conflict is Maharashtra, where a stir by the dominant caste of Marathas seems to have led other backward classes (OBCs) and...

-The Indian Express Swachh Bharat completes two years, but eliminating open defecation is a distant goal. October 2 marks the second anniversary of the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM). Announcing a goal of eliminating open defecation by 2019 was a great idea, but now that we are 40 per cent through India’s flagship sanitation campaign, it is a good time to assess how much progress the SBM has made. Unfortunately, it is impossible...

-The Indian Express Preventive detention is being routinised as an instrument of state repression The recent preventive detention (PD) of Khurram Parvez, a Kashmiri human rights activist, and Jignesh Mewani, a Dalit leader from Gujarat, has turned the spotlight on the provision of PD and the purposes it is being made to serve. National Crime Records Bureau data released in September 2015 indicate that over 3,200 people were being held in administrative...