A Public Interest Litigation (PIL) can be filed in any High Court or directly in the Supreme Court. It is not necessary that the petitioner has suffered some injury of his own or has had personal grievance to litigate. The PIL is a right given to the socially conscious member or a public spirited NGO to espouse a public cause by seeking judicial means for redressal of public injury. Such...

A working group appointed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has recommended “autonomy to the extent possible” for Jammu and Kashmir. “The question of autonomy and its demand can be examined in the LIGht of the Kashmir accord or in some other manner or on the basis of some other formula as the present Prime Minister may deem fit and appropriate so as to restore the autonomy to the extent possible,” the...

Reading the lines that Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh delivered in the Rajya Sabha on Tuesday and between them, the message is evident. “We have been successful in defending India’s national interests,” he said. “I didn’t go to Copenhagen with the mandate of saving the world or humanity. My mandate was to defend India’s right to develop at a faster rate. For Western countries, it is an environmental issue but for...

Nineteen years after he allegedly molested a 14-year-old tennis player who later committed suicide, former Haryana police chief S.P.S. Rathore was today sentenced to six months in jail, a punishment the victim’s friends considered too LIGht. Rathore, who retired in 2002, has been granted bail till a higher court decides on the appeal he said he would file. Ruchika Girhotra had accused the officer of molesting her on August 12, 1990, when...

When a problem is big and tends to profit a powerful group, there’s a time-honoured temptation to sweep it under the rug by assuming it’s natural and inevitable. This was true of slavery until the abolitionist movement of the 19th century, and of colonialism until the contagion of independence movements in the 20th century. Now these same forces are at work in attitudes toward the global and national realities of...