Names 7 from mob that burnt to death his father, step-sister Mirchpur victim Tara Chand's son Amar Lal who was called to depose as a court witness by the Sessions court here hearing the Mirchpur Caste violence case on Thursday named seven members of the Jat community who he said were part of a mob of 300-400 people from Mirchpur village in neighbouring Haryana that burnt to death his father and...

To call Anna Hazare the 21st-century Gandhi, as some have started doing, is pure hyperbole, but many would see a similarity in their methods — in particular, in their resorting to fasts to achieve their objectives. This, however, is erroneous. Indeed, the fact that so many people consider Anna Hazare’s method to be similar to Gandhiji’s only indicates how little contemporary India remembers or understands Gandhiji. Gandhiji undertook 17 fasts in...

It was the writer and activist Arundhati Roy who set foreign journalists in India busily chattering recently. In an interview with Stephen Moss in the Guardian, Ms Roy was discussing the Maoist and Adavasi “resistance” to encroachment on tribal lands. Mr Moss, asked her why, “we in the West don’t hear about these mini-wars?”. Ms Roy replied: “I have been told quite openly by several correspondents of international newspapers, that...

For decades, the victims of communal and targeted violence have been denied protections of law that the rest of us take for granted. It's time to end this injustice. In a vibrant and mature democracy, there would be no need to have special laws to prosecute the powerful or protect the weak. If a crime takes place, the law would simply take its course. In a country like ours, however, life...

-PTI Twenty-two-year-old Dolly now dreams of doing her Ph.D and leaving behind bitter memories of her childhood when she was forced to sit on a separate bench after her teachers found that she was a manual scavenger. Along with 200 women who used to work as manual scavenger, performing the symbolic religious ablution in the holy Ganga, Dolly entered the Kashi Vishwanath temple here as part of Sulabh International's endeavour to...