-The Hindu A recent sting video shows the men acquitted in the Laxmanpur Bathe case boasting about the same massacre. Will the passing of the Prevention of Atrocities (Amendment) Bill finally change the way justice is delivered to Dalits? On the night of December 1, 1997, in Laxmanpur Bathe, a village in Bihar’s Arwal district 90 km from Patna, 58 Dalits were slaughtered by a gang of dominant caste men that went...
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Threat to India’s vibrant civil society -Meenakshi Ganguly
-The Asian Age In granting anticipatory bail to Teesta Setelvad and Javed Anand on August 11, the Bombay high court noted: “A dissenting view cannot be said to be against the sovereignty of the nation.” Like several other recent rulings by the judiciary, the high court also reminded the state of its duty to protect a citizen’s right to criticise and disagree. Successive Indian governments have told the world proudly of the...
More »Chronicle of a struggle retold -Shiv Visvanathan
-The Hindu The battle over the Narmada dam reflects a journey, a pilgrimage, and a recollection of 30 years of resistance. Numbers alone cannot make sense of it because it demands a different kind of storytelling If you were to ask a middle class person today what the most significant act of history in the India of the last 20 years is, most would say this — the rise of Narendra Modi....
More »At least 39 people who used Right to Information law have been murdered over the last decade -Shreya Ila Anasuya
-Scroll.in Records show that more than 250 Indians have been intimidated so far for using the law. Existing mechanisms to protect those who file RTIs are clearly failing. A day after the tenth anniversary of the implementation of the Right To Information Act in India, on June 21, a retired college professor and his adult daughter were accosted close to their home in the Burdwan district of West Bengal by a local...
More »10 years of RTI Act: 39 activists dead, 275 harassed, says report -Chetan Chauhan
-Hindustan Times When right to information activist Guru Prasad Shukla was beaten to death by fellow villagers last month, he became the 39th person to lay down his life for exercising the transparency law in its first decade. Another 275 people have reportedly been assaulted or harassed for invoking the law to raise uncomfortable questions before those in power. The 50-year-old Shukla had sought information about development work in his village and...
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