The Trinamool Congress rode to power earlier this year on the strength of popular resentment against the acquisition of land for commercial development, but farmers in West Bengal seeking higher compensation say the party is no longer as receptive to their demands. That maybe because, while the Trinamool Congress-led state government has said it won’t acquire private property for industrial use, it is keen on creating jobs and is, therefore, allotting...

A report of the National People's Tribunal on the 2008 riots in Kandhamal, Orissa, is out. The report that runs into 197 pages points out that the brutality of the violence falls within the definition of 'torture' under international law, particularly the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.   According to the tribunal, headed by Justice A P Shah, communal forces used religious conversions as an issue for political mobilisation...

A.K. Ramanujan, while referring to the diversity and apparently contradictory element of unity in the Indian traditions, refers to an Irish joke about whether to classify trousers as singular or plural: singular from the top, plural from the bottom.1 A Concurrent Discipline Course in the University of Delhi for Second Year Honours students not doing History was introduced in 2005 on ‘Culture in India—Ancient’, and had sought to very sensitively...

-The Telegraph   Social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter and Google have refused to buckle under pressure from the Indian government to take down content that telecom minister Kapil Sibal and the babus on Raisina Hill find objectionable. Sibal told reporters the government wanted the Big Boys of Cyberspace to remove “abusive” comments and images that could ignite a tinderbox of passions in the country but they had refused to do so...

Environment minister Jayanthi Natarajan landed in Durban on Sunday ahead of the high-level climate talks to hammer out a decision that only the political heads of 195 countries can take - a compromise that would ensure Kyoto Protocol remains alive and that the world signals readiness to discuss a new legally binding deal for all in future. This political decision would be the master key to a success at Durban. India...