Interview with Teesta Setalvad of Citizens for Justice and Peace. TEESTA SETALVAD, through her organisation Citizens for Justice and Peace, has been at the forefront of the fight for justice for the victims of the 2002 communal riots in Gujarat. She has also worked extensively on many other issues affecting minority communities in the State. In this interview to Frontline, she speaks about Chief Minister Narendra Modi's new tactics and the marginalisation...

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...

With the National Integration Council discussing the Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence Bill drafted by the National Advisory Council (NAC), the consensus against the legislation has been consolidated. Till then, the charge had been led primarily by the archetypal minority bashers, the constituents of the Sangh Parivar, who refused to acknowledge the uncomfortable truth about communal and targeted violence — that it is minorities and Dalits who bear the...

The draft Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence Bill 2011, proposed by the NAC, has attracted welcome debate. Any legislative measure, intended to correct a historical wrong, should indeed be subject to the closest scrutiny to improve and strengthen it. For if we get this right it can help realise, far better than we have so far, the constitutional guarantees of equality before the law. This bill is built on India’s...

The communal violence bill prepared by the National Advisory Council (NAC) seeks fundamentally to change how the government deals with violence against minorities. The bill focuses on religious and linguistic minorities as well the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, but religious minorities are at its heart. The bill has some undeniable strengths, but it suffers from two analytically fatal flaws. First, it places excessive faith in the state machinery. Though...