-The Hindu The conviction by a Gujarat court of BJP legislator Maya Kodnani and Bajrang Dal leader Babu Bajrangi along with 30 others for their role in the Naroda Patia massacre is the strongest judicial affirmation yet that large-scale communal violence is almost always a product of pre-meditated political planning and calculation. An estimated 95 Muslims, many of them hapless women and children, were hacked to death in Naroda, a minority...

-The Indian Express The arc of history may finally be bending towards justice for the victims of communal violence that gripped Gujarat in 2002. Thirty-two people, including Maya Kodnani, formerly women and child development minister in the Narendra Modi government, and Babu Bajrangi, a Bajrang Dal leader, were convicted by a special court in Gujarat for their roles in the Naroda Patiya massacre in Ahmedabad. This is the first time, after exhaustive...

-The Times of India The clamour over Pakistan fanning communal passions in India through social networking sites has missed a crucial detail. Around 20% of the web pages — blocked by government agencies — were uploaded by right-wing Hindu fundamentalists seeking to polarize the country on communal lines.  In these posts doctored images or videos showing alleged atrocities against tribal Bodos by Muslims have been tagged with provocative captions and point to...

-The Hindustan Times Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi may have got a clean chit from the Supreme Court-appointed SIT in the Gulbarg Society massacre case, but may still run into trouble over a phone log CD, which reveals the number of calls exchanged by the accused with the top authorities, including calls received by the chief minister's office (CMO), during the 2002 riots. In a fresh development, the SIT has now...

Religious and social groups have trampled on the freedom of expression of artists and scholars to serve their own agendas. “FOR all the big talk about India's great tradition of cultural and religious tolerance, many forces in the social life of our country and a number of established organisations, including the so-called non-political ones, have time and again resorted to blatant suppression of freedom of expression, pointing forcefully to the...