There can be little quarrel with the argument that India requires a comprehensive policy to prevent sex selection as put forward by National Advisory Council members Farah Naqvi and A.K. Shiva Kumar in The Hindu (“India & the sex selection conundrum,” January 24, 2012). That the use of sex selection technologies to abort female foetuses is linked to the increasing devaluation and disempowerment of women is well known. It is...

Here is a fundamental question to friends and supporters of Salman Rushdie: Is the right to speech and expression absolute, without any restrictions, in any democratic society? The right to freedom of expression is recognised as a human right under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 19 goes on to say that the exercise of this right carries “special duties and responsibilities” and may “therefore be...

-Kashmir Dispatch   High Court Bar Association has said that the revocation of “draconian laws” like Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) can minimize the sufferings of the people in Jammu and Kashmir till its resolution was sought out. Addressing a just-concluded 2-day conference on National Consultation on Human Rights, conducted under the auspices of Human Rights Law network at India Islamic Centre at Lodhi Garden New Delhi India, the General Secretary of...

-The Economist   The world’s population will reach 7 billion at the end of October. Don’t panic IN 1950 the whole population of the earth—2.5 billion—could have squeezed, shoulder to shoulder, onto the Isle of Wight, a 381-square-kilometre rock off southern England. By 1968 John Brunner, a British novelist, observed that the earth’s people—by then 3.5 billion—would have required the Isle of Man, 572 square kilometres in the Irish Sea, for its standing...

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...