-The Hindu Nanded police say they have received no complaint Adilabad: Vishwa Hindu Parishad leader Praveen Togadia tried to outdo Akbaruddin Owaisi within a fortnight of the Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM) MLA being sent to jail on charges of delivering a hate speech at Nirmal town in Adilabad district of Andhra Pradesh. At a public meeting at Bhokar town in Nanded district of Maharashtra, just 80 km from Nirmal, on January 22 — details...

-Counterpunch.org     “The rearing and guiding of a civilization must depend upon its intellectual class.”     BR Ambedkar, Ranade, Gandhi and Jinnah, 1943, Delhi. I. Arrest. States are clumsy with their enormous power. When it suits the modern state, it uses it immense apparatus to constraint those who make claims upon it or who say things that denigrate this or that section of society. A college professor in West Bengal draws a cartoon of...

-The Hindu Rival religious extremists survive by feeding off each other. In India, Hindutva and Islamist leaders and activists have often mobilised men and materials through inflammatory hate speeches. But by any yardstick, the recent rabble-rousing speech of Akbaruddin Owaisi, leader of the Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul Muslimeen in the Andhra Pradesh Assembly, plumbs new depths. In substance, his speech was a clear attempt to promote enmity between Hindus and Muslims, and disrupt the...

-The Economic Times The home ministry has sought the opinion of all states on whether offences like terrorism and organised crime can be treated as federal frames. It has forwarded the 5th Report of the second Administrative Reforms Commission (ARC) to states, asking for their comments on each of the 152 recommendations that relate to state governments. This report, submitted to the government in June 2007, is among the only two...

-The Hindu “Take again Section 124-A of the Indian Penal Code,” Jawaharlal Nehru said during a parliamentary debate centred around freedom of speech in 1951. “Now as far as I am concerned that particular Section is highly objectionable and obnoxious and it should have no place…in any body of laws that we might pass. The sooner we get rid of it the better.” Ironically, the sedition clause not only remains on...