-NDTV.com Two BJP chief ministers, UP's Yogi Adityanath and Assam's Himanta Biswa Sarma, both of them young by the standards of Indian politics, do not owe their political strength to either Narendra Modi or the RSS. As chief mahant or priest of Gorakhpur's influential religious math and as head of Gorakhpur's Hindu Vahini (a youth organization run in his name), 49-year-old Adityanath was championing Hindu nationalism independently of the BJP far...
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UAPA’s inherently flawed architecture and the role of courts -Gautam Bhatia
-Hindustan Times A perusal of UAPA shows how its terms — for example, “membership” of unlawful or terrorist organisations — can be stretched to a boundless degree, allowing the State to persecute individuals for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, possessing the wrong kind of literature, or meeting the wrong kind of people, without anything further. The recent judgment of the Delhi High Court (HC), granting bail to three...
More »Recognising caste-based violence against women -Jayna Kothari
-The Hindu By repeatedly setting aside convictions under the PoA Act, courts bolster allegations that the law is misused The horror of the gang rape of a 19-year-old Dalit woman in Hathras in 2020 is still fresh in our minds. Activists, academics and lawyers argued that the sexual violence took place on account of the woman’s gender and caste and that the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act,...
More »Panel to define offences of speech, expression -Vijaita Singh
-The Hindu The committee constituted by Home Ministry on reforms to the IPC may propose a separate Section A panel constituted by the Union Home Ministry to suggest reforms to the British-era Indian Penal Code (IPC) is likely to propose a separate Section on “offences relating to speech and expression.” As there is no clear definition of what constitutes a “hate speech” in the IPC, the Committee for Reforms in Criminal Laws is...
More »RBI’s chicken soup for the economy’s soul -Manas Chakravarty
-Moneycontrol.com The RBI’s state of the economy report enlists Benjamin Franklin, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Paulo Coelho, Barack Obama, Shakespeare and a host of lesser luminaries to drive home a message of relentless positivity Back in January this year, RBI’s state of the economy report prognosticated that India will have a ‘glorious summer’. Seen in heartless hindsight, that remark was gloriously off the mark. Has the devastating second wave of the pandemic changed the RBI’s...
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