The high-handedness of the Trinamool government in West Bengal has now raised international concern. This time it's the arrest of Partho Sarothi Ray, a molecular biologist of international repute. National Advisory Council member Aruna Roy and renowned intellectual Noam Chomsky and more than four dozen other prominent scientists and public figures from across India and other countries have written to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to get the academician released after...

-PTI Voicing safety concerns over encroachments along rail tracks and trespassing which claim nearly 15,000 lives every year, a high-level railway panel has suggested amendments to existing acts and setting up of a task force in Mumbai where such deaths are highest. "No civilised society can accept such massacre on their own railway system," the Anil Kakodar-led safety committee said and suggested amendments in the Public Premises Eviction Act and the Railway...

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...

Not only are the Forest Rights Act and the Panchayats Extension to Scheduled Areas Act routinely violated in Chhattisgarh, the adivasis are also short-changed on legislative representation and reservations in government jobs. As the state cedes land to capital while reducing the adivasis to an ornamental presence, there is increasing assertion of adivasi identity, born out of class predicaments and experiences of displacement as much as notions of indigeneity. Supriya Sharma...

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...