-BBC   Indian media have criticised the government for failing to ensure the security of author Salman Rushdie after threats of violence prevented him from addressing an Indian literary festival. Rushdie cancelled a video-link call to the festival after Muslim groups threatened to disrupt proceedings. The author blamed politicians for failing to oppose the groups for "narrow political reasons". Many Muslims regard his book, The Satanic Verses, as blasphemous. It was banned in India in 1988...

What was our immediate response to further decline in the child sex ratio in India? Within days of the provisional 2011 Census results (March-April 2011), the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare reconstituted the Central Supervisory Board for the Pre-conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex selection) Act 1994 , which had not met for 3 years, and on November 30, 2011 the Ministry of Women and Child Development...

How our dismal education scene is linked to our intolerance What’s common to the Salman Rushdie episode, India’s dismal educational scenario—as underlined by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Pratham’s 7th Annual Survey of Education Report (ASER)—and its appalling ranking on the Global Hunger Index (GHI)? It’s clear even on the surface: a deep disconnect between India’s claims on democratic superpower status and its grim reality. If you probe...

Without equality, democracy and social justice, which are three interrelated factors, secularism cannot exist as a positive value in society. I HAVE known Prof. Romila Thapar for about 45 years, most of it as a colleague at the Centre for Historical Studies of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Romila, as she is called by almost everybody – from her eight-year-old grandnephew to all of us present here – had helped to...

-The Hindustan Times   Suspended IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt on Wednesday produced a fax message, which he claimed he had sent to certain officials on February 27, 2002 immediately after the meeting held by chief minister Narendra Modi at his residence. The message alerted police about an anticipated communal violence in the state soon after the Godhara train carnage.   Bhatt has annexed the fax message in a letter to the SC-appointed SIT,...