The Union home ministry has warned the state government on the Maoist threat, asking it not to go easy on the rebels who have been tightening their grip on strongholds in Jungle Mahal. A senior police officer said this was the ministry’s first warning to the new government on the Maoist menace since it took charge in May. “Over the past three months, we have had letters from the Union home ministry...

-The Times of India   The Haryana government introduced a policy to provide security to whistleblowers and RTI activists in the state if they report to police of specific threats. The state home department issued a notification on this on Tuesday. State home secretary Samir Mathur told TOI that the scale of security cover would depend on the nature of threat perception. "We can provide a cop or a gunman or even a...

A mysterious death in Raipur hospital reveals routine cross-border raids in A.P. by Chhattisgarh police They lock the door when a post-mortem is under way, but the smell of death seeps through the exhaust vents of the mortuary at the Medical College Hospital in Raipur. Outside the morgue, a pack of dogs sniffed the air experimentally; inside, the corpse of Gangraj, a middle-aged Adivasi man lay in body bag in a...

SHEHLA MASOOD’S eventful life was brutally cut short on 16 August, when her body was found in the front seat of her car. A fierce wildlife conservationist and RTI activist, 38-year-old Shehla was also a flamboyant socialite of Bhopal. The murder in broad daylight outside her bungalow in the posh Koh-e-Fiza area sent ripples across the otherwise peaceful city. With the state media jumping from one conclusion to another and...

While the rest of the world is saluting the birth of a miracle - the manifestation of the best of the human spirit in a peaceful movement that is uniting millions of people across religions, geographies and social and economic groups - Arundhati Roy has seized the opportunity to be intellectually irreverent. Sadly, her vituperative dismissal of this powerful human revolution in her piece, ‘I would rather not be Anna' published...