Bombay High Court today noted the rise in murderous attacks on social activists and asked the state police chief to report within a week what the government was doing to protect them. Yesterday, Right to Information (RTI) activist Satish Shetty, 38, was stabbed to death by two attackers close to his home at Talegaon Dabhade near Pune, where he had exposed a series of land scams. Last week, two gunmen had fired...

The thorny question of properly demarcating the maritime and land borders between India and Bangladesh has been highlighted during Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's first official visit to India. One of the legacies of the hasty exit of the British from India in 1947 is the fact that the boundary has never been properly marked out. It is still possible to find houses which straddle the border. But in recent years...

Kabul (Reuters): Dozens of Indian labourers have been forced to take refuge in a Sikh temple in Kabul after job agents who promised lucrative jobs in the unstable capital disappeared, leaving the men penniless and without passports. Billions of dollars in western military contracts have turned Afghanistan — long a source of refugees fleeing chronic conflict — into an unlikely magnet for migrant workers willing to risk their lives for a...

The BJP has wrenched power in “yet another state”. The Congress is looking at long-term gains by refusing to back Shibu Soren. But the Jharkhand verdict has also opened the eyes of the two mainline parties to a disturbing realisation: their failure to “nurture” tribal leaders. “Both of us stand exposed as out-and-out upper caste parties who have failed to create, and worse, nurture tribal leadership. The mandate’s message is the...

Why is the government aggressively attacking and destroying inexpensive eco-friendly technologies and promoting pollution-friendly ones? Are we obliged to repeat all the mistakes that the West committed in its pursuit of economic growth? While it makes sense to corner First World countries into investing in eco- friendly technologies to control carbon emissions, as was attempted at Copenhagen, the stand of the Indian government that India cannot afford to enforce better...