It has been a long and difficult road to justice for the tribal residents of this village in Tamil Nadu's Dharmapuri district The injustice done to the tribal people of India is a shameful chapter in our country's history. The tribals were called ‘rakshas' (demons), ‘asuras', and what not. They were slaughtered in large numbers, and the survivors and their descendants were degraded, humiliated, and all kinds of atrocities inflicted on...

The National Human Rights Commission has issued a notice to the Uttar Pradesh Director-General (Prisons) seeking his report, returnable in four weeks, on allegations of three prisoners in Bhadoi sub-jail being mercilessly beaten. The Commission acted suo motu taking cognisance of the incident based on media reports. The alleged incident took place on August 20. The media said the prisoners concerned, who tried to escape from the jail, was caught by the...

Its facets include concentration of media ownership and the transformation of news into a commodity. THE last two decades have witnessed a dramatic transformation of India's ‘mediascape' – a term first used by Arjun Appadurai, an academic of Indian origin based in the United States, to describe how visual imagery impacts the world and to describe and situate the role of the mass media in global cultural flows. While there...

The communal violence bill prepared by the National Advisory Council (NAC) seeks fundamentally to change how the government deals with violence against minorities. The bill focuses on religious and linguistic minorities as well the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, but religious minorities are at its heart. The bill has some undeniable strengths, but it suffers from two analytically fatal flaws. First, it places excessive faith in the state machinery. Though...

-The Times of India   In a brazen bid to hoodwink the National Human Rights Commission, the Bihar Police headquarters has sat on a DIG's inquiry report on alleged violation of human rights by a district SP and instead forwarded to it an IG's opinion on the report, trashing the DIG's findings that policemen tortured prisoners inside Bettiah jail on the night of May 29-30, 2009. Ironically, the DIG's report was...