-The Hindu With the kernel of the Information Act under threat, the independence of the information commission is in peril When we describe India as a democracy what do we really mean? Are we referring merely to a system of popular sovereignty founded in universal adult franchise? Or are we suggesting something more — perhaps an assurance, grounded in the Constitution, of a set of rights, of the rights, among others, to...

-Hindustan Times The changes empower the government to designate individuals as terrorists, merely if it believes so On August 8, 2019, the President assented to amendments to the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), 1967, introducing a set of changes to an already draconian law. The most fundamental of these changes empowers the government to designate individuals as terrorists, merely if it believes so, leaving little to no recourse for them to protest...

-Livemint.com * An exclusive excerpt from a forthcoming book on the Assam Accord takes a critical look at the NRC crisis * The passage analyses the pros and cons of the debate over a work-permit formula to deal with the situation. One of the foremost thinkers to academically elaborate on the formula (of work permits in Assam) was author–journalist–rights activist Sanjoy Hazarika in Rites of Passage: Border Crossings, Imagined Homelands, India’s East and...

-The Telegraph Dreze showed how Jammu and Kashmir outscored Gujarat on the basis of a raft of development indices New Delhi: Economist Jean Dreze held up a placard at a protest rally here on Wednesday, displaying stats to contest home minister Amit Shah’s claim that Jammu and Kashmir was less developed than the rest of India. Dreze showed how Jammu and Kashmir outscored Gujarat on the basis of a raft of development indices. “I...

-The Hindu The Centre is riding roughshod over Kashmiri public opinion already beset with disaffection In the face of a massive security build-up in Kashmir at the close of July, a seasoned journalist conjectured, “This is just the right time when militants and their masters in Rawalpindi could do with a terror attack in Kashmir.” Such were the arguments trotted out by experienced media persons in seeking to account for the extraordinary...