Rights activists and unions have dubbed “racist” and “class-specific” a Tamil Nadu police exercise of enumerating workers, college students and tenants from other states based on their ethnicity and language. The drive comes after five alleged bank robbers were shot dead in Chennai last month. Documents found with them suggested they were from Bihar and Bengal. Some of the activists are planning to challenge the count in court saying it goes against...

Even as speculation that Communist Party of India (Maoist) Polit Bureau member Koteswara Rao, alias Kishenji, was killed in a fake encounter refuses to die down, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee attempted to clear the air on Friday. “Kishenji's death was not something that we did knowingly. It was an incident that occurred,” Ms. Banerjee told journalists at the State Secretariat. Speaking to journalists after the surrender of leading Maoist leader Suchitra...

-Express News Service   The newly elected Samajwadi Party MLA from Bah, Aridaman Singh, and nine supporters were today booked for the murder of the husband of a Dalit village pradhan. Munna Lal — who virtually ran the show in the name of his wife Guddi Devi, the actual pradhan of Parvati Purva village — was beaten to death in Agra on Thursday reportedly for refusing to vote for the Samajwadi Party candidate...

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has urged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to immediately order an impartial probe into the role of the Chhattisgarh police in the case of alleged torture of tribal teacher Soni Sori, now detained in the Raipur jail on charges of helping Maoists. It wants proper medical facilities provided to the 35-year-old mother, who was tortured so badly that “...two foreign body [sic] recovered of size 2.5 x 1.5...

-BBC A senior Indian police officer has been run over and killed by a vehicle carrying illegally quarried stones in northern Madhya Pradesh state, police said. Narendra Kumar Singh, 30, tried to stop a tractor carrying the stones, but the driver ran him over. The driver of the vehicle, Manoj Gurjar, has been arrested and charged with murder. police suspect the involvement of a local mining mafia in the incident. Senior police official DP Gupta...