Contents of a four-page letter from Chief Justice of India K G Balakrishnan to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh shows the country’s top judge recommending the inclusion of a specific clause in the Right to Information Act, 2005 to exempt judiciary from the transparency law’s ambit. The CJI in his letter dated September 16, 2009 pointed out how the “framers of the RTI Act” failed to visualise the extent to which...

The police at Sekmai in Manipur have rescued 10 tribal children, including three girls, from a child trafficker on Wednesday. They were being taken to Chennai as a part of a racket. The children, hailing from the interior villages of Churachandpur district, can speak only their dialects. They were being taken in an inter-State bus by a trafficker identified as James Khup (27) of New Lamka, Churachandpur. Following numerous instances of child...

Human rights activist Irom Sharmila, jailed since 2000 for resorting to a hunger strike against alleged rights violations by the security forces in Manipur, was once again arrested by police on charges of attempted suicide. The activist continued her refusal to eat a single morsel of food. Sharmila, who earned the sobriquet Iron Lady of Manipur and is now in her 10th year of judicial custody, was arrested Wednesday night and...

A three-hour drive from Delhi a medieval drama is playing out. A khap — or caste — panchayat in Haryana’s Bhiwani district has asked a man and his family to leave the village because he has married a woman of the same “gotra”. The family sought police protection after the panchayat threatened a social boycott and pronounced a ban on the sale of their land, saying that it would be...

"Parading an accused before the media and releasing his 'confessional' statement violated the right of the accused," said the Delhi High Court on Monday. Ordering the Delhi police to stop this practice, a Bench headed by Chief Justice Ajit Prakash Shah has asked the police if they could issue guidelines banning it. "The police should not deliberately make the accused pose before the media. But there is no harm in cameramen...