-The Hindu The killing of the Ranvir Sena chief and the violence it triggered expose the fragile foundations of Nitish Kumar's ‘new Bihar'   The assassination of Brahmeshwar Singh alias Mukhiya, founder of Ranvir Sena, the dreaded private army of upper caste Bhumihars, raises fears of the revival of “Barbaric Bihar”. From the first major massacre of Dalits in Belchi in 1977 to the killings in Mianpur in 2000 by socially dominant castes...

Scheme meant for the tribals has been hijacked by mining firms, claim activists The construction of 24 fortified police bases in the midst of Saranda, an 800-sq. km. patch of foRested hills veined with a quarter of India's iron ore reserves, has sparked concerns among political activists who believe that a development plan intended for tribals in Jharkhand has been hijacked by mining corporations. In October last year, Union Minister for Rural...

Ara, Patna: To any old-timer, the earliest image of the Bihar caste wars is from 1977. Belchhi in Patna had seen 14 Scheduled Caste workers killed, and the enduring image is of a visit by Indira Gandhi, otherwise lying low since the post-Emergency defeat. She had to ride an elephant to the small hamlet of Dalits, the monsoon having waterlogged the approach road. The caste wars Belchhi triggered would not stop...

Past two months saw B D Sharma negotiating release of high-profile hostages by the Maoists in Odisha and Chhattisgarh. TV viewers saw and heard Sharma, probably for the first time. Widely respected in the civil society, he has been championing the rights of tribals for four decades now. He served as collector in the undivided Bastar district of Chhattisgarh in the 1970s, after which he quit the Indian Administrative Service....

Desired outcomes can be reached through a series of ‘imperfect’ small initiatives What is to be done? How can we untie the Gordian knot that has so entangled the political economy of petroleum product prices? This is the question that now exercises our most experienced politicians and our ablest economists. Most well informed people know that a country that imports 80 per cent of its oil requirements cannot de-link itself from the...