Two years after the Tatas moved out of the Nano compound in Bengal, Singur is set to return to the forefront of a political tug-of-war next week. Chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee will address a public meeting in the area on January 9, and Trinamool Congress will follow suit a few days later. But on the ground, the defiance has mellowed to a murmur. Landowners have given up hope of getting...

Condemning the conviction of physician and human rights activist Binayak Sen as a travesty of justice, more than 250 physicians, medical professionals and students here on Tuesday demanded his immediate and unconditional release. Dr. Sen along with Maoist ideologue Narayan Sanyal and city-based businessman Pijush Guha was sentenced to life imprisonment on December 24 by a Raipur court on charges of criminal conspiracy to commit sedition under Section 124(a) of IPC. Assembling...

The Raipur sessions court judgment against civil liberties defender and health activist Binayak Sen has provoked outrage. His two-year long detention had drawn protests from the world over. The only substantial charge against Sen is that he passed on three letters from Narayan Sanyal, an undertrial, suspected -- but not yet proved -- to be a Maoist, to the Maoist leadership. It takes several leaps of imagination, or nasty prejudice, to...

More than half of the nation's forests could be moved out of exclusive state control if Minister of State for Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh has his way. “We need a complete paradigm shift in the way we look at forest management. Our model is based on the primacy of the state, but we must shift to a three-fold model of state, communities, and partnership between the two,” Mr. Ramesh told...

The historian Ramachandra Guha has famously described India as a fifty-fifty democracy. But even admirers of India as a functioning democracy will perhaps be forced to admit that certain events in 2010 forced the needle to move beyond fifty against democracy. Threats to democracy and democratic rights have never been as evident, and as powerful, since the dark days of the Emergency in 1975-76 as they were in the course...