EVEN though the Right to Information Act guarantees citizens their right to know and expose corruption in government offices, increasing attacks on RTI activists have put this most important right in jeopardy. The RTI Act was enacted after a long struggle by civil rights organisations. However, those who dare question the ways of the powers that be and expose them are eliminated in cold-blooded murders. The manner in which Amit...

In the summer of 2006, I travelled with a group of scholars and writers through the district of Dantewada, then (as now) the epicentre of the conflict between the Indian State and Maoist rebels. Writing about my experiences in a four-part series published in The Telegraph, I predicted that the conflict would intensify, because the Maoists would not give up their commitment to armed struggle, while the government would not...

Three men went missing in Indian-administered Kashmir in April. Nothing extraordinary about that, but some time later their bodies were discovered near the Line of Control (LoC), which separates Indian- and Pakistani-administered Kashmir - a fate which militants trying to cross the border often meet. But during investigations, the police discovered that the men had been killed in a staged gun battle in a frontier area. The probe also revealed that a senior...

Can more knowledge about our society, about the individuals and groups who constitute it, be a bad thing? I’ve been wondering about this lately, in the context of two government initiatives to gather more knowledge about us Indians, as caste groups and as individuals. Both of these information-gathering exercises—the proposal for a “caste census”, which has generated a stormy argument, and the merely desultory discussion over the planned Unique Identification...

The proposed land acquisition Bill should adopt scores of suggestions coming from judges. Few laws have drawn criticism from the Supreme Court with such regular frequency as has the Land Acquisition Act, all the more so in recent times as the weak links in the archaic law have led to continuing legal and political battles and bloodletting. Last month, the Supreme Court identified five areas of conflict arising from the inadequacies of...