-The Hindu The conviction by a Gujarat court of BJP legislator Maya Kodnani and Bajrang Dal leader Babu Bajrangi along with 30 others for their role in the Naroda Patia massacre is the strongest judicial affirmation yet that large-scale communal violence is almost always a product of pre-meditated political planning and calculation. An estimated 95 Muslims, many of them hapless women and children, were hacked to death in Naroda, a minority...

-The Hindu Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, espousing the cause of Muslims, has knocked at the doors of the Supreme Court seeking compensation for the community’s youth who were incarcerated in jails for years as accused in bomb blast cases but were let off subsequently. A Bench of Justices T. S. Thakur and Ibrahim Kalifulla, after hearing senior counsel Amarendra Saran, agreed to examine the plight of such youth who were jailed for six or...

-The Hindu The Central government’s decision to amend the Constitution to provide for reservation for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in promotions in government service is a welcome move, though it is fraught with risks if implemented without careful thought and adequate groundwork. The SCs and STs are grossly under-represented in the upper echelons of government — as indeed they are in upper management elsewhere — and every effort must be...

-The Indian Express A little over 11 years ago, when the Congress defeated the Asom Gana Parishad and Tarun Gogoi took over as chief minister of Assam, people had their doubts. Would this man who had spent most of his political career since 1971 as a Lok Sabha member be able to run this state? The state, with its unique tangle of ethnicity and politics, has, after all, always been a...

-The Times of India The clamour over Pakistan fanning communal passions in India through social networking sites has missed a crucial detail. Around 20% of the web pages — blocked by government agencies — were uploaded by right-wing Hindu fundamentalists seeking to polarize the country on communal lines.  In these posts doctored images or videos showing alleged atrocities against tribal Bodos by Muslims have been tagged with provocative captions and point to...