Union Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram, lacking sportsman’s spirit, has stuck to his post like Dendrite paste, despite a series of failures in combating secessionist insurgencies including the armed offensive led by the Communist Party of India (Maoist). He parrots Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and considers Maoists to be “the most formidable challenge to governance.” “Only if villagers think that the real adversary is the Naxal who keeps them under threat will...

Investigating and law enforcement agencies are concerned over the growing number of attempts to misuse Right to Information (RTI) to settle personal scores and animosities, and make personal gains. A senior official from one of the investigating agencies told Business Standard that serious concerns were raised in several meetings convened by the government with the Income Tax Department, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and others in the recent past. “It has...

With the National Integration Council discussing the Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence Bill drafted by the National Advisory Council (NAC), the consensus against the legislation has been consolidated. Till then, the charge had been led primarily by the archetypal minority bashers, the constituents of the Sangh Parivar, who refused to acknowledge the uncomfortable truth about communal and targeted violence — that it is minorities and Dalits who bear the...

-The Telegraph   The “abduction” of children from a school to feed the supply chain of a rally has shed light on how an “enlightened” Bengal has learnt to live comfortably with the abuse of the moral and legal rights of its children. A day after 45 children were plucked out of their school and made to march through the heart of the city, police split legal hairs, some parties found leaving children...

-The Times of India   The Haryana government introduced a policy to provide security to whistleblowers and RTI activists in the state if they report to police of specific threats. The state home department issued a notification on this on Tuesday. State home secretary Samir Mathur told TOI that the scale of security cover would depend on the nature of threat perception. "We can provide a cop or a gunman or even a...