Kashmir: From red swathe to chants of Azadi
By Dhairyasheel Patil
It was an autumn of Great Expectations of 1945 in Sopore. One would see a sea of red flags – Shaikh Abdullah’s party flags with a white plough at the centre – as if competing with Comrade Mao’s Long March. But Abdullah was no Mao. He was a populist who could sway the people of Kashmir with his oratory at par with or even better than Indira Gandhi, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and his daughter.

Committee on economic, social and cultural rights slams India
A report
The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights' considered the second to the fifth periodic report of India on the implementation of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and found many areas of concern that reflect the fundamental inequities of Indian State and society. An abridged version of the Committee's conclusions

Pungent truth reaches NHRC
By Sheila B Lalwani
Days after Lali Bai, then 12, exchanged vows with her husband, her in-laws led her to the upper caste Hindu elders in their village where they told Lali Bai that she was cursed. Her fate, they said, was to clean the latrines.

Khairlanji: A verdict to ponder
By S Anand
A fast-track sessions court in Bhandara, Maharashtra, has awarded capital punishment to six persons in the Khairlanji massacre in which four Dalit-Buddhists of a family were lynched by a mob of about seventy persons. On September 29, 2006, four of the five members of the Bhotmange family – mother Surekha (40), daughter Priyanka (17), and sons Roshan (21) and Sudhir (19) – were lynched by a mob of about seventy people led by men and women belonging to the kunabi and kalar castes (listed as Other Backward Classes in Maharashtra) of the village.

Chhattisgarh DGP defends violations of human rights
By Disha Zaidi and Girish Agrawal
On September 26 and 27, 2008, the Center for South Asia Studies at the University of California’s Berkeley campus, along with the Foundation for Democratic Reform in India (FDRI), held a two-day conference on “Law and Justice” as part of their annual series of conferences on Indian democracy. The conference concluded with a two-hour panel discussion on the human rights situation in Chhattisgarh.

The sinister ways of Chhattisgarh Police
By Kavita Srivastava
The third phase of the trial of Dr Binayak Sen case began on July 29 and lasted till July 31. The key witnesses, the material witnesses had already deposed in the first two phases of the trial and some were tendered off. The subsequent witnesses were to be mostly seizure witnesses or police and jail personnel.

Mining: Who really benefits
By Krishnendu Mukherjee
Mining can bring about not just ecological devastation but also dislocation and hardship to the people who inhabit large mining tracts. It is crucial that the environmental and social aspects of mining projects are scrutinised, and not subsumed under the mantra of economic development, if the new National Mineral Policy 2008 is not to become simply another blank cheque for mining companies.

RAW: Re-victimisation of woman officer
By Anubha Rastogi
Over a decade ago, in the year 1997, the Supreme Court of India in a historic piece of jurisprudence held that in the wake of a legislative vacuum, human rights cannot be infringed and international obligations have to be adhered to especially relating to fundamental rights and this has to be more so vis-à-vis rights and dignity of a vulnerable section of society like women.

Woman IAS officer’s fight for justice
By Sandhya J and Prema Nair
On February 9, 2000, a senior lady officer of Indian Administration Service (IAS), serving in Kerala, complained to the then chief minister that the minister for transport, under whom she was working as secretary, had outraged her modesty in his chamber. The written complaint was later taken as FIS — first information statement — and a case was registered against the minister, Neela Lohita Dasan Nadar, under Section 354 of the IPC.

Courts to the rescue of missing children
By Karuna Dayal
In Malancha Rajbari, a 15 year old girl managed to return after a year in a Delhi brothel……… “Once in Delhi, they put me in a brothel, where I was tortured and sexually abused. It continued for a year before I ran away in the morning”

Mental disability From institutional control to family care
By Megha Bhagat
Stigma, institutional confinement, negligence and ill-treatment are the predominant attributes of the approach to mental disability in India. It is important that if the rights of children with mental disability is to be protected the legal definitions must be altered so that the accent in state intervention is on family care, social acceptance and participation in everyday normal life.

Derelictions of DUTY
By Suresh Nautiyal
Will an increasingly market driven media, whose nexus with different kinds of power— financial, political and coercive—has weakened its sense of public duty, rise to the challenge and return to the values of its illustrious past, when it crusaded zealously on behalf of citizens' rights and drew the attention of the courts to serious violations.

PILs come to West Africa
By Jai Singh
The Open Society Initiative for West Africa (“OSIWA”) invited me for the launch of the West African Public Interest Litigation Centre (“WAPILC”), a special project derived from OSIWA’s Governance and Justice, and Law and Human Rights programmes...

World Bank Tribunal:Findings of the jury

A jury of 12 members, including former justices of the Supreme Court of India and various high courts, writers, scientists, economists, religious leaders, social workers, and former Indian government officials, recorded the testimonies of communities affected by specific World Bank financed projects. This report summarises the main findings gleaned from the depositions of 150 affected people and 60 grassroots groups from all over India

Encountered truths
A Report
L-18 Batla house, the scene of the two ‘encounter’ killings of Atif and Sajid, is a four storied building with two flats on each floor and a single stairwell. There is only one entrance to the building. All the other spaces are grilled and cannot be used to get out of the building. The building is abutted on the left and right by two buildings which are only about two floors high. There is a narrow lane to the front and an even narrower lane at the back.

Delhi encounter raises tough questions
By Praful Bidwai
India is witnessing a sharp increase in the incidence of both anti-minority communal violence and terrorism. Christians are under attack in Orissa, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, and now even Kerala, which has long been held up as a model of pluralism and communal harmony.

Editorial

Letters to the Editor