In the summer of 2006, I had a long conversation with Mahendra Karma, the Chhattisgarh Congress leader who was killed in a terror attack by the Naxalites last week. I was not alone—with me were five other members of a citizens’ group studying the tragic fallout of the civil war in the state’s Dantewada district. This [...]
Last week, the Supreme Court granted bail to Binayak Sen, the doctor and civil rights activist who had been sentenced to life imprisonment by a court in Raipur on the charge of sedition. Dr. Sen was charged with being a Naxalite sympathizer, and of acting as a courier for the Communist Party of India (Maoist). The [...]
In the spring of 1990, a great Indian patriot, the liberal jurist V. M. Tarkunde, led a team of independent citizens on a study tour of the Kashmir Valley. Many cases of police and army excesses were reported to them: beatings (sometimes of children), torture (of men innocent of any crime), extra-judicial (or ‘encounter’) killings, and [...]