New Delhi, Jan 21: The Supreme court of India, has upheld the life sentence for Dara Singh, the prime accused in the Graham Staines murder case. It has also served life sentence to his accomplice Mahendra Hembram.
The duo have been convicted for the murder of Australian missionary Graham Staines and his children.
The judgement comes as a blow to the Central Bureau of Investigation(CBI), which was fighting for a death sentence to Dara Singh and his accomplice. The supreme court also upheld the acquittal of eleven other people in the case.
Krishna Kumar
The teaching of reading during early childhood — when attitudes, habits and skills acquire life-long foundations — assumes crucial significance for the efficient functioning of democracy.
Literacy is the foundation of school education but in our country the term ‘literacy’ is used almost exclusively in the context of adults. This is not surprising, given the embarrassingly large share of India in the global count of adults who can neither read nor write. Why India’s share has not dwindled significantly is partly related to the fact that the years spent by children in primary schools do not necessarily make them literate. Many who acquire a tenuous grip on literacy during those years fail to retain it in the absence of opportunities to read, compounded by elimination from school before completing the upper primary classes. Even in the case of those who acquire lasting literacy, schooling fails to impart the urge to read as a matter of habit. Those who learn to perceive reading as a means to expand knowledge and awareness are a minority. Sensational surveys of children’s poor performance in reading tests throw little light on the deeper problems that the teaching of reading in India suffers from. If these problems are not addressed in an institutionalised manner, the newly enacted law on the right to education will remain ineffective.
This Series of papers on India’s path to full health coverage reveals that a failing health system is perhaps India’s greatest predicament. The papers in this Series reveal the full extent of opportunities and difficulties in Indian healthcare, by…
Dhananjay Rai Relationship of dalits and globalization has been construed in many ways. This paper proposes that interpretations centring on mere economism have profoundly eclipsed various facets of this relationship. ‘Economic’ construal entails that not only defenders of globalization…
The life sentence handed down to Binayak Sen by a Chhattisgarh trial court on Friday is so over the top and outrageous that it calls into question the fundamentals of the Indian justice system. The trial judge shocked the conscience of the nation by finding the eminent doctor and rights activist guilty of sedition and conspiring to wage war against the state under Sections 120(B) and 124(A) of the Indian Penal Code, Sections 8(1), (2), (3), and (5) of the draconian Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act, and Section 39 (2) of the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (as amended in 2004). The fact that the Chhattisgarh police’s case against Dr. Sen consisted of pretty thin material was taken into the realm of the absurd by the public prosecutor tying himself in knots in an attempt to burnish the doctor’s alleged sins. So it was that an innocuous email message sent by his wife, Ilina, to the director of the Indian Social Institute — a Delhi-based institution which happens to share an acronym with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate — got converted into “suspicious communication” with the dreaded “ISI.” Another email referring to an occupant of the White House as a “chimpanzee” was introduced by the prosecutor as evidence of the kind of “code language” terrorists resort to. But tragically, it is the Chhattisgarh police that have had the last laugh in this round.
An Indian court Friday is scheduled to deliver a verdict in the trial of Binayak Sen, a doctor accused of aiding India’s Maoists in a closely watched case that activists have labeled a referendum on whether India, the world’s largest democracy, supports human rights or squashes them in the name of national security.
Dr. Sen was arrested in May 2007 in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh, which in the last decade has become a center for India’s Maoist rebels, locally known as Naxalites. The insurgency, which began in a village called Naxalbari in the eastern state of West Bengal in 1967, seeks to overthrow the Indian government in a bid to present a communist paradigm of development. The rebels have attracted support by playing up local grievances such a lack of school and health facilities and the perceived abuse of land rights in the name of industrialization.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has said Naxalism is the single largest threat to India’s internal security. The government’s approach at the national and state levels has been to counter the insurgency with a two-pronged strategy of police mobilization and infrastructure development.
A joint meeting of human rights activists and delegates of civil liberties organisations today sought the Centre’s intervention for release of rights campaigner and doctor Binayak Sen who has been sentenced to life for sedition.A resolution adopted at the meeting, organised here by People’s Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL), said Sen had been fighting for the well-being of scheduled tribes in Chhattisgarh.
But he had been charged with sedition and awarded life term by a Raipur court, it said.
“This is utterly unacceptable and the leader should be released unconditionally and the Centre should intervene in the matter,” the activists said.
This report is the outcome of the three day regional workshop convened by SAHR from 5-7 December 2007 in Kathmandu, Nepal with experts in the fields of human rights and electoral process. Experts invited from the region included a mix of election…