News Alerts – India

As India takes the helm of the United Nations Security Council’s counterterrorism committee this year, its leaders would do well to think of Shahid, a young man who told me in harrowing detail of being tortured as a terrorism suspect by Indian state police.

Responding to synchronized bombings that killed more than 152 people in the cities of Delhi, Jaipur and Ahmedabad in 2008, the police rounded up scores of Muslim men whom they accused of membership in the Indian Mujahideen, a militant group that claimed responsibility for the blasts. Several suspects alleged that they were mistreated in police custody – some said they were blindfolded and shackled, others said they were beaten, threatened or forced to sign false confessions.

“We were made to wear dark masks,” Shahid told me when I met him in India in 2009. “Whenever they interrogated me and they felt that the answer was improper, they beat me with the wooden stick or the leather belt or whatever they liked. … I was told by the police department, ‘If you do not cooperate, we will take custody of all of your family.’ “

The Indian government should reform its justice system to ensure that abuses do not take place during counterterrorism efforts, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. While Indian authorities have taken recent steps to prevent wrongful accusations…

Samar Halarnkar

At least 1,370 girls are aborted every day in India. For perspective, some 250 Indians die every day in road accidents. Terrorists killed about six people, on an average, every day in 2009. In the last two decades of economic progress, 10 million girls have died before being born. More are strangled, slowly starved or simply tossed in the trash.

This is mass murder on a scale unseen in any other country this century. Only China runs us close. The overall Indian sex ratio should be at least 950 women to 1,000 men (Nature produces more males than females as boys are more vulnerable to infant diseases than girls). But the child sex ratio, the number of girls to every 1,000 boys in the age group zero to six, has dropped from 1,010 girls in 1941 to 945 in 1991 to 927 in 2001, according to census figures. The 2011 census will reveal a further decline based on mostly disturbing trends.

The Chhattisgarh High Court on Thursday rejected human rights activist Dr Binayak Sen’s plea for bail.

Sen’s lawyers will now move the Supreme Court to secure his bail.

The High Court had on Wednesday reserved its order on the bail plea even as the state government opposed it on grounds of his links with Maoists.

Tens of thousands newly displaced in Assam and Meghalaya; displaced Bru groups reach agreement on return to Mizoram

In early January, ethnic violence broke out between Rabha (or Rava) and Garo people in Assam state’s Goalpara district and the adjoining East Garo Hills district of Meghalaya state. By 11 January, ten people had been killed and more than 50,000 from both communities displaced. More than 34,000 people were in 37 camps in Assam and over 19,000 in 18 camps in Meghalaya. In Meghalaya, the state government promised compensation of Rs. 10,000 ($220) and three bundles of corrugated iron sheets to each displaced family.

The Indian parliament should immediately repeal the colonial-era sedition law, which local authorities are using to silence peaceful political dissent, Human Rights Watch said today. The Indian government should drop sedition cases against prominent activists such as Dr. Binayak Sen, Arundhati Roy, and others, Human Rights Watch said.

In two recent cases, in New Delhi and Chhattisgarh, the authorities have pursued sedition charges against peaceful activists, despite a longstanding Supreme Court ruling that prosecution under the sedition law requires incitement to violence, which was not alleged in either case.

Indian authorities should drop criminal proceedings against peaceful protesters who sought accountability for maternal deaths in a public hospital in Madhya Pradesh state, Human Rights Watch said today. District officials cracked down on protesters on December 28, 2010, even as the Indian government was celebrating its recent appointment to the new United Nations Commission on Information and Accountability for Women’s and Children’s Health.

For long, villagers have been at the wrong ends of justice being unaware of the functioning of courts and also sent on a merry-go-round while trying to procure a document — be it a ration card, birth or caste certificate — from panchayat or block offices.

No more, for the National Legal Services Authority (NALSA) is forging ahead with its plan to set up legal aid clinics (LACs) of permanent nature at the taluka level whose function would be akin to that of primary health centres (PHCs) and will meet the basic legal requirements of villagers.

In fact, these LACs, to be manned for 12 hours a day — from 8 in the morning to 8 in the evening — by a trained lawyer deputed by the district legal service authority concerned, will function in close proximity to the PHCs.

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.