News Alerts – India

Tens of millions of dollars have been diverted in India from schemes to fight poverty and used to fund Delhi’s Commonwealth Games, a report says.

The Housing and Land Rights Network pressure group says its report is based on official documents obtained under India’s right to information act.

The group says there should be an independent inquiry into how this was allowed to happen.

Government officials in Delhi say they are looking into the allegations.

Vinay Kumar

NEW DELHI: What is there in a name? A lot, if one goes by the efforts of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) in getting the name of a Rajasthan village changed as even after more than six decades of independence, it still carries a derogatory caste-based connotation for the villagers.

A dusty village in Dausa district of Rajasthan, known as “Kuwan Ka Vas,” had its name changed by the revenue officials in 1987 to “Chamaron Ka Vas,” denoting that it was home to a community which was in the business of making leather goods and footwear.

J. Venkatesan

The Supreme Court on Wednesday said it would be failing in its duty if it permitted any citizen to be forcibly subjected to narco-analysis, brain mapping and polygraph tests in violation of his privacy. Notwithstanding the fact that its judgment would benefit hardened criminals who had no regard for societal values, the court had a constitutional right to protect the rights of citizens.

A three-judge Bench headed by Chief Justice of India K.G. Balakrishnan said: “One of the main functions of constitutionally prescribed rights is to safeguard the interests of citizens in their interactions with the government. As guardians of these rights, we will be failing in our duty if we permit any citizen to be forcibly subjected to these tests.”

By Siddharth Varadarajan

The history of India-Pakistan relations is full of examples of leaders from both countries travelling to distant points on the globe — from Tashkent and New York to Sharm el-Sheikh and Havana — to meet each other only to end up standing still. Meetings held in the subcontinent, on the other hand, have invariably led to breakthroughs, big and small. Think Simla and Lahore, Islamabad and Delhi. Each of these encounters produced conceptual breakthroughs that briefly carried some promise of momentum before being swamped by the forces of inertia, dead habit, treachery or bad faith that are the constants in this cursed relationship.

To the list of promising South Asian summits can now be added the name of Thimphu, where Manmohan Singh and Yusuf Raza Gilani met on Thursday. Defying naysayers within their respective establishments and wider strategic communities, the two Prime Ministers crafted a simple but elegant formula for breaking the current impasse, thereby ensuring that the process of engagement — stuck for several months — now has some chance of moving ahead. The Foreign Secretaries and Foreign Ministers have been tasked with meeting each other to assess the current state of the relationship and identify the reasons for the trust deficit. This is to be the first step in what will eventually lead to a dialogue process aimed at discussing and resolving all outstanding issues and disputes.

Siddharth Varadarajan

Forget Kashmir and terrorism or even Afghanistan and water, the current stalemate between India and Pakistan is all down to one word. Both countries publicly say that Dialogue is the only way forward. Yet each is paralysed by the name ‘Composite’. New Delhi is so allergic to it that it will not accept its use, while Islamabad has become so attached to the C word that it insists there can be nothing else.

This Indian allergy and Pakistani attachment is paradoxical, since the composite dialogue approach has suited India more than it has Pakistan. Under the guise of moving ahead simultaneously on all issues, the framework has allowed progress on trade and other subjects considered important by New Delhi, even as the status quo on major disputes like Kashmir and Siachen — key concerns for Islamabad — has held. Of course, the dialogue did not end cross-border terrorism or extinguish the links between the Pakistani security agencies and violent extremism as some on the Indian side might have hoped. But that was always an improbable shot given the DNA of the Pakistani establishment. Over time, India has realised the best way to deal with the threat of terror is by strengthening its internal capabilities while utilising engagement as a lever for influencing Pakistan’s behaviour over the long run.

If major civilisations make contributions to world history, then the Indian civilisation’s contributions include caste, caste discrimination, caste segregation, and caste-motivated brutality; the anniversary of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar’s birth, April 14, provides an occasion to look at some of the ways governments respond to caste discrimination.

It appears too, that wherever substantial numbers of people of Indian descent settle, caste discrimination appears. Even the British House of Lords was sufficiently exercised about caste discrimination in the United Kingdom to debate it for specific proscription when the new Equality Bill, now the Equality Act 2010, recently came before them. Although this time the House of Lords did not include caste specifically, the government’s earlier statement that the Equality and Human Rights Commission had been asked to research the issue drew the peers’ rebuke that the Commission in fact said they had not been asked to do the relevant research; the government were also accused of consulting only with upper-caste groups of British Hindus.