The long road to justice
The Special Investigation Team tasked by the Supreme Court of India to enquire into the communal violence that shook Gujarat eight years ago has summoned Chief Minister Narendra Modi to appear before it for questioning on March 21. The summons is pursuant to a petition filed in the court by Zakia Jaffrey, widow of the former Congress Member of [...]
Nirmalendu Bikash Rakshit: Compulsory voting
THE Gujarat government has recently introduced a Bill to make voting compulsory. If passed, every voter will be legally bound to cast his vote. He will be liable to face punishment unless he can furnish valid reasons for abstention. In fact, the turnout in this country is so poor that the idea of compulsory voting was made some time ago. The [...]
Fresh Tune
BJP presidents are not known for singing in public. They are better known for their serious demeanour and sounding off on lofty matters such as Hindutva and cultural nationalism. So, it was a welcome change to see the new president, the low-profile Nitin Gadkari, humming a tune from Anand, a popular 1970s movie, when he was on stage during the [...]
Home Alone
Cities are where strangers meet. But in Ahmedabad, a town which is yet to recover from the intense trauma of the 2002 communal riots, both Hindus and Muslims still perceive each other purely through a lens of fear and insecurity. The municipal corporation randomly picked some 8,000 families to resettle them along the Sabarmati Riverfront project [...]
Landmark Verdict
The judgment of the five-member Constitution bench of the Supreme Court (SC) that high courts can order a CBI probe without state consent, enshrines in law a practice that already exists. This is a landmark verdict and posits the desirability and necessity of making the CBI an autonomous federal investigative body, wholly free of political control [...]
Leave the Law to the Law
Justice, essentially, is a system by which the law is kept according to a consensual set of norms. In plainspeak that means some things are considered illegal and with an agreed-upon system in place law-breakers are doled out punishment according to the nature of their crimes. When the law fails in the eyes of the beholder, the vigilante is born. [...]
On The Move
Recent Central Statistical Organisation figures for the last five years reveal that Bihar is the second fastest growing state in India. With a state GDP growth rate of 11.03 per cent for the period between 2004-05 and 2008-09, Bihar has been growing at a pace only a tad slower than the country's economic powerhouse, Gujarat, which grew at 11.05 [...]