Analyses

The death penalty is back in the limelight in India after a long time, this time for all the wrong reasons — mostly political. The issue came back into focus after Indian President Pratibha Patil approved the executions of two death row prisoners. Patil accepted the Indian Home Ministry’s recommendations to reject the mercy petitions of death row prisoners Devinder Pal Singh Bhullar and Mahendra Nath Das. Bhullar was sentenced to death in 2001 for plotting terror attacks that killed nine people...

Critics have long argued that the Indian government lost the plot in Kashmir ages back. But as an incident on Saturday shows, it is now increasingly turning schizophrenic — imagining enemies where there aren’t any. Well-known human rights activist Gautam Navlakha was detained at Srinagar International Airport on his arrival there on Saturday. He was not allowed to enter the city, and was served an order under section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Core (CRPC). Navlakha, who’s a frequent visitor...

Tunisia's Jasmine Revolution is the first of its kind: the toppling of an autocrat in the Arab world who was till the end backed by Western powers. What now remains to be seen is if unrest in this Maghreb country will spread across the Middle East. Early signs, if there can be any, are already there. As in Tunisia, Algeria too has been ravaged by riots in protest against food prices. Shortly after Tunisian President Zine Al-Abidine Ben Ali fled his country, the Algerian government of Abdelaziz...

No journalist worth his or her salt can ever want to see a day without one's paper. But journalists in Manipur, time and again, are pushed so much against the wall, that they are left with no other choice. It's happened once again in the state — this time, it signalling a wrong start to the New Year. Newspapers failed to hit the stands on January 1, and as reports last came in, the stand of the beleaguered scribes has failed to make any impression on the callous rulers of the state. Journalists...

Wage riots and workplace accidents in Bangladesh have not been making mainstream media headlines. The over-populated, under-fed country, should one be told, is caught in a vice-like grip. This stranglehold is all about the lust for fashion in the West over lives of labourers in a developing country. It is about robbing the poor to feed the rich. What Bangladesh has been witnessing for the last few weeks is a fallout of the global economic meltdown and the exigency of outsourcing, the two being...

In October, the husband and wife pair of Munir Ahmad and Syeda, farmers of Laskhar Pur village in Pakistan's Duzafargarh district with their six children, should have been planting wheat. Only, they weren't for their four acres of land that normally produces two crops a year of cotton and wheat, had been damaged by the floods. They had tried hard to protect their fields by building mud embankments, but the floods were unprecedented. The flooding destroyed their cotton crop that had been close to...

The frantic air-dashes by Union home ministry officials to Assam is telling. The possibility of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence fishing in the troubled demographic waters of the state is not a mere bogey any more. What was an impending threat only a few years back is now a reality. What was a pernicious pathogen till yesterday, has today infected the host and spread to such an extent that its debilitating effects are already beginning to show. The days of crying wolf for politicians are...

The tragedy of the Naga political movement has been the annihilation of Nagas by Nagas themselves. The Nagas have remained cleaved along various schools of thought. Between radicals and moderates (from the killing of Theyieu Sakhrie to that of Kaito Sema) among the insurrectionists themselves. Also between those underground and those overground (from the killing of Imkongliba Ao to that of the Kevichusa brothers). And somewhere complicating all these delicate equations and rendering all...