Musings on India, the law, and policy
Posted in Court, Human Rights, india on Jul 24th, 2009
In 1994 Narayan Chetnam Choudhary committed the crime of murdering five women, one of whom was pregnant and two were children with a tender age of two and a half and one and a half years. In 2000 the Supreme Court confirmed his death sentence. Nine years hence, he lies in the jail at Pune [...]
Posted in Human Rights on Jul 18th, 2009
The Children We Sacrifice, a documentary by Grace Poore, a South Asian feminist writer and activist of the Voices Unheard Sisters Unseen fame, deals exclusively with child sexual abuse (CSA). Though I haven’t watched the documentary, the message it seems to be sending across is this: CSA is an everyday reality for about half of [...]
Posted in Foreign Affairs, Human Rights on Jul 14th, 2009
Abondoned freight containers, 40 ft by 8 ft by 8 ft – littering the roads were not an uncommon sight in Afghanistan before and during the US led war. ‘Death by Container’, as it was called was seen as a cheap means of mass murder used by the Taliban and the Northern Alliance before the [...]
Last week the Gujarat Government appointed a Commission to inquire into the changes in demographic patterns in Gujarat ‘since independence’. The idea apparently, was to identify the reasons behind the ‘polarisation’ and migration of population. The first admission that comes out of this action is that fact that there has been polarization in Gujarat. The [...]
Posted in Constitution, Court, india on Jul 8th, 2009
The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to buy the argument that ‘Hanging is inhuman’. The petitioner Ashok Kumar Walia had argued that hanging was a “cruel and painful” method of execution and should be replaced by lethal injection or any other method. The Chief Justice refused to take note of the argument stating that there was no [...]
Posted in Constitution, Democracy on Jul 2nd, 2009
“One of the fundamental contrasts between free democratic societies and totalitarian regimes is that the totalitarian governments rely on secrecy for the regime and disclosure for all other people, where as in the civic culture of liberal democracy, the position is approximately the reverse.” - Geoffrey De Q Walker The new national ID card scheme [...]