'In the wake of Dalit scholar Anand Teltumbde’s illegal arrest by Pune police and his subsequent release, the five petitioners who had approached the Supreme Court against the arrest of the civil rights activists, have called the development a “mockery of constitutional guarantees, of due process and of democracy”. Teltumbde, who was granted relief from arrest until February 11 by the apex court was regardless arrested on Saturday after a Pune court refused to grant him anticipatory bail in a case related to the Bhima Koregaon violence.
'Negligence in maintaining the security of a Jharkhand government web system has resulted in the leaking of personal information and Aadhaar numbers of nearly 1,66,000 government employees in India, TechCrunch reported on Friday. A web system that was used to record employee attendance was left without a password since 2014, exposing Aadhaar numbers, names, job titles and phone numbers of Jharkhand government workers on the Internet, claimed the report.
'As Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government gets ready to present its final Budget in a few days, here is a look at one of the key factors in fiscal calculations – debt. The combined debt of central and state governments stands at a staggering Rs. 97 lakh crore, up 59% since the end of March 2014, months before the BJP government took over in June 2014. The scale of this debt can be imagined by distributing it over the whole population (see chart below). This works out to Rs. 73,966 per person in 2017-18 as compared to Rs. 54,229 in 2014-15...
'The Delhi police on Monday filed its chargesheet against former Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union (JNUSU) president Kanhaiya Kumar and others in a sedition case lodged in 2016... The Delhi police also charged former students – Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya – for allegedly using ‘anti-India’ slogans during an event organised on the JNU campus on February 9, 2016, on the anniversary of the hanging of Afzal Guru. Former JNUSU vice-president Shehla Rashid has also been named, but not charged...
'Barely two days after the Supreme Court held his ouster to be illegal and restored him to his position, Central Bureau of Investigation director Alok Verma was sacked by a high-powered committee on Thursday night. The 2:1 decision was made after a more than two-hour long meeting of the panel, which comprises Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the leader of the largest opposition party – Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge – and Justice A.K. Sikri.
'The Narendra Modi government on Tuesday appointed former finance ministry official Shaktikanta Das as governor of the Reserve Bank of India, a day after former central bank boss Urjit Patel resigned abruptly. Das, a former finance secretary and current member of the 15th finance commission, shot into the public spotlight in late 2016 when he became the bureaucratic face of demonetisation in the weeks following the note-ban decision... In February 2017, he gave a speech that predicted that the positive effects of demonetisation would be felt from April 2017.
'A 28-year-old woman studying in Canada was arrested Monday in Tuticorin and sent to judicial custody for 15 days after she shouted “fascist BJP government down, down” on board a flight in the presence of Tamil Nadu BJP president Tamilisai Soundararajan who filed a complaint. Lois Sofia, on her way home from Canada, was with her parents who joined her at Chennai for the IndiGo flight to Tuticorin. The incident took place after the flight landed at the Tuticorin airport...'
'For the first time, seventy-one years after India rid itself of colonial rule, a Hindu nationalist party was democratically elected to rule the country on its own strength. Future generations will likely look back at Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) win in 2014 elections as the beginning of a drastically different era in independent India.
Following is the final statement with the signatures as they were when it was closed for purposes of releasing to the media and sent to us by the initiators of the campaign.
'The Jharkhand Police filed sedition cases against 20 people, including Jesuit priest Stan Swami and former Congress MLA Theodore Kiro on Sunday for their role in the Pathalgadi protests. Pathalgadi is a practice adopted by some villages in Jharkhand to declare their gram sabha as the only sovereign authority, not the state or central government. The Khunti Police said in the first information report that the accused attempted to mislead Adivasis on social media by providing false information about the Indian Constitution, Hindustan reported.
