Politics

The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) has sharply criticised the implementation of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam, and raised concerns about the subjecting of Bengali-speaking Muslims to “systematic and structural racial discrimination”

Digvijay Bhati and Mohit Jatav allege they were beaten, tied up and humiliated inside police premises; the allegations come weeks after the Meerut police faced scrutiny over its crackdown on protests demanding justice for a Dalit woman

The revised schedule moves the date of publication for the draft electoral roll to August 31 and gives voters until September 30 to file claims and objections; the final electoral roll will now be published on November 4

Dr Ram Puniyani, a former professor of biomedical engineering began his career at IIT Mumbai in 1973 and served within the institution in various capacities for 27 years, beginning in 1977; for close to the past two and a half decades now he is a single man army promoting secularism

The author, an academic and activist presents this dossier on the background and perspective of the RSS, an outfit that has been behind the fashioning of a majoritarian India

After the first letter exposed employees’ phone numbers, a second communication reportedly reveals residential addresses, putting the security of returning Kashmiri Pandits under renewed scrutiny

Alleging that a staggering one crore persons will be finally excluded from the Karnataka state electoral rolls, MG Devasahayam, a former IAS officer, who was recently interviewed by the Kannada daily Vartabharati stated that opposition political parties had failed the voter while citizens groups had posed a robust challenge to the SIR process

Nearly 1.95 lakh blocking directions in five months raise urgent questions about transparency, due process and the constitutional limits of government control over online speech

Nearly 1.94 crore (19.4 million) enumeration forms digitised during SIR; over 20 lakh electors categorised as absent, shifted, dead or duplicate (ASDD), Voters whose names are missing from the draft can file claims for inclusion till September 12, even as complaints on social media during the enumeration phase highlighted difficulties faced by electors

More than 1 in 5 voter enumeration forms have remained “uncollected” on the final day of Maharashtra’s SIR exercise, with urban districts accounting for a large share of those  bureaucratically “excluded”-- nearly 95 lakh forms were uncollected in Thane, Mumbai and Pune, though voters left out of the draft will get a month to seek inclusion or correction