We comfort ourselves: at least, the virus of reservations has not got into judicial appointments; at least, reservations have not been extended to Mu… - Arun Shourie

The Jharkhand government, in turn, has announced that members of thirty-two tribes that are the most backward – literacy level among nine of them is said to be just 10 per cent – shall be directly recruited into government service; those among them who pass the graduation examination shall not have to take the qualifying examination which all others who enter government service have to take.

Now, these are not stray phrases thrown in to light up a purple passage. They are stances, they are standpoints that indicate the direction in which that judgment will go, they are signposts which tell us where the reasoning being advanced in the text will eventually end. Such formulations have a significance beyond the particular judgment in which they figure. Succeeding benches can strike the same pose and gallop further in the same direction.

In Bangladesh, with the gallop towards Islamization, the rapid spread of Tablighi Jamaat, the ever-widening reach and influence of fundamentalist organizations like the Hizb-ut-Tahrir and the Hizb-ut-Tauhid, Shariah Committees sprang up in several parts of the country. Fatwas became ever more frequent. They were often issued by the local mullahs in rural areas, and ever so often the victims were women who had in fact been victims of violence, rape and the rest....