Talk:Indian Supreme Court orders transfer of Asifa Bano gang rape and murder case to Pathankot

Translation of the Hindi source. Link •–• 21:59, 10 May 2018 (UTC)

Grammar question
I noticed Pi zero twice changed "accused of rape and murder" to "accused for rape and murder". I believe this to be incorrect. A suspect can be "wanted for rape and murder" but once they are caught they are either "charged with rape and murder" or "accused of rape and murder". Please see the usage note at Merriam-Webster. Cheers, --SVTCobra 15:11, 11 May 2018 (UTC)
 * I agree, using "for" or "over" is not correct in this instance. Green Giant (talk) 15:43, 11 May 2018 (UTC)
 * Taking this carefully,
 * I did not change "of" to "for", rather I declined a proposed change from "for" to "of".
 * The proposed "of" would be wrong in this case, because the eight are not all accused of rape and murder; only some of them are accused of actually participating in it.
 * Prepositions are extraordinarily slippery words. They effectively defy the basic assumption of a dictionary, which is that each word has its own meaning; in effect, all use of a preposition is somewhat idiomatic (that is, the meaning is in the phrase rather than the individual words).  I believe use of prepositions simply varies between regional varieties of English, and it's really hard to make a call between "incorrect" and "regional variation".
 * I did make suggestions of possible alternatives in my edit summaries. However, I didn't feel they were urgent, and I was, again, primarily declining the proposed change.
 * --Pi zero (talk) 16:58, 11 May 2018 (UTC)
 * I think it is unsound to assume it is a regional variation. As a test, however, I did a verbatim search for "accused for". If it were a regional usage, one would expect a lot of hits from that region. I found no such results. In fact, "accused of" seems to be standard usage in India. See: "Two accused of waging war against India move Delhi High Court against the charge". --SVTCobra 18:50, 11 May 2018 (UTC)
 * (I didn't assume it was regional variation; I'm just uncertain it isn't.) --Pi zero (talk) 19:19, 11 May 2018 (UTC)
 * It is not true that all eight are accused of actually carrying out the acts of rape and murder. The police do not claim that they all participated in those physical acts (although they may be legally guilty of the acts; that's a legal point that should not obscure the claimed events).  They are not all accused of actually doing that.  They are all accused in relation thereto.  The preposition "for" in this case is awkward, imho; the preposition "of" is incorrect, and so I declined to change "for" to "of".  --Pi zero (talk) 19:29, 11 May 2018 (UTC)

NPOV concern
This sentence in the second paragraph: "Two former members of the pro-Hindutva Bharatiya Janata Party participated in a rally showing support for the eight accused." My concern is that it is totally out of place. The paragraph describes the crime and the accused and jumps to point out two people in a rally? The rally is not otherwise mentioned. Were they two out of ten people? Or two out of a thousand? What does the fact they are former BJP members have to do with anything? If this is somehow important and relevant to the article, it ought to be better explained. Right now, it just looks like ugly mudslinging. It is no secret the author has no lost love for the BJP. Cheers, --SVTCobra 11:34, 12 May 2018 (UTC)
 * Focus on the last line of this article: "We are here for the fundamental concept of fair trial for both victims and the accused". If you have paid attention, the victim was from a Muslim minority, who was held captive in a Hindu majority area, raped in a Hindu temple, and all the eight accused are Hindus. If you have read the previous article, the protests took place for this case as well as another rape case in Unnao, and the accused is a BJP MLA. Supreme Court had said about transferring the case at slightest doubt of unfairness. When BJP politicians are participating in rally supporting the accused, and even getting promoted as a minister, while the convicts had requested CBI probe despite the police investigating and filing a charge sheet, there are possibilities of influencing the case -- and as mentioned, the family and lawyer also received death threats. Now, I can't opinionate my article saying "there is a possibility of political bias" -- the political alignment of those supporters had to be mentioned, as not doing it will be hiding known, and related fact. The rally is not mentioned anywhere is because: the only thing to tell about it is that there was a rally supporting the accused, in which BJP MLAs participated, and one of them was promoted as a minister. I do not know how many participated in that rally, and woah woah, it was organised by "Hindu Ekta Manch". Well, when I was following the entire story, I remember there were some who resigned, so they become "former ministers". 2/10 or 2/10k; why does that matter; I am not writing about the rally, I am writing about the potential influence when one involved is ex-minister.

As far as my "lost love" is concerned, I am not pro-anyGovernmentInIndia; I have mentioned this to Wikinewsies time and time again. I never went to get a voter's card, or even know how to get one, to begin with. I am writing on Wikinews because I am politically neutral, and I was fed up with the political bias in every news channel, dailies and social science textbooks.

(This isn't the first time BJP members have supported a rape accused/convict, btw) •–• 12:35, 12 May 2018 (UTC)


 * Some thoughts.
 * In general, if you see a concern like this on an article that's in its 24 hour window after publication, try to devise a way of mitigating the problem that will be extremely uncontroversial (that is, uncontroversial re Wikinews policy) and act on it immediately; perhaps, use an edit summary that says it'll be explained on talk, and leave a note on the article talk page explaining why the submitted edit eliminates the problem. Sometimes one just can't think of a way, but it's worth exerting oneself to try to think of something that no Wikinewsie will strongly object to; I'm just saying, give some pushback against the impulse to start discussions.  You don't, of course, want to submit a "fix" that will be itself controversial.
 * As usual, better to focus on the technical characteristics of the article and leave out personalities.
 * Some article history, that explains how that awkward lack-of-flow that you (SVTCobra) observe happened. There was a misapprehension during the writing of the article, that a source had said the accused former government official was a member of BJP.  If that were true, one would naturally say that in the sentence that says one of the accused was a former government official and two were police, and then it would be entirely natural to mention in the next sentence the thing about the rally.  Review uncovered that it was a misreading of the sources; there is nothing in the sources to indicate the accused is BJP; but when I removed that incorrect claim, I failed to notice that it was creating a problem with the last sentence of the paragraph.
 * I think the simplest solution is to remove the sentence about the rally, as, without the thing that used to come before it, it lacks context. I'm submitting such a change now.  Related articles are possible, of course, depending on availability of fresh developments.
 * --Pi zero (talk) 12:54, 12 May 2018 (UTC)


 * -edit conflict- The problem is, none of this is explained in the article. We can't assume the reader to know all this background information. Also, since they are former BJP members it holds even less validity to include. It would have been better to have a sentence that "Hindu Ekta Manch" held a rally, rather than cast aspersions on the entire BJP which is by far the largest party in the country. Individual BJP MLAs can believe strange things such as this guy who believes PM Modi is the reincarnation of . Does that mean all of BJP believes that? I doubt it. --SVTCobra 13:02, 12 May 2018 (UTC)
 * My apprehension about unilateral action without discussion was based on the history between the author and myself. The perceived adversarial nature of this relationship has led to rather aggressive reverts in the past. The author is usually more amenable to a decision coming from you. --SVTCobra 13:09, 12 May 2018 (UTC)
 * The technique I'm recommending does ultimately allow for discussion on the talk page, but with a gentle solution already in place. It does help if one has some accumulated confidence in successfully steering such discussions away from acrimony.  --Pi zero (talk) 13:19, 12 May 2018 (UTC)
 * Since protests for Kathua and Unnao's incident happened at the same time, there was certain influence and I mistook Sengar's position for the ex-BJP minister involved. That said, when BJP ministers rallying for innocence of rape accused when the accused is or was of the same party -- that has to be mentioned.(if it had happened) 103.254.128.130 (talk) 13:23, 12 May 2018 (UTC)