For two years now, Dr Binayak Sen, an award-winning physician and civil rights activist practising in the Indian state of Chattisgarh, a resource-rich yet economically deprived region, has been rotting in prison. The charges levelled at him by the state are flimsy and the evidence even thinner. Caught, like other Chattisgarhis, in a virtual civil war between Naxalites, Maoist-inspired militants and a state-backed vigilante paramilitary known as the Salwa Judum, Sen has been accused in vaguely speculative terms of supporting the former. The case drags on with neither credible evidence on offer nor a determinate end in sight.