Category Archives: South and Central Asia

‘Slowly the craze will come’: the off-piste plan to get Nepal skiing

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Entrepreneurs aiming to set up Nepal’s first ski resort are undeterred by difficult terrain and lack of state support

Along the single icy road leading through the village of Kuri, high in the hills of eastern Nepal, tourists stop to stare at a pair of skis. “Is it a skateboard?” asks one. “Maybe they are ice skates,” suggests another. “No idea,” they agree, before walking off gingerly along the slippery track.

Nepal may have the highest mountains in the world, but you are about as likely to see a skier here as you are a yeti. Nepal sent no athletes to the Winter Olympics last year, and there is not a single ski resort in the country.

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Millions of forest-dwelling indigenous people in India to be evicted

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Critics say supreme court ruling constitutes ‘mass eviction in name of conservation’

Millions of Indians face eviction after the country’s supreme court ruled that indigenous people illegally living on forest land should move.

Campaigners for the rights of tribal and forest-dwelling people have called the court’s decision on Wednesday “an unprecedented disaster” and “the biggest mass eviction in the name of conservation, ever”.

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Dhaka fire: more than 50 die in apartments used as chemical store

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Police warn death toll may rise in ‘highly combustable’ blaze in old part of Bangladesh capital

At least 69 people have died in a huge fire that tore through apartment buildings also used as chemical warehouses in an old part of the Bangladeshi capita.

Dozens of people were trapped in the buildings, unable to escape onto narrow streets clogged with traffic, as the highly-combustible stores of chemicals, body sprays and plastic granules erupted in flames.

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Polio spreads in Afghanistan and Pakistan ‘due to unchecked borders’

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Campaigners say resurgence of deadly virus threatens despite huge successes of vaccination drive

The unmonitored movement of people across the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan threatens efforts to eradicate polio from the two countries, as the year’s first cases of the virus are recorded in the volatile region.

The Global Polio Eradication Initiative said people travelling through unchecked crossings is believed to be one of the main causes of the spread of the disease in the area.

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Swedish student fined for plane protest against Afghan’s deportation

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Elin Ersson received a £250 fine for refusing to take her seat on a plane in Sweden last year

A Swedish student who livestreamed her protest against the deportation of an Afghan asylum seeker last year has been found guilty of violating Sweden’s aviation laws and fined £250.

Elin Ersson, 22, avoided a prison sentence at the Gothenburg district court, where she was sentenced to a fine of 3,000 Swedish krona.

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Indian soldiers die in Kashmir gun battle as tensions escalate

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Indian soldiers and militants killed in hunt for perpetrators of paramilitary convoy attack

Four Indian soldiers and two militants have been killed in clashes in disputed Kashmir as security personnel hunt for members of an insurgent group that killed at least 40 paramilitaries last week.

Police said they were fired on by militants as they searched a village in Kashmir’s southern Pulwama district, close to where a car laden with explosives rammed a paramilitary convoy on Thursday.

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India enacts reprisals against Pakistan after Kashmir bombing

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Government places tariff on imports while revenge attacks against Kashmiris have been reported

India has announced reprisals against Pakistan for a suicide bombing that killed at least 40 paramilitaries in the disputed region of Kashmir.

India’s finance minister, Arun Jaitley, has placed a 200% tariff on Pakistani imports and the home ministry announced on Sunday it was withdrawing the security details of a several Kashmiri separatist leaders.

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Amnesty India staff complain of harassment and discrimination

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Campaigners demand external investigation after human rights organisation dismisses their claims

Prominent Indian rights activists have withdrawn their support for Amnesty India amid allegations of caste discrimination and harassment within the organisation, the Guardian has learned.

The allegations include claims that staff were humiliated, ill-treated and discriminated against because of their caste, a system of social hierarchy among Hindus.

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Love Commandos: guardians of forbidden romance accused of extortion

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Sanjoy Sachdev helped scores of Indian couples marry across cultural lines, and against family wishes – but police are asking if he was a fraud

It was a world-famous charity dedicated to rescuing star-crossed Indian lovers. For the past nine years, using a network of secret safe-houses across India, Love Commandos sheltered thousands of young people seeking to marry outside their caste, religion or clan – and who feared their families might kill them for it.

Sanjoy Sachdev, the organisation’s chairman, became one of India’s most celebrated activists. Bollywood star Aamir Khan interviewed him on television. International clothing brand Bjorn Borg raised money for his group. Filmmakers and journalists found the craggy, chain-smoking activist who could quote Robert Frost irresistible.

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Dozens of Indian paramilitaries killed in Kashmir car bombing

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First suicide car bombing in disputed region in nearly 20 years leaves more than 30 dead

Dozens of Indian paramilitaries have been killed in the first suicide car bombing in the disputed region of Kashmir in nearly two decades.

A lone militant is believed to have driven a vehicle laden with explosives close to a central reserve police force (CRPF) convoy and detonated it just after 3pm on Thursday on a busy highway outside the state capital of Srinagar.

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Sri Lanka advertises for two hangmen as country resumes capital punishment

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Death penalties to resume as part of Philippines-inspired campaign to be tough on drug crime

Sri Lankan prison authorities are recruiting two hangmen after the president pledged to end a 43-year moratorium on capital punishment and execute condemned drug traffickers amid alarm over drug-related crime.

Interviews of the candidates will be conducted next month and two will be hired, prison department spokesman Thushara Upuldeniya said Wednesday.

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‘Spare innocent men anguish’: India ruling aims to end false rape claims

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Judges have moved to ensure that women driven by revenge and self-interest will no longer be able to make spurious allegations when relationships end

Their romance began at work. She asked him out for coffee with her friends. He took her out for lunch. Dinners and walks in New Delhi’s Lodhi Gardens followed. Then, for 18 months, they were in a sexual relationship.

But last year, when Pavan Gupta* turned 24, his parents began pressuring him to marry. When they introduced him to a girl he liked, Gupta ended his relationship with his girlfriend, Geeta Jain, telling her he could not disappoint his parents. “I liked her but I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with her. I always told her I was an only child and would have to go along with my parents’ choice,” says Gupta.

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Asia Bibi: Pakistani authorities barring her from leaving, friend says

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Labourer whose blasphemy death sentence was overturned has been transferred to Karachi

Pakistani authorities have moved Asia Bibi, a Christian woman recently acquitted of blasphemy charges, to a new “secure area” and are barring her from leaving the country, a close friend and rights campaigner has claimed.

Bibi, who spent eight years on death row, was transferred from a location near the capital to a house in the southern port city of Karachi, her friend Aman Ullah told the Associated Press. She and her husband are locked in a single room in a house where the door opens only “at food times”, he added.

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India: more than three dozen die in bootleg liquor poisoning

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Police arrest eight suspected bootleggers after victims in poor Indian villages drank alcohol containing toxic methanol

Thirty-nine people have died in northern India and more than two dozen others have fallen sick after drinking bootleg liquor containing toxic methanol .

Related: India: eleven die after eating 'toxic' rice at temple

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‘My boyfriend sold one of my kidneys – then he sold me’: trafficking in Nepal

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A checkpoint along the Nepal-India border has become has one of the world’s busiest human trafficking routes. Now it is being policed by survivors who try to spot other potential victims

It is midday in Bhairchawa, one of the 23 official border checkpoints between Nepal and India. Each day, up to 100,000 people cross under the stone arch separating the two countries. Some are on foot, others in trucks or on bikes, mopeds and rickshaws. Amid the chaos – the people, the dust, the noise of traffic and honking of horns – are the guardians: women who, having survived the horrors of human trafficking, now spend every day trying to spot potential victims and their exploiters among the crowds.

One of the women on duty today is Pema. While we talk, her eyes remain fixed on the crowds, scanning the throngs of people moving slowly across the checkpoint.

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Trump wants out of America’s longest war, but Afghans can’t just walk away

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Hope is real after landmark Taliban talks, but fears remain about what might happen if US troops depart

The start of 2019 has brought for Afghanistan a tantalising hope of peace, fragile but very real, as the Taliban sat down for talks first with Americans in Qatar and this week with senior members of the Afghan elite in Moscow.

These discussions come fraught with fears, that the progress for women and civil rights will be traded away too easily, and that the Taliban may renege on any deal once US troops and their coercive power are gone.

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Almaty spills its secrets: lost Soviet art discovered behind wall

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Thanks to the Kazakhstan city’s loss of capital status in the 90s, rare mosaics, sgraffiti and other artworks escaped destruction

When Jama Nurkalieva and a small group of colleagues conducted a site survey of a disused Soviet-era panoramic cinema in Almaty, the former capital of Kazakhstan, they had no idea what lay behind the internal plasterboard wall that faces out towards the street – until someone spotted a narrow gap.

As the caretaker shined a light into the darkness behind, the group caught a glimpse of a man’s head. Out came the toolbox and the rest of the artwork was slowly revealed: a Soviet-era sgraffito by the graphic artist Eugeny Sidorkin that had been lost and forgotten for decades.

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Young woman dies in fourth ‘period hut’ tragedy this year in Nepal

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Smoke inhalation thought to have killed 21-year-old exiled during menstruation despite ban on custom

A 21-year-old woman has been become the fourth person known to have died this year as a result of the illegal practice of chhaupadi, whereby menstruating women in Nepal are banished from their homes and forced to sleep in huts.

Parbati Bogati, from the western Doti district, is thought to have died from smoke inhalation while sleeping in a small, windowless hut. She was discovered by her mother-in-law on Thursday morning.

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‘Treated like cattle’: Angelina Jolie takes aim at Myanmar over Rohingya plight

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Hollywood star meets refugees in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar district where 740,000 Rohingya have fled since August 2017

Angelina Jolie has shared the stories of rape survivors during a visit to Rohingya refugee camps and said the responsibility to let them return “lies squarely with the government and the authorities in Myanmar”.

The envoy for the UN refugee agency said Myanmar must “show genuine commitment” to end violence that has driven hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims into neighbouring Bangladesh.

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‘We have to learn to live with floods’: waterlogged Surat to become latest megacity

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The next 15 megacities #14: Surat’s battle to hold back water has raged since its first flood wall in 1664. As its population soars, India’s ‘diamond city’ needs new solutions

Look up as you walk around Surat and you might spot “HFL 8.8.2006” daubed in red paint on a wall above your head. HFL stands for “high flood level”, and the inscriptions are 15 feet above the ground in places – a fading memory of the devastating floods of August 2006, which killed 150 people, according to official estimates (unofficial counts put the death toll at over 500). More than 60% of the city was underwater and damage was estimated at $2bn.

Surat’s geography – it lies at the mouth of the Tapi river, near the Arabian Sea – makes it prone to flooding, and it experiences a major inundation every four years on average.

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