Two women have visited a Hindu temple in Kerala after India's supreme court lifted a centuries-old ban. They had tried to enter last month but were stopped by protesters
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Two Indian women enter temple after centuries-long ban on women
Event comes as hundreds and thousands of women form a 380-mile human chain in support of gender equality
Two women have become the first to enter a Hindu temple in India’s southern state of Kerala after the supreme court lifted a centuries-old ban on women.
The temple was later “purified” by priests at the famous Sabarimala temple, which does not permit menstruating women inside. They closed the temple for several hours to conduct ancient rituals to remove the “polluting” female presence.
Continue reading...Inside Mother Camp: the woman tackling Afghanistan’s drug problem
Laila Haidari risks her life to run the country’s only private rehabilitation centre, helping hundreds of addicts a year
Laila Haidari is considered a criminal, despite never committing a crime. The 40-year-old works with drug addicts in Kabul. “The addicts I work with are considered criminal and dangerous and by extension I am considered criminal,” she says.
Despite opposition and death threats, eight years ago, Haidari opened the city’s only private drug rehabilitation centre, which so far has helped nearly 4,800 Afghans who would otherwise have ended up on the streets, or worse, dead.
Continue reading...India: world’s biggest election has suddenly become competitive
PM Narenda Modi weakened after Rahul Gandhi’s Congress ends 2018 with string of regional victories
The world’s largest exercise in democracy looms in 2019. In the beachside towns of Kerala state, the mountain villages of the Himalayas and across the dusty cities of the Gangetic plain, an estimated 850 million people will cast their votes in India’s national election sometime between March and May. And the race just got competitive.
A few months ago the prime minister, Narendra Modi, looked invincible. His party had followed its thumping national election win in 2014 with a run of victories in India’s largest states. The Congress party, which ushered India into independence 70 years ago and had been its default ruler since, was reduced to a rump, with leaders from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) boasting the country would soon be “Congress-mukt” (Congress-free).
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