India’s supreme court has ruled that a Hindu temple can be built on the country’s most hotly contested religious site, ending a legal dispute that has run for decades between Hindus and Muslims.
The restoration of the Ram temple in Ayodhya was a key pledge of Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) government. The ruling, which came just six months after his landslide election win, is another huge victory for India’s prime minister
Continue reading...Supreme court says site where mosque was torn down in 1992 should become Hindu temple
The Indian supreme court has ruled that India’s most hotly contested piece of religious land rightfully belongs to Hindus, and has granted permission for a temple to be built on the site in Ayodhya.
The five supreme court judges based their unanimous and historic judgment on Hindus’ claim that the site is the birthplace of the god Ram.
Continue reading...Supreme court due to decide fate of Ayodhya, where mosque was torn down by Hindu hardliners in 1992
India’s supreme court is expected to make a historic ruling on Saturday over the highly disputed religious site of Ayodhya, which is claimed by Hindus and Muslims.
The site has been one of the country’s most controversial religious grounds since the Babri mosque, which had been standing since the 16th century, was reduced to rubble by Hindu fundamentalists during a 1992 riot in which more than 2,000 people died.
Continue reading...British Indian Aatish Taseer believes move is intended as a warning to other writers
A British Indian author and journalist has been stripped of his Indian citizenship after he wrote an article criticising the regime of the country’s prime minister, Narendra Modi.
Aatish Taseer, who was born in the UK but raised in India and spent a further decade living there from the age of 25, was stripped of his overseas citizenship of India (OCI) status on Thursday.
Continue reading...Indian city suffering record levels of poor air quality, partly caused by stubble burning
The illegal burning of crop stubble by farmers in India, one of the biggest causes of the record-breaking pollution that has enveloped Delhi over the past week, is expected to continue for the next two weeks, despite a supreme court order for all farm fires to be halted.
Delhi has been experiencing its longest spell of hazardous air quality since public records began, with the city suffering from “severe” levels of pollution for nine days straight, prompting a public health emergency to be declared.
Continue reading...Pollution in Delhi has reached its worst levels so far this year, at almost 400 times the amount deemed healthy. A week on from Diwali, the thick brown smog that shrouded the city after the festival has shown no sign of shifting. One local said the pollution was so bad it burned his nose and throat, making simple activities such as jogging difficult
Continue reading...Vehicles with odd or even licence plates are banned from roads on alternate days
Delhi restricted many private vehicles from the roads on Monday to try to lessen pollution as India grapples with a public health crisis over its toxic smog.
The “odd-even” scheme will restrict private vehicles with odd-number licence plates to driving on odd dates while even-numbered plates are allowed on even-numbered dates. It was begun days after authorities in the Indian capital began emergency control measures and ordered the closure of schools as pollution levels reached a three-year high.
Continue reading...Sixteen-nation Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership will cover half the planet’s people
The world’s largest trade deal is unlikely to be signed this year, with a draft statement from south-east Asian leaders suggesting it will be delayed until 2020, despite China’s desire to bring it into operation as soon as possible as a counterweight to its debilitating tariff war with the US.
The 16-country Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership – known as the RCEP – would be the world’s largest when operational, spanning India to New Zealand, including 30% of global GDP and half of the world’s people.
Continue reading...Car fumes, industrial emissions and smoke from farms have contributed to pollution crisis
Pollution in Delhi has reached its worst levels so far this year, at almost 400 times the amount deemed healthy, causing planes to be diverted away from the city.
A week on from Diwali, the thick brown smog that shrouded the city after the festival has shown no sign of shifting. On Friday a public health emergency was declared and Delhi’s chief minister Arvind Kejriwal said the city had turned into a “gas chamber”.
Continue reading...Claimants are given a 12-digit number linked to their data, and if something goes wrong they can be refused food
Motka Manjhi had been back and forth to the ration shop four or five times, his wife said, but on each occasion he returned empty-handed. His thumbprint, needed to prove his identity, wasn’t registering on the new system.
He was told to do an online update. But to do so he would need to get to a private centre – a four-mile journey from his village in Dumka, in the state of Jharkhand, north-east India. This would mean missing at least a day’s potential work, which he desperately needed to buy food. And even if he made the trek, there was no guarantee that the system, which often suffers from network outages, would be working properly. What was to be done?
Continue reading...Relatives tell of 1,000km bus journeys to Agra where prisoners are held after Modi crackdown
The last time he saw her, Mehraj-ud-din Wani assured his wife that he would soon be a free man.
Wani was speaking to his wife, Gulshan, from behind bars in Srinagar jail in Kashmir. “He was certain that he would be released,” she said. “He said that he will be home in a matter of days.”
Continue reading...Newborn baby girl was heard crying after being buried alive in clay pot in Uttar Pradesh
A man digging a grave in northern India found a newborn girl buried alive, police have said, in the latest case to shine a spotlight on female infanticide in the country.
Hitesh Sirohi had gone to bury his own daughter, who died a few minutes after birth on Wednesday, when his spade hit an earthen pot, local police in Uttar Pradesh state told AFP.
Continue reading...In an exclusive global series, the Guardian lays bare the tech revolution transforming the welfare system worldwide – while penalising the most vulnerable
All around the world, from small-town Illinois in the US to Rochdale in England, from Perth, Australia, to Dumka in northern India, a revolution is under way in how governments treat the poor.
You can’t see it happening, and may have heard nothing about it. It’s being planned by engineers and coders behind closed doors, in secure government locations far from public view.
Continue reading...A scheme training people to host outsiders is creating alternative livelihoods that will help build resilience against climate crisis and stem migration for Indian families
Datta Kondar leads a group of tourists through his village in Maharashtra to view the firefly spectacle for which it is so famous. With the arrival of the monsoons in June, thousands of fireflies emerge at twilight and perform an elaborate courtship ritual, signalling to prospective mates with their glowing bodies in a mesmerising show.
Being a tour guide is not what Kondar, 36, had planned. In 2003, he took the typical route of many rural Indians, travelling to the city in search of work. But he found himself unable to cope with the gritty realities of life in Mumbai and returned to his village, Purushwadi, within a year.
Continue reading...With the country’s major cities set to run out of groundwater in 2020, volunteers are helping to conserve precious supplies
Drenched in perspiration on a muggy Sunday afternoon in New Delhi, Ashia Saifi climbs up and down the stairs of apartment buildings, ringing on doorbells and asking if residents have any leaking taps they want fixed.
Sometimes, the door is slammed shut in her face. People are scared of intruders and strangers, even though Saifi sports a little white cap that’s the emblem of the Aam Aadmi party (Common Man), or AAP, which rules the Indian capital.
Continue reading...Murders took place over 14-year period and each victim ate a meal prepared by the killer
A woman in the southern Indian state of Kerala has confessed to poisoning six members of her family over a 14-year period by adding cyanide to their food.
Police began investigating earlier this year when the brother-in-law of 47-year-old suspect Jolly Thomas became suspicious that she may have forged his parents’ will.
Continue reading...Young people in the global south have been tackling the climate crisis for years. They should be celebrated too
Ridhima Pandey was just nine years old in 2017 when she filed a lawsuit against the Indian government for failing to take action against climate change. Pandey’s fierce, astounding passion for the environment is not accidental. Her mother is a forestry guard and her father an environmental activist; and the whole family was displaced by the Uttarakhand floods of 2013, which claimed hundreds of lives.
In Kenya Kaluki Paul Mutuku has been actively involved in conservation since college, where he was a member of an environmental awareness club, and has been a member of the African Youth Initiative on Climate Change since 2015. Raised in rural Kenya by a single mother, Mutuku’s vigorous activism, like Pandey’s, was inspired by the direct challenges his family (and wider community) faced from the effects of climate change: “Growing up, I witnessed mothers cover kilometres to fetch water,” he says.
Continue reading...Google and Facebook told to take down sexual harassment claims against Subodh Gupta
The high court in Delhi has ordered Google and Facebook to remove all anonymous social media posts accusing the artist Subodh Gupta of sexual harassment and ordered Facebook, which owns Instagram, to reveal the identity of the person behind the account that first made the allegations.
Last year, many well-known Indian men, mostly in the film and media industries, had their names mentioned at the height of the #MeToo movement including Gupta, one of India’s leading artists.
Continue reading...Videos shared on social media show submerged roads and heavy flooding at one of the big hospitals in Patna, the state capital of Bihar, where patients lie on beds barely above dirty water. More than 100 people have died in flooding in eastern India, where vast areas have been inundated by delayed monsoon rains. In Uttar Pradesh, 93 people have died as the rains cause homes to collapse and lead to an increase in snake bites. Dozens of people have also died in Bihar, where boats have been deployed to rescue stranded residents
Continue reading...Prime minister’s announcement of an end to open defecation in India marred by claims of coercion and violence
Narendra Modi is to declare that his flagship sanitation programme has ended open defecation in India, amid accusations that the scheme has sparked violence and abuse.
India’s prime minister will make the announcement on Wednesday at an event in his home state of Gujarat, attended by 20,000 village chiefs and international dignitaries, according to the government.
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