Category Archives: Delhi

Crisis at Adani Group intensifies as Indian activists stage protests

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Opposition groups push Modi to investigate allegations by US short-seller as firm suffers market rout

The crisis engulfing the Adani Group has intensified as hundreds of members of India’s opposition parties took to the streets to press for an investigation into allegations by a US short-seller against India’s second-biggest business group which triggered its market rout.

The Adani Group said on Monday that its major investors, known in India as “promoters”, had pledged to prepay $1.1bn (£916m) in share-backed loans due for repayment by September 2024. The repayments include shares in Adani’s ports business, Adani Green Energy and Adani Transmission.

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Shock in India as woman, 20, reportedly dragged by car for hour after collision

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Police in spotlight after claims they failed to respond to reports car with five men had not stopped

The death of a 20-year-old woman who was reportedly dragged for almost an hour by a car after a vehicle collision in Delhi has provoked outrage and calls for justice.

The woman was driving home from work in the early hours of New Year’s Day when her scooter and a car collided. News reports say the car driver and four passengers, all male, did not stop, dragging her body for miles through the streets of outer Delhi.

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India: 27 people killed after fire rips through Delhi office block

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Dozens injured as official says building had no fire exit and most died ‘due to asphyxiation’

At least 27 people have died and dozens more were injured in a huge fire in a commercial building in India’s capital, Delhi.

The large fire broke out at the four-storey building near a railway station in the western suburb of Mundka in the late afternoon on Friday, but its cause was not immediately clear.

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‘Hatred, bigotry and untruth’: communal violence grips India

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Country appears more divided than ever along Hindu-Muslim lines – and for many, Modi’s BJP is to blame

The procession had begun peacefully. Marching through the streets of Delhi’s Jahangirpuri district on Saturday, the devotees had gathered to celebrate the Hindu festival of Hanuman Jayanti. But the peace did not last long. As the evening drew in, an unauthorised parade began to gather. This time, men clad in saffron, the signature colour of Hindu nationalism, filled the streets brandishing swords and pistols, and started to shout provocative communal slogans.

Ignoring previous agreements between Hindu and Muslim residents for the procession to avoid passing by a local mosque, they charged toward it.

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Women with electric rickshaws combat Delhi’s toxic air – and its sexism

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Break into male-dominated public-transport helps tackle city’s pollution crisis and safety concerns

Monika Devi is thrilled to be driving her autorickshaw. The 35-year-old has two reasons to be particularly proud as she winds her way through New Delhi’s insanely congested streets.

She is one of the first women to be driving one of the three-wheeled taxis that swarm the roads of the Indian capital. And she is driving one of Delhi’s first e-rickshaws – part of the city’s drive to tackle its notoriously filthy air.

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Toxic fumes fill Delhi’s skies after vast landfill site catches fire

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Blaze at 65-metre high ‘mountain of shame’ in Ghazipur still not completely put out

Parts of a fire that broke out on Monday at a gigantic landfill site on the outskirts of Delhi known as the “mountain of shame” were still smouldering 24 hours later, choking local residents who have complained of breathing in toxic fumes.

Dozens of firefighters struggled to douse the flames at the landfill site in Ghazipur, due to its height and a lack of access roads.

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‘It’s so liberating’: India’s first salon run by transgender men

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Founder Aryan Pasha wants La Beauté & Style to be an inclusive and comfortable space, as well as tackle prejudice and provide employment

The beauty treatments listed at the new La Beauté & Style salon are much the same as those offered by the dozen or so other parlours that dot the traffic-heavy Dilshad Extension area of Ghaziabad, 17 miles (28km) east of Delhi. But that is where the similarity ends.

The wall behind the reception desk is painted in rainbow colours; a mural of a trans man with flowing multicoloured locks decorates another wall; a woman wearing a sari is having her eyebrows plucked next to a trans man who is telling a stylist how he would like his hair cut.

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Burning issue: how enzymes could end India’s problem with stubble

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Bans failed to stop farmers torching fields each year but a new spray that turns stalks into fertiliser helps the soil and the air

Every autumn, Anil Kalyan, from Kutail village in India’s northern state of Haryana, would join tens of thousands of other paddy farmers to set fire to the leftover stalks after the rice harvest to clear the field for planting wheat.

But this year, Kalyan opted for change. He signed his land up for a trial being held in Haryana and neighbouring Punjab as an alternative to the environmentally hazardous stubble burning that is commonplace across India and a major cause of Delhi’s notorious smog.

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Delhi schools to close for a week due to smog

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Levels of PM 2.5 particulates hit 20 times safe levels as agricultural fires add to city’s air pollution crisis

Authorities in Delhi have announced that schools are to close for a week as the Indian capital’s pollution control body warned of a looming health emergency due to smog.

Delhi is ranked one of the world’s most-polluted cities, with a hazardous mix of factory and vehicle emissions and smoke from agricultural fires turning its air a toxic grey every winter.

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The unravelling of a conspiracy: were the 16 charged with plotting to kill India’s prime minister framed?

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In 2018, Indian police claimed to have uncovered a shocking plan to bring down the government. But there is mounting evidence that the initial conspiracy was a fiction – and the accused are victims of an elaborate plot

In April 2018, a large group of policemen arrived at the Delhi flat of Rona Wilson, a 47-year-old human rights activist. They had travelled from Pune in the western state of Maharashtra, and appeared, accompanied by Delhi police officials, at Wilson’s single-room flat at 6am. For the next eight hours, they scoured the modest premises, searching the files on Wilson’s laptop and rifling through his books. Annoyed and short of sleep, he asked that they be put back in place after they had been scrutinised. When the police eventually left, they took away Wilson’s Hewlett-Packard laptop, a SanDisk thumb drive and his mobile phone.

Seven weeks later, the police were back at Wilson’s flat, this time to arrest him. He was accused of conspiring to assassinate the prime minister, Narendra Modi, and planning to overthrow the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government. Evidence of these crimes had allegedly been found on his laptop. Wilson was flown to Pune, charged under India’s anti-terror law and incarcerated. More than three years after the arrest, he remains in prison.

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Delhi hospitals issue SOS alerts over oxygen supplies as India’s Covid crisis mounts

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Staff posted emergency messages on social media as several hospitals in the capital exhausted oxygen supplies on Thursday night

Hospitals in Delhi issued SOS alerts on Friday morning, warning they had just a few hours supply of oxygen left, as another unprecedented surge in Covid-19 cases overwhelmed health systems in major Indian cities.

Hospital staff posted emergency messages on social media throughout Thursday and Friday, saying they were unable to cope with demand and pleading for assistance from government.

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Two Muslim students face ‘bogus’ charges of inciting Delhi riots

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Lawyers say pair were peacefully protesting against Indian citizenship act

Delhi police have been accused of slapping two Muslim student activists with “bogus” charges of conspiring to incite the recent riots, the worst religious violence in India’s capital for decades, and in which the police were accused of being complicit.

Meeran Haider and Safoora Zargar, students at Delhi’s Muslim-majority Jamia Millia Islamia University, were charged under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, which is usually reserved for terrorist activity and means they can be held for six months.

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‘I just want to go home’: the desperate millions hit by Modi’s brutal lockdown

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The Indian prime minister’s handling of the pandemic has heaped more misery on the country’s poorest citizens

For more than a decade, Begum Jan had managed to survive on the streets of Kolkata. A longtime wheelchair-user, she had a specific spot on a busy street. Rickshaw drivers and passers-by always made sure she had something to eat.

But last week, for the first time since she became homeless after falling ill with tuberculosis and losing her job as a housemaid, the 62-year-old was in danger of starving.

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Divided Delhi under lockdown: ‘If coronavirus doesn’t kill me, hunger will’

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India’s shutdown is catastrophic for Muslims driven from their homes by sectarian carnage and now without food or shelter

It wasn’t possible for Mohammed Idrish to watch Narendra Modi’s address to the nation last Tuesday exhorting 1.3 billion Indians to stay at home. His TV was looted along with everything else in his home in Delhi during the recent anti-Muslim riots in the Indian capital.

When Idrish, a carpenter, heard about Modi urging Indians to stay at home to stop coronavirus spreading, he shook his head again and again. “I don’t understand … I don’t understand. Doesn’t he know we have no home?”

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India executes four men convicted of 2012 Delhi bus rape and murder

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Four found guilty of attack that shocked the world were hanged in capital on Friday morning

India has executed the four men who were convicted of the brutal gang rape and murder of a young woman on bus in Delhi in 2012, a case which shocked the world and brought India’s problem with sexual violence against women into the spotlight.

Akshay Thakur, Vinay Sharma, Pawan Gupta and Mukesh Singh had been found guilty in a 2013 trial and sentenced to death by hanging, but their execution had been postponed multiple times due to Supreme Court appeals.

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Delhi’s Muslims despair of justice after police implicated in riots

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Allegations mount that police in Indian capital incited and aided recent mob violence and failed to help Muslim victims

On one side of the marketplace, it was carnage. As the Hindu mob descended, Muslim-owned stalls selling car parts were slowly reduced to debris and ashes. But just 100 metres away stood two police stations.

As the mob attacks came once, then twice and then a third time in this north-east Delhi neighbourhood, desperate stallholders repeatedly ran to Gokalpuri and Dayalpur police stations crying out for help. But each time they found the gates locked from the inside. For three days, no help came.

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Death toll from Delhi’s worst riots in decades rises to 38

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New citizenship law has triggered days of violence between Muslims and Hindus

The death toll from Delhi’s worst riots in decades has risen to 38, as a political row broke out over the transfer of a judge who criticised the police and government’s handling of the crisis.

Tensions remained high in India’s capital, as thousands of riot police and paramilitaries patrolled streets littered with the debris from days of sectarian riots.

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‘I thought they would kill me’: Delhi mob victim describes attack – video

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Mohammad Zubair, a Muslim, was brutally attacked by a Hindu group as Delhi experienced some of its worst religious riots in decades. ‘My clothes were drenched in blood,’ he said of his ordeal. Muslims and Hindus across the region have been mourning their loved ones after dozens of people were killed in the latest wave of violence

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Delhi protests: India’s worst religious violence in decades – video report

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The death toll from some of the worst religious violence in Delhi in decades has risen to more than 20, as Muslims fled their homes and several mosques in the capital burned after attacks by Hindu rioters. Clashes between Hindu and Muslim groups that began on Sunday showed no sign of abating, with reports of hundreds injured from gunshot wounds, acid burns, stabbings and wounds from beatings and peltings with stones

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Delhi protests: death toll climbs amid worst religious violence for decades

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Calls for army to be deployed as clashes between Hindu and Muslim groups show no sign of abating

The death toll from the worst religious violence in Delhi in decades has risen to 21, as Muslims fled from their homes and several mosques in the capital smouldered after being attacked by Hindu mobs.

The deathly clashes between Hindu and Muslim groups that began on Sunday showed no sign of abating on the third consecutive day, with reports of early morning looting on some Muslim homes which had been abandoned out of fear.

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