The Londoner

A mob burned down a Christian orphanage in eastern India yesterday, killing one woman, police said, in rising religious violence sparked by the killing of a Hindu leader. The mob beat up a priest, drove children away and set the orphanage on fire in Orissa state, trapping the 22-year-old woman. "The woman was found burned to death inside one of the rooms," said a senior police officer. Hindus protesting their leader's death also destroyed churches, blocked traffic with burning tyres and clashed with police. advertisement Last week armed men raided a Hindu school in the rural Kandhamal district and killed five people, including a religious leader linked to India's main opposition Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The Hindu leader had been leading a campaign to reconvert Hindus and tribal people from Christianity. Police blamed the killings on Maoist rebels, but Hindus say Christians were to blame. The Kandhamal region is rife with tension between hard-lin

AS any psychologist or counselor can confirm, little disputes are rarely the cause of major rows. They can be a flashpoint for something bigger, but that is because there are underlying issues that have been festering away in the background — ignored and unresolved. The row in Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state, over the state government’s decision to take back the land allotted to a Hindu shrine (Amarnath) should be seen in this context. The land was taken back over Muslim protests. The reason it has led to unprecedented mass protests, first by Muslims and then by Hindus, is because both the Hindu minority and the Muslim majority in Kashmir have grievances, real and imaginary. Hindus feel that the Muslim-dominated state government is biased against them. Muslims feel the same about the Hindu majority in India. Too many Kashmiris feel they do not belong in India and that India is an alien occupier. For this the federal government in New Delhi is largely to blame. It has consis

NEW DELHI, Aug 25: Key resistance leaders, including heads of both factions of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference and Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) chief Yasin Malik, were among more than 100 activists arrested in the occupied Kashmir ahead of a protest rally on Monday. An official spokesman said Mr Malik, who had gone underground on Sunday evening, was picked up from an area in the city on Monday. Reports said that about 100 second rank and other separatist leaders, including the Hurriyat chiefs were taken into custody during the last 24 hours to prevent them from participating in a march to Srinagar’s Lal Chowk city square -- call for which was given by their Coordination Committee (CC) -- spearheading the present agitation in the valley. Indian Information Minister Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi said meanwhile that the federal government would probe an attack on media personnel by the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) men when the former were performing their duty in Srinagar

Protesters defy curfew, clash with forces | Police use teargas, guns | Death toll rises to 6 Iftikhar Gilani NEW DELHI: An uneasy calm prevailed in the Kashmir Valley on Tuesday with no incidents being reported in the state where an indefinite curfew remained in force across all the 10 districts for the straight third day. The agitators openly defied the curfew at different places and clashed with the paramilitary forces and the police despite the cracked down on protests, led by the Hurriyat Conference. The police used teargas and gunfire to disperse hundreds of protesters as the death toll among defiant demonstrators rose to six during the ongoing violence in the state. The security forces also used batons as protesters broke a curfew and gathered in Achabal village. A strict curfew remains in force all over the valley, a police official said. More than 600 Kashmiris have been injured in clashes over the two weeks of the protests. The state, whose tourist brochures proclaim the valle

A country that has had to press the pause button when it comes to celebrating its economic successes, is now face to face with hard political and social questions. There is the Kashmir reprise, the killings and subsequent lynchings in Orissa (shades of Godhra?), the shortsightedness of Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal, the sobering realisation that there is now a domestic Islamist terror network in operation, the spreading Maoist challenge, and floods in Bihar. Each of these would have been crisis enough; all of them together raise questions about the dysfunctionality of the Indian state, the counter-productiveness of its divisive politics, and the collapse of the rules by which a modern democracy should function—if every issue has to be settled on the streets, or by taking the law into your own hands, by reaching for a gun or planting a bomb, it does not say much for the virtues of Indian democracy. The BJP is not much better when it seeks to deny that there was no blockade imposed by J

MASKED by the Olympics, the bloody events in Georgia, and the forced departure from office of Pakistan's president Parvez Musharraf, another closely linked troublespot has begun to rumble. For the first time in a decade, serious unrest has brought the troubled region of Kashmir to the brink of a full-scale rebellion by disgruntled Muslims, who form the overwhelming majority of the population. Tens of thousands marched in the capital, Srinagar, last week demanding United Nation's intervention and freedom from India after police and para-military forces shot dead 15 protesters at an earlier demonstration. The shootings took the death toll to 34 since June, when unrest surged following the transfer of state land for use by Hindu "Amarnath Yatra" pilgrims. The State Government was forced to revoke the transfer order, which prompted activists in the Hindu-majority Jummu area to erect roadblocks that stopped all trade between the Valley of Kashmir and the rest of India. The

ISLAMABAD, Aug 17: Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani has said that time has come for the nation to take its own decisions about its future course of action because people had voted for a change. Talking to Balochistan Chief Minister Nawab Mohammad Aslam Raisani and members of his cabinet here on Sunday, the prime minister pledged full support of the federal government for accelerating the development process in the province. He handed over two authorisation letters to the chief minister for a special grant of Rs6 billion for Balochistan. The prime minister had announced the grant in June. Mr Gilani said: �Our aim is to strengthen you because you are people�s representatives and you have been given a mandate for change.� Talking about the move to impeach President Pervez Musharraf, he said: �We are not against any person but we want to restore the 1973 Constitution in its true spirit. �Article 91 makes all the executive branches answerable to the National Assembly and we don�t want