Delhi schools ordered to close early for summer as temperatures soar

All schools in the Indian capital have been told to take ‘mandatory summer vacation’ as heatwave continues 

 Officials say temperatures will continue to rise in the coming weeks, after reaching 44C (111F) on Monday. Photograph: Harish Tyagi/EPA

Vidhi Doshi in Mumbai

Wednesday 4 May 2016 06.49 EDTLast modified on Wednesday 4 May 2016 17.00 EDT

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All schools in Delhi have been ordered to take a “mandatory summer vacation” from 11 May amid a heatwave that has swept the city.

Officials say temperatures will continue to rise in the coming weeks, after reaching 44C (111F) on Monday – the hottest day of the year so far.

Indian drought 'affecting 330 million people' after two weak monsoons

 

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Schools in other parts of India have already been forced to close because of heatwaves and a drought that has affected 330 million people across India.

Delhi’s state-run schools finish for the summer on 10 May anyway, but private and municipal schools’ term dates vary. Many schools’ end-of-term tests will now need to be rescheduled. 

Nav Bharti public school was due to break up for the summer on 18 May. Its headteacher, Sanjay Bhartiya, said the government’s decision would cause a scheduling nightmare. “We had cycle tests and unit tests scheduled for the second week of May, so now all our schedule will be disturbed,” he said.

“We are going to follow the government’s order, there is no alternative right now. But in the school calendar, one week matters a lot. We understand the government’s concern over the heatwave but this abrupt decision will definitely affect us.”

Madhulika Sen, headteacher at Tagore International school, Vasant Vihar, which will lose three working days because of the government’s order, was less forgiving. “Where the temperature is concerned, the government schools have no infrastructure – no fans, no back up for electricity, drinking water. They can’t handle the heatwave, so it makes sense for the government schools to be closed.” 

“But I don’t know why private schools have been affected because we have all the infrastructure – many schools even have air conditioning. The government just doesn’t want to make it sound as though children in government schools are finishing earlier than private school students,” she said. 

India's long wait for justice: 27 million court cases trapped in a legal logjam

Ashish Kumar last saw his brother Vinod when he was being driven away by a senior police officer in Ludhiana, in northern India.

Vinod’s body was never found but the CBI, India’s intelligence agency believes that the officer, Sumedh Singh Saini, was responsible for his death.

They filed murder charges against him within a month.

That was in 1994.

Twenty-two years have passed since the murder case began. Only three of 36 witnesses have been heard so far. Four witnesses have already died without being presented in court.

At 94 years old, Vinod’s mother Amar Kaur can’t hear or speak well. She doesn’t seem to understand much about life at present. But when she hears her son’s name, she yells at the top of her voice, “Insaaf!” “Justice”.

Kaur, who used to go to court in a stretcher, gave her testimony in her son’s murder case when she was aged 86, 14 years after he went missing.

 94-year-old Amar Kaur is still waiting for justice after the death of her son, Vinod, in 1994. Photograph: Vidhi Doshi

She asked the court several times to hear her statement sooner, fearing that she didn’t have long to live. When she was finally heard, the judge had to step down from the podium and stand next to the witness box to be able to hear her thin, fading voice. But before she could finish, he decided to break for lunch. The next available date for her to deliver her statement was a month later.

In the time that has passed since Vinod disappeared, Saini has continued in his role and was promoted to Director General of Police in Punjab. He still has charges hanging over him.

Vinod’s family on the other hand, has had to leave their family home, give up their business, and move to Delhi. They claim to have been threatened on numerous occasions and moved in order to remain safe and follow the case.

Vinod’s murder case is not exceptional in India.

More than 22 million cases are currently pending in India’s district courts. 6 million of those have lasted longer than five years. Another 4.5 million are waiting to be heard in the high courts and more than 60,000 in the supreme court, according to the most recently available government data. These figures are increasing according to decennial reports. 

Last week, Chief Justice of India’s supreme court, Tirath Singh Thakur broke down while addressing the Prime Minister Narendra Modi, blaming the government for inaction over judicial delays, particularly for failing to appoint enough judges to deal with the huge backlog of pending cases.

In the government’s budget for 2016, only 0.2% of the total budget was given to the Law Ministry, one of the lowest in the world.

 More than 22 million cases are currently pending in India’s district courts

“There is a systematic problem with India’s courts,” Vinod’s younger brother Ashish says. “And because of it our family has suffered so much.”

The number of cases, however, is only a part of the problem. Take a walk through any court building in India and you’ll see long queues of people waiting outside courtrooms without any guarantee of getting a complete hearing.

 Ashish Kuar last saw his brother Vinod in 1994 when he was murdered. The Indian court system currently has a backlog of nearly 27 million cases. Photograph: Vidhi Doshi for the Guardian

India has one of the world’s lowest judges to population ratios in the world, with only 13 judges per million people, compared to 50 in developed nations. As a result, judges hear scores of cases every day, which leads to a large number of adjournments, multiple judges passing cases between them, and increasingly long queues of people waiting outside courtrooms on the off chance that their case is heard. 

“Judges are under enormous pressure,” justice Mukul Mudgal, a former high court judge, says. “You have around 30 or 40 cases every day, and usually, you spend an hour before court reading the files. I used to do half of them the previous night. It’s a lot of work, and it is chimerical to hope that any judge will read every page of every case he’s dealing with.” 

Judges are paid little compared to lawyers, which has led to a steady decline in the quality of judges. 

 “Judges are under enormous pressure,” says justice Mukul Mudgal, a former high court judge. Photograph: Vidhi Doshi for the Guardian

To add to the burden, lawyers frequently use delaying tactics such as appealing verdicts endlessly, or saying they’re sick or failing to show up to court.

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“Adjournments are given freely, witnesses don’t come on time, and there’s nobody looking at judicial administration,” explains Harish Narsappa, whose thinktank Dakshanalyses data on judicial delays.

“If you go to court and ask the judge for an adjournment, the judge will ask ok, what day do you want? At that time, neither the judge nor the lawyer has any clue what the judge’s capacity is for that day next week. What’s the point of saying I’ll hear you on this day next week, if he just doesn’t have the time?”

Narsappa estimates that the delays cost India’s economy trillions of rupees every year.

Major Manjit Rajain had to skip a day of work every month for nine years over a case against him which was was eventually dismissed as a clerical error.

After he retired from the army and opened his first business, the Registrar of Companies filed a suit against him for misrepresenting himself because his army files showed his surname to be Rajan, without the i, and he had written his surname Rajain, with an i on the forms to register his company. 

Major Rajain explained how trivial the error was.

Even though the former soldier showed the court his passport, birth certificate, marriage certificate, and several other documents to prove there was an ‘i’ in his last name, the case against him was not dismissed for nine years.

“The good thing that came out of it,” Major Rajain says “was that I made friends with many major businessmen sitting outside the courtroom, because they had all been dragged there for equally trivial reasons.

Pakistan PM promises tougher stance on 'honour' killings

Laws that allow families to murder their daughters in the name of “honour” and avoid punishment will be changed as soon as possible, Pakistan’s prime minister has promised.

Nawaz Sharif said the perpetrators of so-called honour killings must not be allowed to be forgiven by family members, in a challenge to sharia laws that could trigger a confrontation with religious conservatives.

“This is totally against Islam and anyone who does this must be punished and punished very severely,” Sharif told the Guardian. “Changing the law is something that needs to be done at the earliest possibility.”

Sharif was speaking after the Pakistani premiere of an Oscar-nominated short documentary about “honour” killings attended by senior cabinet members and diplomats. Its director, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, won Pakistan’s only Academy Award to date for Saving Face, her 2012 documentary about women disfigured by acid attacks.

She said toughening up existing laws would help change the climate in a country where the problem is widespread. “Before we can change mindsets we have to send the guilty to jail so people begin to understand that taking someone’s life is a big deal and merits a lengthy jail sentence,” she said.

According to the women’s campaign group the Aurat Foundation, about 1,000 Pakistani women are killed every year for “bringing shame” on their families. Some killings can be brazen, such as the 2014 killing of a woman by her family outside Lahore’s high court.

Although religious leaders condemn the killings, there is wide support for the tradition under Islamic law that allows murderers to avoid punishment if they are forgiven by the family of their victims, a practice that sometimes involves the payment of “blood money”.

Such payments are unnecessary when the killer is a brother, father or uncle – he can simply be forgiven by the rest of the family.

Obaid-Chinoy’s 40-minute documentary A Girl in the River tells the story of Saba Qaiser, an 18-year-old who survived being shot in the face by her father and uncle and dumped in a river. 

The family said they had been humiliated and lost standing in the community after Qaiser married a man she fell in love with. They had wanted her to submit to an arranged wedding to a relative the family considered to have higher social status.

Although initially determined not to forgive her father, Qaiser ultimately pardoned him after coming under intense pressure from male community leaders in her home town of Gujranwala.

In an interview featured in the film, Qaiser’s father told Obaid-Chinoy his attempt to kill his daughter had earned him greater respect among his neighbours.

The decision by Sharif – a veteran conservative politician who tried to introduce strict sharia law in the late 1990s – to confront the religious establishment has surprised some observers.

Mufti Kifayatullah, a leader of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, a religious party, accepted that some Islamic laws were being misused to protect killers. But he said any reform attempts would be resisted.

“Removing Islamic laws shall never be tolerated as this country came in to being in the name of Islam,” he said. “The religious parties will not allow the government to solve the problem in this way.”

Rouhani Meets Erdogan

Rouhani meets Erdoğan as regional conflicts strain Iranian-Turkish ties
Sunni/Shia rift brought to surface as sharp split between Tehran and Ankara over Syrian and Yemeni civil wars cool relations between once-friendly neighbours
 Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, right, meeting his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, at the Saadabad palace in Tehran. Rouhani praised Turkey for backing the recent nuclear agreement with the west.
 Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, right, meets his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, at the Saadabad palace in Tehran. Rouhani praised Turkey for backing the recent nuclear agreement with the west. Photograph: AP
Saeed Kamali Dehghan
Tuesday 7 April 2015 14.12 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 7 April 2015 14.52 EDT
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Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, has met his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in Tehran amid strong differences between the two countries over the region’s most bruising conflicts, especially the Syrian civil war and the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen.

Erdoğan infuriated Iranians last month when he said the Islamic republic was “trying to dominate the region” and accused Tehran of pursuing a sectarian agenda in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. More than 60 Iranian MPs had asked for his visit to be cancelled.

Despite this, Erdoğan was welcomed by Rouhani in the Iranian capital on Tuesday and, in an unusual departure from Tehran’s diplomatic protocol, the Turkish leader’s motorcade had a mounted escort as it made its way into the Saadabad palace, following a similar ceremony held for the Iranian president in Ankara.

Erdoğan also met Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader in Iran. In a direct reference to Turkey’s support for the Saudi-led intervention there, Khamenei’s Twitter account announced later: “Solution to Yemen crisis is to stop foreign intervention & invasion. It’s on Yemenis to decide for their future.”


“We’ve had a substantial and good meeting,” Rouhani said in a joint press conference after the two leaders met behind closed doors, praising Turkey for welcoming the preliminary agreement reached in high-level nuclear negotiations in Switzerland.

“Our both countries want to increase the [bilateral] trade volume from $14bn [£9.5bn] in the previous year to nearly $30bn,” the Iranian president said. Rouhani predicted that a final agreement between Iran and the west, which could lead to the lifting of economic sanctions, would boost economic ties between Tehran and Ankara.

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Turkey imported almost $10bn worth of goods from Iran in 2014 and exported a total of $4bn. Ankara provided a financial lifeline to Tehran when international sanctions cut off its banking system from the outside world by paying for Iranian natural gas in gold.

Iran and Turkey share a long border and have had peaceful relations in modern times, usually putting economic relations over regional politics. But relations became frosty as the two capitals followed opposing paths over the Syrian conflict.

Iran has extended unwavering support for Bashar al-Assad’s regime, while Turkey backed Syrian opposition forces and called for Assad to be removed from power. In Yemen, too, they have strong disagreements: Iran supports the Shia Houthi rebels but Turkey has backed Saudi Arabia’s air strikes against the Houthi forces, also known as Ansar Allah (the Supporters of God). In recent months, Turkey has become closer to Iran’s main rival in the region, Saudi Arabia.

Erdoğan sparked a row in March after voicing opposition to Iran’s growing influence in the Middle East, echoing similar concerns made by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. He urged Tehran to respect the territorial integrity of Syria, Iraq and Yemen by withdrawing any forces it has in those countries.

“Iran’s attitude towards the matter is not sincere because they have a sectarian agenda. So they will want to fill the void that will be created by Daesh [Islamic State] themselves,” Erdoğan said at the time.

Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, strongly objected. “It would be better if those who have created irreparable damages with their strategic mistakes and lofty politics would adopt responsible policies,” he said.

Iran accuses Turkey of supporting takfiris, its terminology for Sunni extremists. Hossein Shariatmadari, the hardline editor of the state-run newspaper Kayhan, said before Erdoğan’s arrival that the Turkish president’s visit to Tehran was an insult to the Iranian people.

Fadi Hakura, an expert on Turkey and associate fellow at Chatham House, said it was unlikely that such disputes would lead to a complete breakdown in relations between the two states. “Iran and Turkey have maintained their bilateral relationship in the face of major disagreements over regional issues. They cannot afford to allow their bilateral relations to experience a complete rupture.

“The two countries share a common border, which is the most peaceful border in the Middle East since the 17th century, and they have substantial energy and economic ties.”

Nevertheless, Hakura said relations were not as warm as they had been five years ago. “Iran no longer trusts Turkey as an effective mediator and does not engage in strategic dialogues with Turkey on the nuclear issue or other issues such as Iraq, Syria and Yemen,” he said.

“In essence, the Arab spring has brought the so-called Sunni/Shia divide to the surface and that has led to the cooling of relations between Tehran and Ankara.”

Iran Accuses Saudis of Genocide

Iran's supreme leader accuses Saudis of 'genocide' in Yemen

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei escalates rhetoric over Riyadh’s intervention in sectarian fighting between government and Shia rebels

 Yemen air strike

 The scene of an air strike in al-Jiraf district in Sanaa, Yemen. Photograph: Rex Shutterstock

Saeed Kamali Dehghan

Thursday 9 April 2015 13.50 EDT Last modified on Thursday 9 April 2015 20.02 EDT

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Iran’s supreme leader has accused Saudi Arabia of committing genocide in Yemen and said air strikes against Houthi rebels are doomed to fail, in a sharp escalation of tensions between the two rivals over the outcome of yet another bruising conflict in the Middle East.

In Iran’s most critical comments yet, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said the Saudi-led campaign against the Houthis was a mistake and warned that the intervention will ultimately backfire on Riyadh.

Tehran’s foreign ministry also summoned the Saudi envoy over claims that Iran was meddling in Yemen. Saudi Arabia and its Sunni Arab allies accuse Shia Iran of militarily backing the Houthis, who call themselves Ansar Allah (“supporters of Allah”) and belong to the Zaydi sect of Shia Islam.

The Saudis are attempting to halt an advance by the Houthis and reinstate ousted president Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who fled first to the main southern city of Aden, and then to Riyadh. Houthi fighters, who control the capital city Sana’a, have spread out across the country and are now engaged in heavy street fighting in Aden.

Khamenei’s stark warning came as the UN secretary general said that air strikes and rebel advances in Yemen “have turned an internal political crisis into a violent conflict that risks deep and long-lasting regional repercussions”. Ban Ki-moon told reporters: “The last thing the region and our world need is more of the chaos and crimes we have seen in Libya and Syria.”

The US secretary of state, John Kerry, alluded to the Saudis’ concerns, saying Washington would not stand by as Iran wreaks havoc in the Middle East. Khamenei said the US, which is supporting the Saudi campaign, was siding with the oppressor rather than the oppressed.

Relations between Iran and the US have improved over matters such as the Iranian nuclear programme and the fight against Islamic State in Iraq, but they have opposing views on other issues, such as the Syrian civil war, in which Tehran backs Bashar al-Assad.

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There are increasing fears in the Middle East that the fighting in Yemen might spiral out of control, with deeper Saudi involvement provoking the Iranians to follow suit, leading to a full-scale proxy war of an even more sectarian nature. Iran dispatched a destroyer and another warship to waters off Yemen on Wednesday.

“By invading Yemen, Saudis are making a mistake, setting a bad precedent in the region,” Khamenei said. “It’s a huge crime to kill children, destroy houses and obliterate a country’s infrastructure … This is a crime and genocide which can be prosecuted internationally.

“They will not win, they will suffer loss and damage … Their aggression is not acceptable and I warn that they should stop their crimes in Yemen.”

Khamenei compared Saudi Arabia to Israel, Tehran’s sworn enemy, saying that their military campaign in Yemen was similar to Israel’s in Gaza.

But Saudis and the US say Iran also plays a major role in Yemen, a charge Tehran vehemently denies. Speaking on US TV, Kerry said on Wednesday that Washington closely monitors Iranian movement in the Yemeni conflict. The United Arab Emirates’ foreign minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan, has echoed Kerry’s sentiments.

“There have been – there are, obviously – flights coming from Iran. Every single week there are flights from Iran and we’ve traced it and know this,” Kerry told PBS television. “Iran needs to recognise that the United States is not going to stand by while the region is destabilised or while people engage in overt warfare across lines, international boundaries, in other countries.”

Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, has also called the military intervention in Yemen a mistake, but in milder terms.

“A great nation like Yemen will not submit to bombing. Come, let us all think about ending war. Let us think about a ceasefire,” he said. “Let us accept that the future of Yemen will be in the hands of the people of Yemen, not anyone else.”

At least 643 people, including children, have died and thousands wounded since the violence erupted in Yemen last year. On Thursday alone, at least 20 Houthi rebels were killed in southern Yemen in eight dawn air raids by Saudi fighter jets. According to the UN agency for children’s rights, Unicef, about 30% of fighters in the armed groups were minors. “We are seeing children in battle, at checkpoints and unfortunately among [those] killed and injured,” Julien Harneis, Unicef’s representative in Yemen, said on Thursday.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Facebook Twitter Pinterest

 Ayatollah Ali Khamenei: ‘This is a crime and genocide which can be prosecuted internationally.’ Photograph: STR/AP

Saudi Arabia, which launched their air strikes last month, is backed by Turkey, Egypt, Qatar and the UAE, who all fear Iranian control of Yemen. Gulf Arabs often complain about Iran’s increasing influence in Iraq and Syria, though the exact extent of Iranian support for rebel forces in Yemen is unclear.

The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, met Rouhani and Khamenei in Tehran last week to discuss Yemen, among other regional issues. He published an article on Thursday warning that the Islamic world is at the risk of “disintegration” due to sectarian conflicts between Sunnis and Shias in the region.

“You can have a different denomination [of Islam] but if you seek to impose one denomination on another you will break up the ummah [Islamic community],” he warned.

Adam Baron from the European Council on Foreign Relations struck a cautious note on the notion that the conflict in Yemen is an Iranian-Saudi proxy war. “Houthis are not Iranian proxies: the fact of the matter is that Houthis are motivated and deeply rooted in Yemen and their decision-making is largely, if not entirely, rooted in Yemeni local issues,” he said.

“I do not see this as a proxy war. That being said, I think what we are seeing is a regionalisation of an internal political conflict. It was sort of started by Iran but the main catalyst for the regionalisation of this is the Saudi military campaign.

“The reason why we are seeing such language from the supreme leader is that his hands – or rather the Iranian government’s hands – are pretty tied at this point. In terms of providing financial or military support for the Houthis, it’s very hard to see how they would be able to do it. Making these strong statements are almost their only option.”

Baron said Khamenei and Erdogan were speaking about a potential political solution to the Yemeni crisis on Wednesday. “I’m under the impression that that is in Tehran’s interest and Riyadh’s, as well as all Yemeni factions and regular Yemenis.”