SRINAGAR, India — Three young people have died in violence in Indian-controlled Kashmir despite a curfew that continued for a third day Monday following the execution of a Kashmiri man convicted in a deadly 2001 attack on India’s Parliament.

Mohammed Afzal Guru was hanged in New Delhi early Saturday. Ahead of the execution, authorities ordered people in most of the Indian-held part of the disputed Kashmir region to remain indoors indefinitely in anticipation of anti-India protests.

 

Despite the curfew, protests and clashes between troops and demonstrators broke out at a dozen places in the region Monday. Police and paramilitary soldiers fired tear gas and used batons to chase away rock-throwing protesters, police said.

Guru’s execution is an extremely sensitive matter in the Himalayan region, where most people believe his trial was not fair. Several rights groups in India, and political groups in Indian Kashmir, also questioned the fairness of his trial.

Monday’s protests coincided with the 29th anniversary of the execution of Mohammed Maqbool Butt, the founder of the pro-independence Jammu-Kashmir Liberation Front. Several activists tried to hold a procession in Butt’s honor in Srinagar, the main city in the region, but police chased them away.

 

ntelligence officer and he was hanged in 1984 in the same New Delhi jail where Guru was executed.

In Watergam village near the town of Sopore, which was Guru’s home, a 12-year-old boy, Obaid Mushtaq, died early Monday of injuries after police and paramilitary troops fired tear gas shells and bullets a day earlier to disperse an angry crowd, hospital official Aijaz Mustafa said. He said an 18-year-old boy injured in the clashes was on life support. At least two other people were also injured, police said.

Another young man died in Sumbal village in northern Kashmir on Sunday after he jumped into a frigid river while trying to run away from troops who were firing tear gas and swinging batons. The body of a high school student who had been missing since Sunday’s protest was also recovered from the river on Monday, police said.

Thousands attended the funeral processions of the two young men on Monday, shouting slogans such as “We want freedom.”

Read the rest here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/2-dead-in-kashmir-prot…

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First they worship the rat then they eat it LOL LOL

I wonder how a rat would taste with tomato ketchup?

Leprosy has officially been eliminated in India, yet 130,000 new cases are diagnosed every year. Richard Cookson and Seyi Rhodes report on the plight of the patients shunned by society

Narsappa was just 10 years old when he was told he had leprosy, but the news changed the course of his life forever. People in his Indian village immediately began to shun him and told his parents that he had to leave. He says his mother started grieving for him "as if I was already dead". Shortly afterwards, his father took him to a hospital two hours away from home and left him there. No one ever came to visit him and Narsappa never went home again.

Now 42, he now lives in a leprosy colony on the outskirts of Hyderabad and campaigns on behalf of people affected by the disease. "I lie awake at night thinking about how I was treated and how I can stop others from going through the same thing," he says.

Read more @ The Guardian

A massive rescue and relief operation is under way in southern India after severe flooding left about 250 people dead and millions without homes.

More than 350 villages are still marooned after five days of heavy rain in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka states.

Rainfall has eased in the worst affected state of Karnataka but many farms have been destroyed.

The rains have come late. Only last week the government said India had been hit by the worst drought in 40 years.

Indian air force aircraft are being used to drop relief materials to the hundreds of thousands of villagers stranded by rising flood waters.

Soldiers have been trying to reach those affected in boats.

'No shelter'

Officials say billions of dollars are needed for relief and reconstruction.

Karnataka chief minister BS Yeddyurappa said 10 million people had become homeless and nearly two million houses had been destroyed across 14 districts in the state.

Thousands of livestock, which many farmers depend on to make a living, have also perished in the torrential rains that lashed the state for nearly a week.

Read more @ BBC News

India will import food to make up for shortages caused by a drought thought to be affecting 700 million people, the finance minister has said.

The minister, Pranab Mukherjee, did not specify what would be imported and when, saying he wanted to avoid speculation on prices.

The drought is affecting almost half of India's districts.

Food prices have risen by 10% after poor monsoon rains hit sowing. Monsoon rains are critical to India's farmers.

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The summer rains are crucial to crops such as rice, soybean, sugarcane and cotton.

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Up to 70% of Indians are dependent on farm incomes, and about 60% of India's farms depend on rains.

Read more @ BBC News