India Archive

As if COVID-19 were not enough to worry about, the global climate crisis is driving a “staggering rise” in natural disasters, the United Nations detailed last week in a new report, “The Human Cost of Disasters.” According to the U.N.’s Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, known as UNDRR, the number of natural disasters was 75 percent higher between 2000 and 2019 than in the previous 20 years. Unless humanity takes prompt, dramatic action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the planet risks becoming “an uninhabitable hell for millions of people,” the report’s authors warn. Unfortunately, the world is not doing nearly […]

Editor’s Note: WPR has agreed to publish this article anonymously due to the hostile environment in Kashmir toward independent reporting. SRINAGAR, India—In July, I joined a group of young men plodding glumly through verdant paddy fields in Bijbehara, a picturesque town tucked inside a network of lofty mountains in the Kashmir Valley. It was the middle of the monsoon season. One of the men was recounting a midnight raid conducted by the Indian Army in a nearby village, Arwani, in August last year. “They were bloodthirsty,” he said, in a wobbling voice. “We live in the shadow of violence,” another […]

The historically close relationship between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia hit a snag recently over differences in how to address India’s decision last year to revoke the special autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir, a Muslim-majority state that is also claimed by Pakistan. Pakistani officials had repeatedly urged Saudi Arabia to convene a meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, or OIC, to discuss Kashmir, to no avail. Finally, in early August, Pakistan’s foreign minister, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, took the unprecedented step of publicly criticizing Riyadh. Appearing on a TV talk show, he threatened to “call a meeting of the Islamic countries […]