Pakistan Hindu women hoping for ‘protection’
China lashes out at India
ISLAMABAD, April 12, (Agencies): Sapna Gobia is busy preparing for her wedding in Pakistan in a few weeks. In many ways, her wedding will follow traditions passed down through generations, with the bride and groom circling a sacred fire lit by their families.
But unlike the marriage of her parents, Gobia’s will be formalised by a government certificate under a new Hindu marriage law.
The 25-year-old will be one of millions of women from mostly-Muslim Pakistan’s Hindu minority who now have the right to a certificate establishing her marital status under the Hindu Marriage Act 2017 that was signed into law on March 19.
“We Hindu girls and married women have lived in the shadow of constant fear ... of being kidnapped, forced to abandon our faith and convert and re-married forcibly to someone not from our faith,” said Gobia, a graduate in English literature from a government college in the town of Dharaki in southern Pakistan.
She hopes the new marriage law will help prevent such incidents of kidnapping of Hindu minority women and their forced conversion to other faiths for bigamous, forced marriages.
“With our marriages now legally registered with government authority ... no one could be able to stop us and our husbands from proving our marital status,” Gobia told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“More importantly, bigamy has now been termed an unlawful and punishable crime in the new law – that is a big relief.”
After partition from India in 1947, and the creation of Pakistan as a separate state for Muslims, marriages of the Hindu minority were not officially recognised, leaving Hindu women without protection under the law.
The historic Hindu Marriage Act aims to protect families, and the women and children of the Hindu community particularly, by recognising their marriages in law, said Zahid Hamid, federal law and justice minister.
It will also allow Hindus to file for divorce and remarry.
China lashes out at India: China has lashed out at India for hosting the Dalai Lama near their disputed border, warning that the Tibetan spiritual leader’s visit has touched on the political foundation of the Asian giants’ relationship.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said Wednesday that bilateral ties will suffer after Indian officials hosted the 81-year old monk in disputed territory and they and the Dalai Lama “indulged in provocative political statements.”
Beijing considers the India-based Dalai Lama a dangerous separatist seeking Tibet’s independence and frequently objects when governments host him.
His visit last week to a remote monastery was compounded by the fact that it took place in Arunachal Pradesh, which China also claims.
The nuclear-armed neighbors’ forces have faced off for decades and at times clashed over a long mountainous border.
Fishermen recall ordeal in Gulf: For six months, Indian fisherman S. George lived in fear on a boat, thinking he would never see his wife and children again.
George was one of 15 fishermen from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu detained in October last year on charges of straying into Iranian waters while fishing in the region, officials said.
Reaching their homes last week, after months with no contact with their families, the fishermen said nothing had prepared them for the ordeal they went through when they left their homes in 2014 to work on fishing boats off the coast of Bahrain.
“Once we were trapped, there were days of confusion,” George told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“It was not clear to us that we had crossed international waters into Iran while fishing and were being detained. What followed we never imagined could happen.”
There are an estimated six million Indian migrants in the six Gulf states of Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Oman, many of them trafficked and exploited, campaigners say.
Indian police widen trafficking probe: The discovery of the body of a 12-year-old Indian girl who was trafficked to work as a maid in southern city of Bengaluru, has raised fresh concerns about other children trapped in domestic servitude, police said Tuesday.
Preliminary investigations suggest the girl had fallen to her death from the ninth floor apartment where she had worked for two years after being sent to work for a couple in Bengaluru by a New Delhi-based agency, police said.
The child’s death has prompted police to launch an investigation across the southern state of Karnataka to find other girls who may have been recruited by the same agency to work as maids, senior police officer Hemant Nimbalkar said.
“She was trafficked and our probe suggests that the placement agency that sent her to Bengaluru also sent many other young girls,” Nimbalkar told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“There appears to be a big network operating.”
Nepal quake survivors at risk again: Tens of thousands of survivors of Nepal’s 2015 earthquake are at risk of future quake damage with about one third of newly constructed homes failing to meet safe building codes, the head of the country’s reconstruction agency said on Tuesday.
Nearly one million houses were destroyed by the 7.8 earthquake on April 25, 2015 and hundreds of aftershocks that ensued in the following months. Almost 9,000 people were killed and millions left homeless.
As the impoverished Himalayan nation prepares to mark the second anniversary of the disaster, Nepal faces increasing pressure over the slow place of reconstruction, particularly from foreign donors who have pledged $4 billion to help rebuild.
Govind Raj Pokharel, CEO of the National Reconstruction Authority (NRA), said close to 100,000 houses have been built or are in the process of being built since the earthquake with over 525,000 houses still required.