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      India’s Epidemic of Cow Vigilantism Unnerves Nation’s Muslims

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      An unexpectedly narrow victory at the polls for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu-first agenda has not cooled simmering sectarian tensions, as some had hoped.A recent series of attacks by Hindus on Muslims in India have highlighted how sectarian violence remains a serious problem, even as the country seeks to define itself on the world stage as a robust democracy with equal rights for all.Despite a close election victory in June by Prime Minister Narendra Modi that many interpreted as a rebuff, there have been numerous instances of such violence, according to India-focused human rights organizations and a New York Times tally of local news reports. At least a dozen involve so-called cow vigilantism — violence related to the slaughter or smuggling of cows, or the suspicion of such acts.In August, a group of Hindu men beat up a 72-year-old Muslim man because they believed he was carrying beef in his bag. Also that month, a group that describes themselves as cow protectors fatally shot a 19-year-old Hindu student because they thought he was a Muslim smuggling cows, according to his family.The cow issue is deeply divisive because it pits the religious beliefs of one group against the diet of another. Cows are sacred in Hinduism, especially among its upper castes, and many Indian states ban their slaughter, as well as the sale or smuggling of beef. But beef is consumed by many Muslims. Religious violence is not rare in India, where more than one billion Hindus, around 200 million Muslims, 30 million Christians, 25 million Sikhs and other religious minorities coexist, sometimes uneasily.Under Mr. Modi, who has pursued a Hindu nationalist agenda since coming to power in 2014, Muslims have increasingly become a target for hard-line Hindu groups affiliated with his Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P. Hundreds of instances of religious violence, including lynching, beating and abuse, occur every year, according to data from the National Crime Records Bureau.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Nepal Lifts Ban on TikTok, in a Likely Overture to China

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      The move signaled that Nepal’s new prime minister, who has cultivated ties with China, would continue on that path.The new prime minister of Nepal, K.P. Sharma Oli, on Thursday overturned a ban on TikTok that his predecessor imposed in November, an apparent sign that the veteran politician intended to strengthen the country’s relations with China, its northern neighbor.The popular social media app, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, was banned for its refusal to curb what the previous Nepalese government had described as hate speech that disturbed “social harmony.” At the time, Nepali officials said that they had resorted to the ban after TikTok declined to address concerns about troubling content.TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.The decision to reinstate TikTok signaled Mr. Oli’s belief that, amid the geopolitical bickering between China and India, Nepal’s neighbor to the south that also banned the app, the Himalayan country was better off aligning with China.TikTok and many other Chinese apps have been banned in India since 2020, amid historically fraught relations between the two countries and more recent efforts to dominate the South Asian region.Prithvi Subba Gurung, a Nepalese government spokesman, said TikTok would now have to abide by certain directives, such as naming a point of contact in the country.“We have set a few conditions such as TikTok to be used for promoting Nepali tourism, supporting us for digital safety, digital literacy and digital education and curb hate content,” Mr. Gurung said.On Thursday morning, the Chinese ambassador to Nepal, Chen Song, wrote on the social media platform X, “Today is a good day,” which many Nepalese took to mean that the talks to reinstate TikTok had been finalized.Mr. Oli, 73, who leads Nepal’s largest communist party, returned to power in July as the leader of a new ruling coalition, taking charge of the government for the fourth time. The previous leader, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, was seen as easier than Mr. Oli for India to manipulate and frequently changing coalition partners for his personal benefit.Mr. Oli has made no secret of his opposition to India’s influence in Nepal. During his first stint as prime minister in 2015, he stood up against a crippling economic blockade that India had imposed over certain provisions in Nepal’s Constitution.During his second stint as prime minister, after elections in 2017, Mr. Oli revised Nepal’s political map in a way that further soured relations with India.On Thursday, Nepal and China also agreed to expand a few development projects aimed at strengthening bilateral ties, including an agreement to complete the upgrade of a highway in Kathmandu, the Nepalese capital, as part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative project. Anupreeta Das More

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      The Willful Amnesia Behind Trump’s Attacks on Kamala Harris’s Identity

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      When I was a child, my dad sat my older sister and me down in our living room and explained to us the rules of race in America. A Black man born into a Mississippi where Black boys could be lynched for merely standing too close to a white woman, he met my white mom in 1972. That was just a few years after the Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia finally struck down 300 years’ worth of laws prohibiting people who descended from slavery from marrying people whose ancestors had enslaved them. In other words, Dad held no illusions about how race worked in our society and felt it was his duty as a parent to prepare us. Our mother might be white, he told us, but in this country, that fact was irrelevant to how we would be seen and treated. She might be white, but we were Black.What my dad said that day when I was an elementary school student merely confirmed an understanding that I already had. I grew up surrounded by aunts, uncles, cousins and my grandmama from my dad’s side as just another child in a big Black family, my mom most often the only white person at family events. Several times a year, we’d travel about an hour out of town to rural Iowa, where we’d spend time with my white grandparents, who loved us dearly but who existed in a completely white world that we were never quite fully a part of.I cannot say exactly how I knew I was Black before my dad sat us down, but I knew. Everyone knew. With my white family I was not white but part white. With my Black family and in the rest of America, I was Black. In American society, this race rule is so embedded that it is not even questioned.Last week, former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee, told a room full of Black journalists that Vice President Kamala Harris, whose mother was Indian and whose father is Jamaican, “was always of Indian heritage” and “now wants to be known as Black.” When he did so, he was embracing a convenient historical amnesia about the country he seeks to lead.By suggesting that there was something nefarious or politically contrived about a mixed-race person claiming Blackness as her identity, he was acting as if that choice hadn’t been made for Harris when she was born to a Black father. We saw this same orchestrated amnesia when Barack Obama set out to become the first Black president. It seems that when a mixed-race Black American appears to be ascending to the pinnacles of American power, some white Americans suddenly forget the race rules that white society created.Trump’s questioning of Harris’s Black bona fides was swiftly denounced because Harris has long identified as Black, recounting a similar story to mine about her Indian mother explaining Harris’s Blackness to her as a child. In her 2019 autobiography, Harris wrote: “My mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters. She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women.” And of course, Harris would go on to graduate from one of the most prestigious historically Black universities where she had joined the nation’s oldest Black sorority.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How a Crisis for Vultures Led to a Human Disaster: Half a Million Deaths

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      The birds were accidentally poisoned in India. New research on what happened next shows how wildlife collapse can be deadly for people.To say that vultures are underappreciated would be putting it mildly. With their diet of carrion and their featherless heads, the birds are often viewed with disgust. But they have long provided a critical cleaning service by devouring the dead.Now, economists have put an excruciating figure on just how vital they can be: The sudden near-disappearance of vultures in India about two decades ago led to more than half a million excess human deaths over five years, according to a forthcoming study in the American Economic Review.Rotting livestock carcasses, no longer picked to the bones by vultures, polluted waterways and fed an increase in feral dogs, which can carry rabies. It was “a really huge negative sanitation shock,” said Anant Sudarshan, one of the study’s authors and an economics professor at the University of Warwick in England.The findings reveal the unintended consequences that can occur from the collapse of wildlife, especially animals known as keystone species for the outsize roles they play in their ecosystems. Increasingly, economists are seeking to measure such impacts.A study looking at the United States, for example, has suggested that the loss of ash trees to the invasive emerald ash borer increased deaths related to cardiovascular and respiratory illness. And in Wisconsin, researchers found that the presence of wolves reduced vehicle collisions with deer by about a quarter, creating an economic benefit that was 63 times greater than the cost of wolves killing livestock.“Biodiversity and ecosystem functioning do matter to human beings,” said Eyal Frank, an economist at the University of Chicago and one of the authors of the new vulture study. “And it’s not always the charismatic and fuzzy species.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kamala Harris y su herencia india, más allá de los memes

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      Harris ni presume ni oculta sus raíces indias. Hace una que otra referencia a ellas. También las utiliza estratégicamente.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]Para la mayoría de las personas que vieron la cita que circuló esta semana como meme, solo se trataba de algo gracioso que Kamala Harris dijo en un discurso en 2023: “¿Creen que acaban de caerse de un cocotero?”.Sin embargo, para muchos indios e indios estadounidenses, la frase, que Harris atribuyó a su madre, tiene un significado más profundo. Tamil Nadu, el estado del sur de India del que es originaria la familia de su madre, es uno de los mayores productores de cocoteros del país. También es el tipo de cosa que diría un padre o una madre en India.Harris, vicepresidenta y candidata demócrata a la presidencia, ni presume ni oculta su herencia india. De vez en cuando hace alguna referencia. Y también la utiliza estratégicamente.El año pasado, Harris habló de su profunda conexión personal con India en una comida ofrecida en Washington para Narendra Modi, el primer ministro indio, a quien Estados Unidos ha estado cortejando. Su introducción a los conceptos de igualdad, libertad y democracia vino de su abuelo indio, con quien daba largos paseos durante sus visitas a Chennai, explicó Harris.“Fueron estas lecciones que aprendí a una edad muy temprana las que inspiraron mi interés por el servicio público”, afirmó.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Family Loses 3 Generations of Women in India Crowd’s Panic

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      Vinod Kumar was away from home on Tuesday, as he usually is for days at a time in search of masonry work, when he got the dreadful call.All the women in his family, three generations of them, were dead, crushed in a stampede.For the rest of the day, Mr. Kumar and his three sons went from hospital to hospital searching for their loved ones among the bodies of the 121 people who had died when a large gathering of a spiritual guru broke into deadly panic.Close to midnight, they found the bodies of his wife, Raj Kumari, 42, and daughter, Bhumi, 9, at the government hospital in Hathras, laid out on large slabs of ice among the dozens others in the corridor.“Why did you leave me just like that? Who will scold the children now and push them to go to school?” Mr. Kumar wailed at the feet of his wife.But he couldn’t afford to be entirely lost in grief yet. The body of his mother was yet to be found. He bent over to pick up his daughter for one last embrace. Bhumi wore a yellow top, and her hair was tied in a ponytail with a pink band.“Let her sleep,” Nitin, Mr. Kumar’s oldest son, told him, pulling the girl away from his father to lay her back on the slab so they could continue the search.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Roof Collapses at Delhi Airport Terminal Amid Storms and Heavy Rain

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      At least six people were injured when parts of the roof caved in and crushed vehicles at Indira Gandhi airport in New Delhi, according to local reports. All domestic departures were suspended.Part of the roof at a terminal at India’s busiest airport collapsed early Friday amid heavy thunderstorms and rains, causing injuries and trapping passengers. The airport suspended all departures from the terminal.India’s minister of civil aviation said in a social media post that rescue operations were in progress at Terminal 1 of the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi and that emergency responders were on site. Airport officials said that the collapse happened around 5 a.m. local time in the departure area of the terminal and that all departures from the terminal had been suspended. Terminal 1 handles domestic flights.Part of the roof collapsed onto the pickup and drop-off area outside the terminal, crushing several vehicles, the Press Trust of India, a news agency, reported, citing local fire officials. At least six people were injured, according to the report.More than 600 flights out of the airport were delayed and 17 canceled as of around 8 a.m., according to FlightAware, a flight information tracking site.The terminal was recently renovated and expanded to reach a capacity of 40 million passengers annually, according to a news release from the airport.This is a developing story. More

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      Nancy Pelosi Meets With Dalai Lama, Despite China’s Criticism

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      The former House speaker joined a congressional delegation that met with the Tibetan spiritual leader at his home in India. China calls him a separatist.A high-level U.S. congressional delegation, including the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, met with the Dalai Lama at his Indian home on Wednesday, a visit that was condemned in advance by China’s government, which considers the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader a separatist.The delegation, led by Michael McCaul, the Republican chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, arrived on Tuesday in the Himalayan town of Dharamsala, where the Dalai Lama has lived since the 1960s. The delegation visited the offices of the Tibetan government in exile, which is pushing for autonomy for Tibet within China.The trip comes days after Congress passed a bill with bipartisan support that urged China to start dialogue with Tibetan leaders to find a solution to the longstanding conflict.China’s criticism of the visit was immediate and unsurprising. Its leaders consider the government in exile illegal and regard any support for the cause of autonomy for Tibet, which they call Xizang, as interference in internal Chinese matters.“We urge the U.S. side to fully recognize the anti-China separatist nature of the Dalai group, honor the commitments the U.S. has made to China on issues related to Xizang, stop sending the wrong signal to the world,” the Chinese Embassy in New Delhi said in a statement on Tuesday night. U.S. officials have often met with the Dalai Lama, 88. Ms. Pelosi’s presence in the delegation, however, brought reminders of her 2022 trip to Taiwan, the self-governing island that China claims as its territory, when she was still speaker of the House.That contentious visit, which raised fears within the Biden administration of further deteriorating an already frosty relationship with Beijing, led to a sharp response from China, including trade restrictions on Taiwan and military exercises near the island.The visit to India also comes as Washington and New Delhi deepen their relationship, motivated in part by the perception of a shared Chinese threat. Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, is in New Delhi this week, holding multiple rounds of talks with Indian officials on expanding defense and technology cooperation.Those extensive discussions, coming weeks after Prime Minister Narendra Modi won a third term in office, indicate how much Washington prioritizes the relationship with India, with American officials increasingly speaking of New Delhi as a counterweight to Beijing.Tenzin Lekshay, a spokesman for the Central Tibetan Administration, the government in exile, said that Tibet’s situation should not be seen through “the lens of increasing rivalry between the U.S. and China,” but as a reminder of how the Tibetan way of life “is facing an existential threat” as China assimilates the region.“We do hope that leaders of the free world will stand for the Tibet cause, particularly stressing the Chinese leadership to reinstall the dialogue to resolve the Sino-Tibet conflict,” Mr. Lekshay said. More