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      India to Repeat Voting at Polling Sites Hit by Violence

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      The attacks occurred in Manipur, a northeastern state that has been troubled by ethnic unrest. Witnesses reported that voting booths were captured and bogus ballots cast.India’s election authorities have directed officials to redo voting at several polling places in the troubled northeastern state of Manipur, after armed men attacked polling stations and captured voting booths despite the presence of dozens of paramilitary soldiers.The state of Manipur has endured ethnic conflict for months after a dispute erupted over who gets to claim a tribal status that grants extra privileges, for example preferential treatment in seeking government jobs.The conflict, which began last May, has essentially split the region, home to about three million people, pitting two ethnic groups against each other: the mostly Hindu Meiteis, who form a narrow majority, and members of Christian hill tribes known as Kukis. More than 200 people have been killed, members of both groups. Thousands were internally displaced and still fear returning to places they once called home, seeking refuge in squalid camps.The Election Commission of India said on Saturday that voting would be done again on Monday in 11 polling stations where voting had been held on Friday.The order came after the region’s top election commissioner wrote to his agency describing mob violence, gunfire, damage to electronic voting machines and bogus voters entering the booths.Video footage from the Inner Manipur constituency, one of the two seats in the state for the lower house of Parliament, showed mobs raiding a polling station and breaking electronic voting machines.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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      Sobhita Dhulipala of ‘Monkey Man’ Charts an Unusual Path to Hollywood

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      Sobhita Dhulipala considers herself an outsider — wherever she is.She grew up in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, making her an outsider in the country’s financial and fashion capital, Mumbai. Her native tongue is Telugu, making her an outsider in predominantly Hindi-speaking Bollywood.And now, with the release on Friday of the high-octane, Jordan Peele-produced “Monkey Man,” in which she stars alongside Dev Patel, she is again an outsider, thrust into Hollywood’s limelight. In fact, the premiere of the film at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, last month was the first time Ms. Dhulipala, 31, had ever set foot on American soil.“In India, I’m South Indian,” Ms. Dhulipala, who lives in Mumbai, said in a video interview from her hotel room in Los Angeles. “When I come to America, I’m Indian.”“It’s amazing that I get to come to this country with a film,” she added. “It’s like I come with an offering.”In the Amazon Prime series “Made in Heaven,” Ms. Dhulipala portrayed a social climber, navigating her way to ever higher rungs of Indian society.Amazon Prime Video IndiaThat real-life feeling of being an outsider is the undercurrent for many of her onscreen roles. In the Amazon Prime series “Made in Heaven,” Ms. Dhulipala’s character is a low-income nobody who schemes her way into upper-class circles. In “Monkey Man,” she plays Sita, a call girl whose business is the pleasure of powerful but despicable men.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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      Tangled in Steel With No Way Out: How the Crew Stuck in Baltimore Is Faring

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      Twenty-two seafarers from India find themselves not only trapped in the ship that struck the Francis Scott Key Bridge, but also in an unexpected spotlight.Even from miles away, the destruction of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore is a jarring visual: Chunks of steel jut above the water like metallic icebergs. Twisted gray beams protrude in crooked positions. From a park near Fort McHenry, visitors can see the giant cargo ship that struck the bridge and remains lodged in the wreckage.Less visible, however, are the 22 crew members from India who have remained on the ship, named the Dali, since the disaster on Tuesday.Little is publicly known about them other than that they are seafarers who embarked on a journey aboard the 985-foot-long cargo ship that was on its way to Sri Lanka, carrying 4,700 shipping containers, when it lost power and struck the Key Bridge, causing the structure to collapse.Since the accident, which killed six construction workers, the crew members have found themselves in an unexpected spotlight. While keeping the ship operable, they are answering a deluge of questions from officials investigating the nighttime catastrophe, as the evidence of what occurred lays around them in mangled ruins stretching across the bow and deck.While officials investigate what could have caused the tragedy, another question has emerged this week: What could the crew members, who have limited access to the outside world, be going through right now?“They must feel this weight of responsibility that they couldn’t stop it from happening,” said Joshua Messick, the executive director of the Baltimore International Seafarers’ Center, a religious nonprofit that seeks to protect the rights of mariners.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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      Tax Dispute Becomes Political as India Freezes Opposition’s Accounts

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      Just weeks before pivotal elections, the authorities have blocked access to several of the Indian National Congress’s main bank accounts, the party said.India’s largest opposition party accused the national authorities on Thursday of paralyzing its political activities by blocking the party’s access to its bank accounts, in what it described as a heavy-handed response to a tax dispute just weeks before a pivotal general election.Officials with the party, the Indian National Congress, said that eight of its 11 main accounts at four banks had been frozen, and that there was no clear indication of when the party would regain access to the money.“We can’t support our workers; we can’t support our candidates,” Rahul Gandhi, an Indian National Congress leader, said at a news conference in New Delhi. “Our leaders can’t fly. Forget flying — they can’t take a train.”“Our ability to fight elections has been damaged,” he said.Campaigning is heating up for a six-week-long election that starts on April 19 and will determine the next prime minister for the world’s most populous democracy. To run election campaigns from the Himalayan mountains to India’s southern shores, political groups spend billions of dollars in what is seen as one of the world’s most expensive elections.Under Indian law, political groups are exempted from paying income taxes on their funding from individuals and corporations, but must declare their income to the tax authorities each year. The current dispute relates to how heavily the Indian National Congress should be penalized for past irregularities.Last month, the country’s Income Tax Department, which is controlled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, froze the Congress party’s accounts on accusations that it had been 45 days late in filing tax returns on its cash contributions for the 2017-18 financial year. The department also took from the party’s bank accounts $2 million of the $16 million that it said was owed in penalties.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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      The Ambani Wedding Event Signifies the Rise of the Oligarch in Modi’s India

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      Rihanna, Mark Zuckerberg, bejeweled elephants and 5,500 drones. Those were some of the highlights of what is likely the most ostentatious “pre-wedding” ceremony the modern world has ever seen.On a long weekend in early March, members of the global elite gathered to celebrate the impending nuptials of the billionaire business titan Mukesh Ambani’s youngest son, Anant, and Radhika Merchant. Monarchs, politicians and the ultrawealthy, including Bill Gates and Ivanka Trump, descended on an oil refinery city in the western Indian state of Gujarat for an event so extravagant you’d be forgiven for thinking it was, well, a wedding. But that will take place in July. For the long windup to the big day, some of Bollywood’s biggest stars, though invited as guests, took to the stage to sing and dance in what amounted to a bending of the knee to India’s most powerful family.Watching the event, I couldn’t help thinking of the 1911 durbar, or royal reception, when King George V was proclaimed emperor of India. Once India won its independence from Britain in 1947, it committed itself to becoming a democratic welfare state — an audacious experiment that resulted in what is now the world’s largest democracy. But in advance of this year’s general election, expected to begin in April, the Ambani-Merchant matrimonial extravaganza shows us where true power in India now lies: with a handful of people whose untrammeled wealth and influence has elevated them to the position of India’s shadow leaders.It’s difficult to imagine the Ambani-Merchant wedding event in an India that isn’t ruled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It’s true that the Ambanis have been wealthy for years now and that accusations of favorable treatment from government authorities are not unique to this family or the Modi government. But no other prime minister in India’s history has been so openly aligned with big business, and never before has the concentration of wealth been more apparent. India’s richest 1 percent now own more than 40 percent of the country’s wealth, according to Oxfam. The country has the world’s largest number of poor, at 228.9 million. And according to a newly published study looking at 92 low- and middle-income countries, India had the third-highest percentage of “zero food” children — babies between 6 months and 23 months old who had gone a day or more without food other than breast milk at the time they were surveyed. Oxfam has described this new India as the “survival of the richest.”For the uberwealthy, this presents a no-holds-barred opportunity to exert their power and influence. In 2017, Mr. Modi introduced a fund-raising mechanism called “electoral bonds” to allow unlimited anonymous donations to political parties. In the five years that followed, the prime minister’s Bharatiya Janata Party received $635 million in contributions through such bonds, 5.5 times as much as its closest rival, the Congress Party. The 2019 Indian general elections cost $8.6 billion, surpassing the estimated $6.5 billion spent on the 2016 U.S. presidential and congressional elections.Analysis by three independent media organizations in India published on March 14 revealed that a company called Qwik Supply Chains purchased bonds in the scheme worth $50 million. One of the company’s three directors, reporters later uncovered, is also a director at several subsidiaries of Reliance, Mukesh Ambani’s mega-firm. A spokesperson for Reliance said that Qwik is not a Reliance subsidiary and did not respond to further questioning from Reuters. The Indian Supreme Court has since struck down the electoral bond mechanism, calling it unconstitutional, but the delay in addressing the matter has most likely come too late to change the outcome of the forthcoming election, which is widely considered all but certain to go in Mr. Modi’s favor.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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      India’s 2024 General Election: What to Know

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      Why does this election matter?How does India vote?Who is running and who is likely to win?When will we find out the results?Where can I find out more information?What other elections are happening?Why does this election matter?India is holding its multiphase general elections from April 19 to June 1, in a vote that will determine the political direction of the world’s most populous nation for the next five years.The usually high-turnout affair, which was formally set on Saturday, is a mammoth undertaking described as the biggest peacetime logistical exercise anywhere.Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose power is well entrenched, is seeking a third term. In his decade at the helm, he has projected himself as a champion of India’s development, trying to address some of the basic failures — like antiquated infrastructure and a lack of clean water and toilets — holding the country back from reaching its potential as a major power. But his push to reshape India’s secular democracy as a Hindu-first nation has aggravated the religious and ethnic fault lines in the hugely diverse country.In a region of frequent political turmoil, India is deeply proud of its nearly undisrupted electoral democracy since its founding as a republic more than 75 years ago. Although independent institutions have come under assault from Mr. Modi’s efforts to centralize power and the ruling party is seen as having an unfair advantage over political fund-raising, voting in India is still seen as free and fair, and results are accepted by candidates.How does India vote?India has a parliamentary system of governance. The party leading the majority of the 543 seats in the upper house of the Parliament gets to form the government and appoint as prime minister one of its winning candidates.The country has over 960 million eligible voters, with about 470 million of them women. Turnout in Indian elections is usually high, with the parliamentary elections in 2019 drawing a 67 percent turnout.

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      U.S. Fears Russia Might Put a Nuclear Weapon in Space

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      American spy agencies are divided on whether Moscow would go so far, but the concern is urgent enough that Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken has asked China and India to try to talk Russia down.When Russia conducted a series of secret military satellite launches around the time of its invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, American intelligence officials began delving into the mystery of what, exactly, the Russians were doing.Later, spy agencies discovered Russia was working on a new kind of space-based weapon that could threaten the thousands of satellites that keep the world connected.In recent weeks, a new warning has circulated from America’s spy agencies: Another launch may be in the works, and the question is whether Russia plans to use it to put a real nuclear weapon into space — a violation of a half-century-old treaty. The agencies are divided on the likelihood that President Vladimir V. Putin would go so far, but nonetheless the intelligence is an urgent concern to the Biden administration.Even if Russia does place a nuclear weapon in orbit, U.S. officials are in agreement in their assessment that the weapon would not be detonated. Instead, it would lurk as a time bomb in low orbit, a reminder from Mr. Putin that if he was pressed too hard with sanctions, or military opposition to his ambitions in Ukraine or beyond, he could destroy economies without targeting humans on earth.Despite the uncertainties, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken raised the possibility of the Russian nuclear move with his Chinese and Indian counterparts on Friday and Saturday on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference.Mr. Blinken’s message was blunt: Any nuclear detonation in space would take out not only American satellites but also those in Beijing and New Delhi.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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      Indian Burglars Return Filmmaker’s Medal

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      Thieves in southern India kept the cash, the gold and most of the silver, but returned to the scene of the crime with one item, and an apology note.When the thieves broke into the country home of a renowned film director in southern India, taking gold, silver and cash, they made a clean getaway. But days later, a small plastic bag appeared outside the house’s gates, stitched shut with thin sticks and containing something wrapped in a white handkerchief.Inside was a medal for a prestigious national award that the director, M. Manikandan, had won in 2021 for one of his films.With it was a brief note handwritten in Tamil, a regional language.“Sir, please forgive us,” the note read. “Your hard work belongs to you alone.”The burglary and partial return, with its small-town intrigue and big-hearted absurdity, could have figured in the kind of movies Mr. Manikandan and other filmmakers in India’s south make.While Bollywood gets much attention and recognition outside the country, some of India’s most endearing and creative films come from its diverse regional cinemas, in languages such as Tamil and Malayalam. Mr. Manikandan broke through with a film about two egg-stealing, slum-dwelling brothers with a single goal — to do whatever it took to taste pizza. The film for which he won the purloined medal, “Kadaisi Vivasayi” or “The Last Farmer,” was a commentary on the difficulties of farming in India. But its surreal twists also laid bare the absurdities of the nation’s bureaucracy.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