Woman's suicide: Family denies moral policing charge, police claim evidence
Kannur: The suicide of 40-year-old Razeena at Kayalode here following moral policing by a group of SDPI members took a turn on Friday, with the woman's family defending the youths arrested on the basis of her suicide note and refuting the allegations of harassment.
Police, however, maintained that they have got evidence of moral policing.
Razeena, a mother of three, was found dead at her home in Pinarayi village on Tuesday. Police on Thursday arrested three members of the Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI), the political wing of the banned Popular Front of India (PFI), on charges of suicide abetment. The arrested are V C Mubsheer (28), K A Faisal (34), and V K Rafnas (24) — all residents of the locality.
However, Razeena's mother, Fathima, said on Friday that the arrested youths had no role in her daughter's death. She claimed that they only spoke to Razeena and her male friend at a nearby SDPI office about their financial dealings. "Their relationship started around three years ago. The man extorted money from her, leaving her in a debt trap. But we came to know about their relationship only recently," she said.
Fathima said the arrested youths are their relatives and they only intervened to settle the financial dealings.
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"They saw Razeena and her friend talking to each other on the road; the man was taken to a nearby SDPI office to discuss the matter. Both the families were also called in. The man was not assaulted there," she said. Kannur city police commissioner Nithinraj, however, refuted the family's claim and said police acted on the basis of evidence collected from Razeena's house.
He said Razeena was talking to her male friend when the youths approached them on a motorcycle.
"They spoke in a derogatory manner and seized their mobile phones and a tablet. Later, they took the man to the SDPI office," he said. He said Razeena's suicide note clearly spoke about the trauma she underwent due to the incident. "A detailed investigation is needed to examine how many people gathered at the SDPI office. The allegations raised by the family on financial dealings between Razeena and her friend will also be investigated," he said.
Razeena's family, meanwhile, lodged a police complaint against Razeena's friend, seeking an investigation of his financial dealings with her. The family alleged that the man, a resident of Mayyil, extorted money from the woman.
Senior CPM leader and All India Democratic Women's Association national president P K Sreemathi termed the incident as 'Talibanism'. It is unfortunate that a section of people still believed that a woman should not talk to any other man other than her husband, she said.
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Time of India
34 minutes ago
- Time of India
‘Diplomatic intervention': Pakistan nominates Donald Trump for 2026 Nobel Peace Prize; cites role in India-Pakistan crisis
Donakd Trump Pakistan has nominated US President Donald Trump for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize , crediting his "decisive diplomatic intervention and pivotal leadership" during the recent crisis between India and Pakistan. The announcement was made in a post on social media platform X, where Pakistani officials said Trump played a key role in defusing tensions between the two nuclear-armed neighbours. The nomination follows comments made by Trump on Friday, in which he argued he deserved the prestigious award for multiple peace efforts, including his involvement in easing tensions between India and Pakistan. 'I should have gotten it four or five times,' the president said. 'They won't give me a Nobel Peace Prize because they only give it to liberals.' While the Indian government has rejected the idea that Trump played a role in the ceasefire, Trump insists he helped prevent a potential war. 'Well, I stopped a war... I love Pakistan. I think Modi is a fantastic man. I spoke to him last night. We're going to make a trade deal with Modi of India,' he told reporters earlier this week. 'But I stopped the war between Pakistan and India. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Free P2,000 GCash eGift UnionBank Credit Card Apply Now Undo This man was extremely influential in stopping it from the Pakistan side. Modi from the India side and others. They were going at it – and they're both nuclear countries. I got it stopped.' Pakistan's Chief of Army Staff, General Asim Munir, has also secured a lunch meeting at the White House following his recommendation that US President Donald Trump be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2026. White House spokesperson Anna Kelly confirmed the meeting will take place but did not provide a date. This is not the first time Trump has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. In the past, loyal lawmakers and supporters have submitted his name for consideration. He has also repeatedly voiced frustration at being overlooked, referencing the 2009 win of former US President Barack Obama. Trump also announced on Truth Social that he had arranged a peace treaty between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda. He said officials from both countries would travel to Washington on Monday to sign the agreement, although their joint statement listed the date as June 27. 'This is a Great Day for Africa and, quite frankly, a Great Day for the World!' Trump wrote. He also criticised the Nobel committee for not acknowledging his previous peace efforts in other regions. 'I won't get a Nobel Peace Prize for this, I won't get a Nobel Peace Prize for stopping the War between India and Pakistan, I won't get a Nobel Peace Prize for stopping the War between Serbia and Kosovo, I won't get a Nobel Peace Prize for keeping Peace between Egypt and Ethiopia. .. No, I won't get a Nobel Peace Prize no matter what I do... but the people know, and that's all that matters to me!' The peace agreement between the DRC and Rwanda, reached during three days of negotiations in Washington, aims to end a decades-long conflict in eastern Congo. Trump has positioned himself as a global peacemaker, often highlighting his negotiation skills as a key approach to ending international conflicts. However, the wars in Gaza and Ukraine are ongoing, with no resolution reached more than five months into his presidency.
Hindustan Times
34 minutes ago
- Hindustan Times
Sam Dalrymple: 'The Northeast was probably the most affected by Partition'
This book is about the five partitions of the Indian Empire, which stretched from Aden in the west to Burma in the east to now 12 nations in three geographic regions. At the time, you write, even Britain downplayed its size. Nepal and Oman were never officially recognized. Arab states bordering the Ottoman Empire and Himalayan states near Tibet were left off the maps. But these were all run by the Indian political service, defended by the Indian army, their currency was the Indian rupee. So how did the British manage to hide them? And what did the Indian Empire actually look like? Sam Dalrymple, author, Shattered Lands (Courtesy HarperCollins) So, for example, a 1909 map [Political Divisions of the Indian Empire by The Indian Gazetteer] shows Burma as British India, and Nepal and Bhutan as princely states — they're in yellow exactly like Jaipur and Hyderabad are — but hides Arabia. A 1909 map of Aden by The Indian Gazetteer recognizes much of southern Yemen as dominated by princely states. A rare Indian Empire map from 1930 includes Aden but not the Gulf states. The British were always quite reticent to talk about what they were doing in the Arabian states, partially because very few people actually lived there. These were the poorest states in the Raj. Oil hadn't been discovered yet, and so, largely, it was small settlements on the coast. The Brits were only involving themselves in the cities and making sure that the sheikhs were abiding by them. The person who integrated the sheikhs of the Gulf into the Indian empire was Lord Curzon. Lord Curzon went on a Durbar trip to Sharjah [in 1903] and invited the sheikhs and gave them all gun salutes, and created a Persian Gulf residency, on the model of the Hyderabad residency or the Jaipur residency. So, subsequently you had the list of princely states beginning alphabetically with Abu Dhabi. There's a map of the Arabian peninsula in the Gazetteer issued to Indian civil servants, and if you placed it beside the India maps, it gave you a full picture of the size of the Indian Empire from Aden to Rangoon. The public never got to see its full scale though. The Ottoman Empire officially claimed the Arabian peninsula and the British wanted to avoid aggravating Constantinople, so they always kept the Arabian Raj off official maps of India. Likewise, Britain's presence in Nepal and Bhutan — they didn't want to scare China or Tibet. But officially under the Interpretation Act of 1889, these were India. And everyone was eligible for an Indian passport... At the Round Table Conference on Burma in 1931, Burmese leaders were against separation from India. In Aden at the same time, some saw 'the connection with India as organic.' The city's many Gujarati and Parsi residents thought Aden 'was an integral part of the Indian nation'. In the 1940s, the Nawab of Bhopal wanted the princely states to, instead of acceding to India or Pakistan, be unified as a third dominion called 'Rajastan'. The Nagas wanted a separate Christian state under the Commonwealth nation. Kalat [in present-day Balochistan], then the third largest princely state in the Raj, wanted to be independent. What were, at the time, considered the most plausible partitions? I think what's remarkable is how late the idea of independence comes up. It took them until 1929 to ask for it. What they'd all been asking for until then is for the interconnectivity of the empire to remain but for equal opportunity within the empire. The model was the Roman Empire, which, around 200 AD, became completely racially equal — so Philip the Arab could become the Roman emperor and then you've got people from Tunisia or Egypt or Syria or France suddenly ruling the Roman Empire. So, for early nationalists, it would have included everything from Aden to Burma as one giant country probably governed along a system like the United States of America, which was another country that had gained independence from Britain in the past. Once it became clear that independence was happening, you had hundreds of different ideas of what different states could look like and virtually no one could have imagined what we actually got. Gandhi wanted independence for basically Bharatvarsha. He wanted to carve out a nation state that resembled Bharat of Mahabharata fame. We're so used to this idea of undivided India that we forget until as late as the 1920s, it had never been attempted before to have all of it ruled on one country. Even Ashoka and the Mughals had never ruled over the whole of the subcontinent. There had always been a bit of Tamil Nadu or a bit of Kerala that had been independent. Or it had included Afghanistan as well or something. There were various other ideas of kind of uniting all the Muslim areas. There were ideas of Burmese nationalists. There was a very early idea of a Dravidian state that has Hindustan and India as two separate bits. The idea that we grow up with in Delhi schools is the idea that Gandhi had of this eternal Bharat. The fact that there were hundreds of other visions or just near misses is forgotten. 536pp, ₹799; HarperCollins Did Gandhi set the tone for what India now looks like? It wasn't him specifically. The idea that set it up was in the wake of the 1905 Partition of Bengal. You suddenly had nationalists producing images of Bharat Mata, and the Congress latched on to it. But the depiction of independent India as Bharat Mata alienated the Burmese and the Arabs. These partitions occurred within the last hundred years and still exist in living memory. The 'Long March' of about 600,000 Indian refugees from Burma, 80,000 of whom die... How well are these stories documented — and were they hard to access? The origin story of this book was from a conversation with someone in Tripura who I was asking about Partition for our Project Dastaan [an initiative co-founded by Dalrymple in 2018 to reconnect people displaced by Partition]. And they said 'Which partition? ... Because there was the 1937 one from Burma, 1947 from India. And then Pakistan became Bangladesh in 1971 and we got another influx for refugees.' And I, having studied Partition for three years, had never considered that. Each of these 12 countries has brushed over its past. Unlike Partition where lots of people are still alive, the 'Long March' was six years earlier so we've lost six more years and it's very late to get these stories out. I've only got a couple of people who I was able to interview in person. A Sikh family from north London — of the character Uttam Singh from the book, his grandkids — had reached out to me on Instagram and said they had a Partition story. I told them about what I was doing with the book and they said 'Oh, we were in Punjab for Partition, but actually before 1941 we were all in Burma.' And then they opened this trunk and they had an untranslated diary, photographs, and everything. I think that the key one though is Yemen — it lost most of its papers in the communist takeover of South Yemen. Many of the archives there were burnt. And all of these Arab states have been very harsh with their citizenship laws — about who gets to be Kuwaiti or from Dubai... and they don't particularly want to run over this history, especially in the present day. But the big story there got discovered by professor James Onley, who was the director of research at the Qatar National Library. He was commissioned by the sheikh of Qatar, who wanted to create a Qatari digital library, to find documents relating to Qatari history. And there was nothing in Qatar on what its life was before the 1950s and '60s. He eventually stumbled upon the fact that everything is sitting in the Bombay archives. It's not in London, it's not in Qatar, it's all in Bombay. He wrote a big book that's a classic called The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj (2007). You've used a lot of personal correspondences and diaries for your research — starting from letters written by John Simon [of the Simon Commission] to his mother describing his travels, or the ones between Sarojini Naidu and her daughter Padmaja, Asha Sahay who was a foot soldier of the INA, Uttam Singh... Tell me more about finding private papers and working with such personal research material. There were some particularly interesting ones. Two of the wildest interviews and private papers I had was Ghalib Al-Qu'aiti, the Yemeni Sultan, who's descended from the Nizam of Hyderabad. I ended up meeting him and he's living stateless in Jeddah; he's not allowed to leave the country and the Brits are refusing to give him a passport. He'd attempted to write his own autobiography but never got it published... he had all these letters and private papers that no one's really ever used before. The other one was Feroz Khan Noon, the seventh prime minister of Pakistan, who was removed when martial law was first imposed in 1957. His family live in Lahore and the family archives just haven't been utilized. And then the other one was actually my godmother Brigid Keenan who, as a young girl saw the last Brits disappearing through the Gateway of India and whose father was in the PBF, the Punjab Boundary Force. He was an Irishman who is one of the few people who volunteers to try and keep the peace... and I found his letters, which were just sitting in a house in Somerset. What was your most surprising discovery? That the Persian Gulf remained a part of the Indian Empire till 1947. That one muddled me. And it was weirdly difficult to find any papers on — so much of it is online, but it's difficult to find anyone talking about it. The thing that we've got to remember is that the Gulf was the lowest ranking princely states in the Indian empire. Not even worthy of one gun salute, you write. They weren't invited! The Sultan of Oman is the exception, and Qu'aiti State, the guys in Eastern Yemen. Oman had 21 [gun salutes] Qu'aiti State had 10, and Dubai and Abu Dhabi had zero. They all were invited to go to Mayo College, etcetera as princes. I think that's going be the big surprise for Indian readers – the fact that there was a world where the united oil wealth of the entire Gulf could have gone to either India, or let's not forget, Pakistan. These were Muslim-majority states, they could have joined Pakistan instead and probably would have. Many cities, thriving centres of culture and trade, suffered tragic declines in this time. What were some of the biggest casualties? I don't think we should be nostalgic about the 1930s. Each of these countries has gained things and lost things. This was a time of high imperialism and very racially segmented societies that worked on the basis of exclusion. One of the places that's changed the most and suffered the most in this time would probably be Hyderabad, which was this centre of courtly wonder and baroque palaces. So much has been lost, so many great libraries, collections of art — Hyderabad should be the number one tourist destination in the country and would have been in the 1930s. Jaipur and Jodhpur and Udaipur and all the places we visit today were nothing compared to Hyderabad. Half of it was bulldozed, destroyed and ghettoized in the wake of the events of the 1940s. But I feel like it's a complicated legacy. This was also a place of great brutality, probably the most socially hierarchical place in the entire subcontinent with bonded labour ruining the lives of most the population. Today, through the lens of modern politics, we often look at it as a Hindu-Muslim thing with the Nizam as a Muslim, but I think if we look at it through the lens of class, we see that this was the site of, in the 1950s, South Asia's biggest communist movement and communist revolution. The Indian Army was still fighting communists in the Telangana countryside three years after it went into the place. Burma lost something immense. It was the most multicultural region in Asia, and today it's driven by ethnic factionalism, mass murder and civil war. But at the same time, Rangoon in the 1930s was also not necessarily a completely open place. It was driven heavily by class and race. Aden was a very diverse cosmopolitan place filled with traders from across the Indian ocean. It was one-third Indian, one-third Somali, one-third Arab, about ten percent Jews. Like Rangoon, it is the one that's fallen the most from one of the great ports of the world to a southern Yemeni city that's now riven by ethnic and religious civil war. The culture of Lahore is mourned immensely. But there were quite justifiable reasons many Muslims felt like they needed separation. Urvashi Butalia and Aanchal Malhotra have both talked a lot about this. People in Lahore who lived through Partition, who miss their friends, but also will tell you about how Hindus were never able to eat in the same room as their Muslim best friends. You write about the alliance between India and Pakistan after Partition. How did it come about and what went wrong? Of the two books that really discovered this, one is Pallavi Raghavan's Animosity at Bay (2019), which is an alternative history of the relationship of India and Pakistan. After the ceasefire in 1949 over Kashmir, both countries were quite happy to leave it to the UN and move on creating a new future, particularly in the wake of the Liaquat–Nehru Pact. And so Jinnah's tomb was built by an Indian Muslim. His daughter lived in Bombay her whole life without much issue. There were whole communities with half a family living on one side and the other half on the other side of the border. The other book is Avinash Paliwal's who was the first to used declassified intelligence files from the Northeast, and he's completely rewritten everything that we thought — because until that point, we'd been relying on memoirs and oral histories and news reports, often which got things wrong. Bizarrely, the thing that breaks apart the India-Pakistan relationship is India sending the army into Goa [in 1961] to annex it from the Portuguese. And that whilst everyone in India and half the world saw this as a final moment of decolonization, the Pakistani leadership, which had a year earlier put a military pact with India on the table, saw it as India suddenly muscling up its army, taking on European powers militarily, and essentially as a new Indian expansionism — that India would have this irredentist thing of trying to claim back lost territory. So the Pakistani leadership was terrified and started funding Naga separatists the same year. Within a year, India started funding the Pashtuns and Bengali separatists. And it became a tit for tat. But from 1949 to 1960, the whole of the 1950s, there was another way, many what-ifs that could have happened. And I think that more research really needs to be done to figure out the details of what went wrong. The 1965 war is actually the one that broke down the complete relationship: enemy property acts come in, all transport across the borders stopped, the beginning of a border wall is built up. How was the Northeast affected by Partition? The Northeast was probably the most affected by Partition. It's the reason that the Northeast is now a strange appendage on the right of India. Tripura was 20 kms from Chittagong, South Asia's largest port, and suddenly became landlocked by 2,000 kms in an area with no roads. The economy completely crumbled, and the indigenous population was overwhelmed by Bengalis flooding into the country. Half of the conflict, with the exception of Arunachal Pradesh, all of the others — the AFSPA agitation, the insurgencies in Tripura, Mizoram and Nagaland — have roots in Partition. Many of the ethnic conflicts in the Northeast — when you grow up in Delhi, at least — seemed so complicated. But the moment you think about how everything has to do with borders cutting through communities, and with regions being overwhelmed by new migrants, suddenly all of its politics became clear overnight. That fog lifted. Saudamini Jain is an independent journalist. She lives in New Delhi.
Time of India
an hour ago
- Time of India
Azamgarh got new identity under BJP: CM
Azamgarh/Gorakhpur: Accusing the previous govts of turning Azamgarh into a "terror hub", Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Friday said that BJP's double engine govt brought major development to the district giving it a new identity and making it the fortress of "indomitable courage" under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The CM on Friday inaugurated the 91.35-km long Gorakhpur Link Expressway, built at a cost of Rs 7,283 crore, from both its start and end points in Azamgarh and Gorakhpur, respectively, and said that the project would boost connectivity and redefine growth. The expressway, which connects Gorakhpur to Lucknow, will reduce travel time to just 3.5 hours, and will also bring down the travel time from Gorakhpur to Delhi by two hours. Besides improving connectivity, the expressway will have industrial clusters along it which will accelerate development in eastern UP. Hitting out at the previous state govts, Yogi claimed that they used to "partner with D-company and Dawood gang instead of development, breached security and made Azamgarh a stronghold of terror"."Before 2017, people did not take the name of Azamgarh as the district once struggled with an identity crisis despite having given two chief ministers to the state. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like 5 Books Warren Buffett Wants You to Read In 2025 Blinkist: Warren Buffett's Reading List Undo They (opposition parties) aligned with underworld elements instead of prioritising development and turned Azamgarh into a hub of terror," he said. "They joined hands with the D-Company and Dawood's gang, compromising with the state's security," the CM alleged, recalling the murder of Ajit Rai in 2007-08 at Shibli National College for standing up for 'Vande Mataram'. "Now, nobody would dare take law into their own hands," he said. "After 2017, the double-engine govt gave a new identity and recognition to Azamgarh's saree, black pottery, and the music heritage of Hariharpur. After Nirahua and Neelam Sonkar became members of parliament, the district witnessed a rapid wave of development," Yogi said. Speaking about the infrastructural development in the state under his govt, Yogi said that in 2017, there were only two expressways, Yamuna Expressway and Agra–Lucknow Expressway, adding that the latter had to be completed by the BJP govt. "Now, the state also boasts of the 340km Purvanchal Expressway, the 300-km Bundelkhand Expressway, and the 91-km Gorakhpur Link Expressway. In addition to these, work is underway on six more expressways, including the 600km Ganga Expressway, Lucknow-Kanpur, and the Ballia link expressway," he added. The CM said that the Delhi-Meerut Expressway had already cut down the travel time between the two cities from three hours to just 40-45 minutes. "The Ganga Expressway will be inaugurated by the PM by the end of this year. By 2047, when India becomes a developed nation, UP will play a leading role as a developed and self-reliant state," Yogi said. "Before 2017, roads in UP were in such poor condition that it was hard to distinguish the road from the potholes. The foundation stone for the Purvanchal Expressway had been laid, but land had not been acquired. The previous govt wanted to build a 110m wide expressway for Rs 15,200 crore, but the double-engine govt built a wider, 120m expressway for Rs 11,800 crore," he said. Drawing a comparison between UP before 2017 and after, the CM spoke about the recent recruitments of 60,244 police personnel, and said that for the first time, youth from every caste and religion, including 12,045 girls, were selected for govt jobs without any recommendations or bribes. "Before 2017, 'chacha-bhatija' used to go out for extortion, but now it's 'Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas'. We are developing industrial clusters along expressways to provide jobs to local youths and giving them the respect and recognition they deserve across the country and the world. Today, the youth no longer struggle for an identity. UP now has 16 airports, including four international airports, and four-lane connectivity across the state," he said. He added that the BJP would not allow national and state security to be compromised under any circumstances and referred to Operation Sindoor, surgical strikes, and air strikes as examples of the resolve of 'New India'. At the other end of the Expressway, where the CM addressed another gathering at Bhagwanpur toll plaza, he spoke about the benefits the expressway would bring to Gorakhpur and other parts of eastern UP. He said that in the past eight years, Gorakhpur Industrial Development Authority (GIDA) had attracted investments worth Rs 15,000 crore, generating employment for nearly 40,000 local youth. "With the Gorakhpur Link Expressway now operational, and with Purvanchal, Bundelkhand, and Ganga expressways set to be functional by the end of this year, the UP government is building a network that will redefine growth in the state," he said. "Who would have imagined that areas like Belghat, Khajni and Sikriganj would one day be connected by an expressway? Today, this vision has become reality. While southern Gorakhpur once witnessed large-scale migration, the region is now witnessing signs of industrial growth and job creation, with investment proposals already pouring in," Yogi said. The CM also announced that President Droupadi Murmu would inaugurate the state's first AYUSH University in Bhathat, Gorakhpur, on June 30. He also invited people to participate in the International Yoga Day celebrations on June 21 (Saturday). "Yoga is India's ancient gift to the world, and thanks to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, it received global recognition 11 years ago. Let's adopt a healthy routine by embracing yoga. As our scriptures say, the body is the means to all pursuits, so keeping it healthy is our responsibility," he said.
