Just a day before the Covid-battered year 2020 ended, a mob led by local leaders of a religious party vandalised a century-old Hindu shrine in Karak district of Khyber Pukhtunkhwa (KP). The mob of more than 1,000 people set the shrine on fire. They did not even spare an under-construction house owned by members of the Hindu community. The incident occurred in the wake of the permission granted to the minority community to extend the temple.
The administration and police remained silent spectators as the mob went about vandalising and setting fire to the premises. The police arrested 24 people for the arson only after outcry from human rights activists and the minority Hindu community. The incident also caused global embarrassment to Prime Minister Imran Khan’s PTI government, prompting Noorul Haq Qadri, the Minister for Religious Affairs, to condemn the attack, saying that the incident was “a conspiracy against sectarian harmony”.
Sohini Nayak
The sixth meeting of the India-Nepal Joint Commission, co-chaired by Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar and his Nepalese counterpart Pradeep Kumar Gyawali, was held on 15 January 2021 in New Delhi. As the Nepalese delegation, comprising the Foreign Minister, Foreign Secretary Bharat Raj Paudyal and other senior officials visited India, the world kept a keen eye on the probable developments, after the cold demeanour of the recent past over the border row.
As mentioned by the spokesman for India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), Anurag Arivastava, the primary vision of this meeting lay in having constructive discussions on the bilateral relationship between the two countries, that has indeed been taking the test of time and implement constructive measures for the future.