World

Bollywood megastar Ranveer Singh was grilled by police on Monday on charges of “obscenity” after posting naked photos of himself, in a case highlighting India’s complex relationship with nudity.

Singh, 37, posted in July on social media the racy images shot for New York-based Paper magazine, sparking a media frenzy in India and resulting in multiple complaints.

Mumbai police questioned Singh for more than two hours on Monday morning on charges of “corrupting youth of society” and “embarrassing women”, police said, and recorded his official statement.

“The inquiry is ongoing,” senior police inspector Jaykumar Suryavanshi told AFP, without disclosing details of Singh’s statement.

The photos of Singh, the star of hits “Gully Boy” and “Simmba”, stretched out naked on a carpet provoked a storm of debate on India’s rolling TV news.

“Of course this is vulgar, we can see his bum… it’s a national issue!” exclaimed lawyer Vedika Chaubey during a panel show on broadcaster NDTV, days after lodging a complaint against Singh with police.

India is home to ancient sex treatise the “Kama Sutra” and erotic scenes are a common sight on ancient temples, as are ash-smeared holy men taking part in religious festivals today.

But Singh, who is married to fellow superstar Deepika Padukone, is heading down a well-trodden path of complaints and charges against celebrities falling foul of vague colonial-era rules about “obscenity”.

“Like they say, ‘beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder’. Obscenity very much therefore… lies in the crotch of the beholder,” said Supreme Court lawyer Faisal Sherwani.

Personalities hit by complaints include fellow Bollywood megastar Aamir Khan, who was naked apart from a strategically placed cassette player in a poster promoting his 2014 movie “P.K.”.

Model turned actor Milind Soman was hit with charges after baring it all in a 1995 shoe advertisement with model Madhu Sapre and a python. The charges were dropped after 14 years.

Renowned artist M.F. Husain fled the country after a painting depicting a nude woman posing across a map of the country got him in legal trouble, dying in self-imposed exile in 2011.

Earlier this year a professor in Kolkata said she was fired after posting photos of herself in a bikini on Instagram. The university is reportedly suing her for $12 million.

Human rights lawyer and social activist Abha Singh said the laws needed to be updated.

“(Indian) youth feel, ‘What is wrong? If you don’t want to see, turn your eyes, close your eyes. A piece of beauty is something which you have to appreciate’,” she told AFP.

The Iranian president on Monday said reviving a 2015 deal with world powers will be pointless unless the UN nuclear watchdog puts an end to its probe of undeclared sites in the country.

Ebrahim Raisi’s comments came as Tehran reviews the US response to its suggestions on a “final” text put forward by the EU to salvage the landmark deal.

The United States had remained adamant that Tehran cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency to clear up suspicions about earlier work at three undeclared sites.

“In the negotiations, safeguard issues are one of the fundamental ones. All of the safeguard issues must be resolved,” Raisi told reporters at a press conference in the capital Tehran.

“Without resolving the safeguard issues, talking about the agreement is meaningless,” he added.

Iran has repeatedly urged the IAEA to end the issue before any revived deal is implemented but US State Department spokesman Vedant Patel on Thursday said “we do not believe there should be any conditionality” between that issue and the JCPOA, as the deal is known.

Patel called on Iran to answer the IAEA’s questions about the three sites.

In June, the IAEA’s board of governors adopted a resolution censuring Iran for failing to adequately explain the previous discovery of traces of enriched uranium at three sites not declared by Tehran as having hosted nuclear activities.

The agreement between Iran and six world powers — Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States — gave the Islamic republic sanctions relief in exchange for curbs on its nuclear programme.

Since taking office in 2021, President Joe Biden has sought to return the US to the deal unilaterally abandoned by his predecessor Donald Trump in 2018.

The Vienna talks, which began in April last year, aim to return the US to the nuclear pact, including through the lifting of sanctions on Iran, to return Tehran to full compliance with its commitments.

The indirect negotiations between Tehran and Washington have so far been carried out through the mediation of the European Union.

The 2015 deal, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA, aimed to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon — something it has always denied wanting to do.

“Nuclear weapons have no place in our defense doctrine,” Raisi reiterated on Monday.

The smattering of homes in Panjal Sheikh started to collapse one by one, as torrential rain lashed the tiny southern Pakistani village and flooded the vast stretches of farmland around it.

After nearly two weeks of incessant downpours this month, there was nothing left but damaged walls, debris and piles of people’s belongings poking out among pools of brown floodwater and grey mud.

The residents of Panjal Sheikh are among the tens of millions hit across Pakistan by the worst monsoon floods in a decade, which have destroyed or damaged nearly a million homes and killed more than 1,000 people since the rains began in June.

“When it started raining, there was destruction in every direction,” said Panjal Sheikh resident Mukhtiar Ahmed.

“As we rushed to try and save the children in a house that had just collapsed, another house fell, and then another,” he told AFP on Sunday.

“The whole village has been erased.”

Pakistan receives heavy — often destructive — rains during its annual monsoon season, which are crucial for agriculture and water supplies.

But the catastrophic damage from this year’s downpours and flooding has not been seen for decades.

Pakistani officials blame climate change, which is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather around the world.

– ‘We are in deep pain’ –

The relentlessness of the disaster was shocking, said Ghulam Rasool, the 80-year-old village head of Panjal Sheikh — which lies less than 25 kilometres from the banks of the mighty Indus River.

“There was a loud sound suddenly, and we could not figure out what had happened,” he told AFP.

He suspected that his son’s small home on the family land had collapsed.

“We thought all the four had died,” Rasool said, referring to his son, daughter-in-law and their two children.

As the family tried and failed to keep the floodwaters from rising on their land, Rasool’s pregnant daughter went into labour.

“I felt the pain but I was scared to tell anyone,” said Naheed Sheikh, 30. “I finally told my mother.”

Through the driving rain, her family managed to get her to an unkempt hospital where her daughter was delivered via a caesarean section.

Her ordeal continued when she got home.

“I was half asleep in my room… when we felt that the room could collapse,” she told AFP.

“I rushed out with my daughter in my arms and the walls fell as soon as we got out.”

The rooms Rasool had built for his other sons and daughters also fell one after another.

At the end of the 13 days of rain, he surveyed what remained, stumbling through heaps of straw, personal belongings and the piles of firewood he would sell to make ends meet.

– Desperate for aid –

He said he pushed down the weak walls that remained so they do not fall on any passersby.

“Everything is destroyed. We can’t even cook a meal for ourselves,” Rasool said.

“We are in deep pain and waiting for someone to help us.”

Many flood survivors from villages such as Panjal Sheikh have made their way to Sukkur, the largest city nearby, hoping for assistance.

Some sat along an elevated highway under tents fashioned from plastic sheets.

As two military trucks passed carrying food, sacks of wheat, tents and cooking pots, a crowd of people rushed towards them.

Some desperately tried to climb up the trucks, fighting each other to try and reach the aid items.

Soldiers shouted at them to form a queue, but few listened.

Floods in Pakistan have killed more than 1,000 people after what its climate change minister called a record unbroken cycle of monsoon rains with “8 weeks of non-stop torrents”.

AFP explains what the monsoon is, why it is so important and yet so dangerous, and how climate change and other man-made effects may be altering the vast life-giving but destructive annual weather system.

What is the South Asian monsoon?

The Southwest or the Asian Summer Monsoon is essentially a colossal sea breeze that brings South Asia 70-80 percent of its annual rainfall between June and September every year.

It occurs when summer heat warms the landmass of the subcontinent, causing the air to rise and sucking in cooler Indian Ocean winds which then produce enormous volumes of rain.

Why it is important?

The monsoon is vital for agriculture and therefore for the livelihoods of millions of farmers and for food security in the poor region of around two billion people.

But it brings destruction every year in landslides and floods. Melting glaciers add to the volume of water while unregulated construction in flood-prone areas exacerbates the damage.

Is it the same every year?

Despite being heavily studied, the monsoon is relatively poorly understood. Exactly where and when the rain will fall is hard to forecast and varies considerably.

This year, for example, while Pakistan has seen a deluge, eastern and northeastern India reportedly had the lowest amounts of July rainfall in 122 years.

What explains the variability?

Fluctuations are caused by changes in global atmospheric and oceanic conditions, such as the El Nino effect in the Pacific and a phenomenon called the Equatorial Indian Ocean Oscillation (EQUINOO) only discovered in 2002.

Other factors are thought to include local effects such as aerosols, clouds of dust blowing in from the Sahara desert, air pollution and even irrigation by farmers.

What about climate change?

India is getting hotter and in recent years has seen more cyclones but scientists are unclear on how exactly a warming planet is affecting the highly complex monsoon.

A study last year by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) tracking monsoon shifts from the mid-20th century suggested that it was becoming stronger and more erratic.

Initially, aerosol pollution reflecting sunlight subdued rainfall, but from the 1980s the warming effects of greenhouse gases began to drive stronger and more volatile rainy seasons, the study said.

Do other studies bear this out?

Broadly yes. The Indian government’s first ever climate change assessment, released in 2020, said that overall monsoon precipitation fell around six percent from 1951 to 2015.

It said that there was an “emerging consensus” that this was down to aerosol pollution considerably offsetting the expected rise in rainfall from global warming.

With continued warming and lower aerosol emissions, it projected more rain and greater variability by the end of this century, together with “substantial increases” in daily precipitation extremes.

What will this mean for people?

India’s 2021 monsoon was a case in point: June rain was above normal, in July it fell, August was nearly a drought and in September precipitation returned with a vengeance.

Several hundred died in floods in Maharashtra in July and in Gujarat in September. The same month a cloudburst turned the streets of Hyderabad into raging rivers in just two hours.

But by October farmers in parts of northern and north-eastern India were reeling from drought while elsewhere the monsoon took longer than usual to withdraw.

“More chaos in the Indian monsoon rainfall will make it harder to adapt,” Anders Levermann from PIK and Columbia University told AFP last year.

International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi said on Monday he was en route to inspect Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, which has been targeted by fresh shelling over the past day, according to its operator.

The Zaporizhzhia plant — Europe’s largest atomic facility — has been occupied by Russian troops since the start of the war.

Moscow and Kyiv are trading blame for shelling around the complex of six Soviet-designed nuclear reactors in the city of Energodar, in southern Ukraine.

Last week the plant was briefly cut off from the national grid for the first time in its four-decade history owing to Russian shelling of the last working power line, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said.

Over the weekend, Ukrainian nuclear agency Energoatom, which operates the plant, warned of the risk of a radiation leak.

Nevertheless, “during the last day, the Russian military continued to fire at Energodar and the site of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant”, the agency said on Monday morning.

Ten people were injured, including four plant workers, and as of 10:00 am (0700 GMT) the plant “operates with the risk of violating radiation and fire safety standards”, Energoatom said on Telegram.

“The occupiers, preparing for the arrival of the IAEA mission, increased pressure on the personnel of the plant to prevent them from disclosing evidence of the occupiers’ crimes at the plant and its use as a military base,” it added. 

– Long-awaited visit –

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has for months been asking to visit the site, warning of “the very real risk of a nuclear disaster”.

On Monday Grossi said “the day has come” and that an IAEA support and assistance mission is “now on its way”.

On Twitter the IAEA director general said the team from the UN nuclear watchdog would arrive at the power plant “later this week”.

In a photograph accompanying his tweet, Grossi posed with a team of 13 people wearing caps and sleeveless jackets bearing the IAEA logo.

The United Nations has called for an end to all military activity in the area surrounding the complex.

Ukraine initially feared an IAEA visit would legitimise the Russian occupation of the site before finally supporting the idea of a mission.

The G7 industrial powers on Monday demanded access “without impediment” for the IAEA team.

They must be allowed to “engage directly, and without interference, with the Ukrainian personnel responsible for operating these facilities”, the G7 Non-Proliferation Directors Group said in a statement.

But Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said in Stockholm: “This mission will be the hardest in the history of the IAEA, given the active combat activities undertaken by the Russian federation on the ground and also the very blatant way that Russia is trying to legitimise its presence”.

Last week the advisor to the Ukrainian energy minister said she was sceptical the team would even reach the plant.

Advisor Lana Zerkal told Ukraine’s Radio NV that Russia was “artificially creating all the conditions so that the mission will not reach the site”, despite formally agreeing to the inspection.

Ukraine was the site of the world’s worst nuclear catastrophe in 1986, when a reactor at the northern Chernobyl plant exploded and spewed radiation into the atmosphere.

Experts say any leak at Zaporizhzhia would more likely be on the scale of the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan.

Energoatom warned on Monday that any leak would scatter radiation over swathes of southern Ukraine and south-western regions of Russia.

– Counter-accusations –

Kyiv suspects Moscow intends to divert power from the Zaporizhzhia plant to the Crimean Peninsula, annexed by Russia in 2014.

But Russia insists Ukraine is responsible for shelling around the complex.

Russia’s defence ministry said on Saturday that Ukrainian forces had “shelled the territory of the station three times” from the town of Marganets across the Dnipro River.

The ministry accused Kyiv of “nuclear terrorism” and said shells had landed near areas storing fresh nuclear fuel and radioactive waste.

Radiation levels at the plant “remain normal”, it said. 

But residents in the Ukraine-held areas around the plant are being equipped with iodine pills to reduce the medical risk of radiation in the event of a disaster.

Tens of millions of people across swathes of Pakistan were Monday battling the worst monsoon floods in a decade, with countless homes washed away, vital farmland destroyed, and the country’s main river threatening to burst its banks.

Officials say 1,061 people have died since June when the seasonal rains began, but the final toll could be higher as hundreds of villages in the mountainous north have been cut off after flood-swollen rivers washed away roads and bridges.

The annual monsoon is essential for irrigating crops and replenishing lakes and dams across the Indian subcontinent, but it can also bring destruction.

This year’s flooding has affected more than 33 million people — one in seven Pakistanis — said the National Disaster Management Authority.

“What we see now is an ocean of water submerging entire districts,” Climate Minister Sherry Rehman told AFP Monday.

“This is very far from a normal monsoon — it is climate dystopia at our doorstep.”

This year’s floods are comparable to those of 2010 — the worst on record — when more than 2,000 people died and nearly a fifth of the country was under water.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, on a tour of the north to oversee relief operations, said the monsoon rains were “unprecedented in the last 30 years”.

Near Sukkur, a city in southern Sindh province and home to an ageing colonial-era barrage on the Indus River that is vital to preventing further catastrophe, one farmer lamented the devastation wrought on his rice fields.

Millions of acres of rich farmland have been flooded by weeks of non-stop rain, but now the Indus is threatening to burst its banks as torrents of water course downstream from tributaries in the north.

“Our crop spanned over 5,000 acres on which the best quality rice was sown and is eaten by you and us,” Khalil Ahmed, 70, told AFP.

“All that is finished.”

– Landscape of water –

Much of Sindh is now an endless landscape of water, hampering a massive military-led relief operation.

“There are no landing strips or approaches available… our pilots find it difficult to land,” one senior officer told AFP.

The army’s helicopters were also struggling to pluck people to safety in the north, where soaring mountains and deep valleys make for treacherous flying conditions.

Many rivers in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province — which boasts some of Pakistan’s best tourist spots — have burst their banks, demolishing scores of buildings including a 150-room hotel that crumbled into a raging torrent.

The government has declared an emergency and appealed for international help, and on Sunday the first aid flights began arriving — from Turkey and the UAE.

It could not have come at a worse time for Pakistan, where the economy is in free fall.

In Washington later Monday, the International Monetary Fund executive board was scheduled to meet to decide whether to green-light the resumption of a $6 billion loan programme essential for the country to service its foreign debt, but it is already clear the country will need more to repair and rebuild after this monsoon.

Prices of basic goods — particularly onions, tomatoes and chickpeas — are soaring as vendors bemoan a lack of supplies from the flooded breadbasket provinces of Sindh and Punjab.

The met office said the country as a whole had received twice the usual monsoon rainfall, but Balochistan and Sindh had more than four times the average of the last three decades.

Padidan, a small town in Sindh, was drenched by more than 1.2 metres (47 inches) of rain since June, making it the wettest place in the country.

– More arriving daily –

Across Sindh, thousands of displaced people are camped alongside elevated highways and railway tracks — often the only dry spots as far as the eye can see.

More are arriving daily at Sukkur’s city ring road, belongings piled on boats and tractor trollies, looking for shelter until the floodwaters recede.

Sukkur Barrage supervisor Aziz Soomro told AFP the main headway of water was expected to arrive around September 5, but was confident the 90-year-old sluice gates would cope.

The barrage diverts water from the Indus into 10,000 km of canals that make up one of the world’s biggest irrigation schemes, but the farms it supplies are now mostly under water.

The only bright spark was the latest weather report.

“Dry weather is forecasted for this week and there is no chance of significant rains,” said met office spokesman Zaheer Ahmed Babar.