Indian farmers cut off as activists warn of pre-election digital blackouts

A farmer talks on his mobile phone during an ongoing protest to demand minimum crop prices, near the Punjab-Haryana state border at Shambhu in Patiala district on February 22, 2024. (AFP)
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Updated 05 March 2024
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Indian farmers cut off as activists warn of pre-election digital blackouts

  • Farmers march on Delhi to demand higher prices for crops, Internet shutdowns hamper flow of food and aid 
  • Campaigners say shutdowns aim to quell dissent as India tops world charts of Internet switchoffs

SHAMBHU, India: They have been beaten with canes, doused in tear gas and blocked by concrete barricades and metal spikes but the thousands of farmers trying to march to India’s capital to demand higher crop prices also face an invisible barrier — digital blackouts.

As their caravan of tractors and trucks moved from the northern state of Punjab toward New Delhi in February, the farmers found their phones going dead as state authorities imposed temporary Internet shutdowns.

It is not the first time authorities have cut the Internet — India imposed the highest number of Internet shutdowns in the world in 2022 — and campaigners fear more digital crackdowns ahead of elections expected by May.

Farm union leaders are seeking guarantees, backed by law, of more state support or a minimum purchase price for crops.

The farmers, who set off on their “Delhi Chalo” (Let’s go to Dehli) protest in early February, were stopped by security forces about 200 km (125 miles) north of the capital, with water cannons and tear gas used to push them back.

They are now camped out at Shambhu Barrier, on the border between the states of Punjab and Haryana.

Since Feb. 12, Haryana state authorities have cut access to mobile Internet services at regular intervals and for several days at a time. They said they did so to “stop the spread of misinformation and rumors” and to prevent the mobilization of “mobs of agitators and demonstrators,” according to local media.

The farmers, many of whom are members of the Sikh religious minority from Punjab, say the shutdowns made it hard to get medical help for the injured and to source food. It also cut them off from their leaders, making coordination difficult.

“Snapping the communication lines only spreads rumors and distresses our families,” said Hardeep Singh, a 28-year-old who was nursing an injured eye after recent clashes with police.

“We’re already far away from home and the communication blackout adds to our miseries,” he said.




Farmers shout slogans during a protest against India's central government to demand minimum crop prices in Amritsar on March 5, 2024. (AFP)

Neither the chief minister’s office in Haryana nor the state’s telecoms ministry responded to requests for comment.

Campaigners have accused the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi of repeatedly using Internet shutdowns to stifle opposition.

“The alarming trend of Internet shutdowns coupled with widespread online censorship is a grim reflection of digital authoritarianism, particularly in the lead-up to elections,” said Gayatri Malhotra of the digital rights organization Internet Freedom Foundation.

“Should this trajectory persist, it threatens to severely impede people’s access to information, curtail their capacity to make informed electoral decisions, and restrict their freedom to organize, assemble and communicate their electoral demands peacefully,” Malhotra told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

NO SIGNAL

India frequently uses Internet shutdowns to control protests, including in disputed Kashmir and northeastern Manipur state, where dozens have died in ethnic clashes since last year.




A farmer performs a fire breathing act during a protest demanding minimum crop prices, at Shambhu Haryana-Punjab border near Ambala some 220 Km from New Delhi on February 14, 2024. (AFP)

Mobile access has also often been cut during elections and examinations and these shutdowns were often imposed for indefinite periods and without the publication of shutdown orders, in violation of a 2020 judgment by the nation’s top court.

The state of Haryana ranks fourth in the country for the highest number of Internet shutdowns, following Jammu and Kashmir, Rajasthan, and Manipur, according to Delhi-based advocacy group Software Freedom Law Center.

The farmers’ protests have already sparked other restrictions.

Dozens of accounts on social media platform X have been suspended for backing the farmers, with rights groups and those affected calling the step a worrying sign in the world’s largest democracy where nearly a billion people will cast their votes in national elections due by May.

Although the farmers’ protest is confined to Punjab for now, their complaints of falling incomes resonate more widely, highlighting a perception in India’s huge rural hinterland that Modi has done too little to support the farming community and raise living standards.

Over 40 percent of India’s 1.4 billion people are dependent on agriculture and many say they have suffered economically under Modi. Hardeep Singh, for example, grows wheat and rice on his four-acre farm, but like many he said poor returns on investments, including pesticides and farm equipment, made it increasingly difficult to make ends meet without guaranteed prices for his produce.

While pollsters say Modi will almost certainly win a rare third term in office, the discontent of farmers will be a headache for years to come.

The federal agriculture ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the protesters’ demands for higher guaranteed prices for all crops.

‘STATE OF DARKNESS’




Farmers hold placards and shout slogans during a protest against India's central government to demand minimum crop prices in Amritsar on March 5, 2024. (AFP)

Farmers said the blackout not only stopped them from spreading their message to the outside world, but also blocked them from receiving information and instructions.

“The Internet was our primary means of ensuring our protests receive adequate coverage and reach a wider audience, free from the interference of mainstream media that often portrays us in a negative light,” said Taranjeet Singh, a 34-year-old farmer. In Punjab, Singh is a common surname and middle name.

To overcome the challenge, many farmers have installed television sets in their tractor trailers to get the latest news.

The blackouts also make it harder to treat injured and sick people, and to contact emergency services such as ambulances.

“We are forced to walk several kilometers away from the protest site to access stable wireless network connections, which wastes our valuable time, and could prove fatal for those injured and requiring immediate medical care,” said Baba Sukhdev Singh, a 50-year-old volunteer with the Kisan Mazdoor Sangharsh Committee, one of the unions leading the march.

Many farmers also said signal jammers were being used in the area, preventing them from contacting people in their villages to ask for food supplies.

Taranjeet Singh said farmers were left walking around in desperation, asking one another about what the protest leaders might want them to do next.

“The communication blackout casts us into a state of darkness, exacerbating the chaos and confusion,” he said.


‘Thrown out like trash’ from Iran, Afghans return to land they hardly know

Updated 5 sec ago
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‘Thrown out like trash’ from Iran, Afghans return to land they hardly know

  • More than 1.2 million Afghans deported from neighboring Iran since March 2024, IMO says
  • Tehran had pledged mass deportations to counter growing local discontent over refugees

ISLAMABAD: Ghulam Ali begins his days in pain, his muscles aching from hauling grain on a rickety cart through the streets of Kabul, homesick for the country he called home for nearly four decades.

Ali is among more than 1.2 million Afghans deported from neighboring Iran since March 2024, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), after Tehran pledged mass deportations to counter mounting local discontent over refugees.

Thousands have also fled this month after Israeli and US airstrikes hit Iranian military targets.

For Ali, 51, whose family left Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion in the 1980s when he was just 10, Iran was home.

“I grew up there, worked there, buried my parents there,” he said during a midday break from work in Kabul, sipping green tea with a simple lunch of naan bread.

“But in the end, they threw us out like trash. I lost everything — my home, my little savings in cash, my dignity,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by video link.

Afghan refugees arrive in a truck from Pakistan, in Takhta Pul district in Kandahar province on June 24, 2025. (AFP)

Like many others, he has returned to a homeland he barely knew and one that has changed drastically.

Outsiders in their own country, many men struggle to support their family while women face severe restrictions on their daily life under the ruling Taliban.

Since late 2023, an estimated 3 million Afghans have been forced out of Iran and Pakistan, where they had sought safety from decades of war and, since the Taliban’s return to Kabul in 2021, from extremist rule.

Unwelcome abroad, they have returned to a homeland facing economic collapse and international indifference.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, in his latest report on Afghanistan, called on countries hosting Afghan refugees to protect those in need and abide by international obligations to ensure any returns to Afghanistan are voluntary.

“Returnees face immense challenges... in particular securing housing, employment and access to basic services,” he said.

Up to 10,000 Afghan women, men and children are taking the Islam Qala border crossing from Iran on a daily basis, according to the Taliban authorities. Inside Afghanistan, humanitarian aid agencies say conditions are dire, with inadequate shelter, food shortages and no road map for reintegration.

“They return to a homeland that is dramatically unprepared to receive them,” warned Arafat Jamal, the UNHCR representative in Afghanistan in a statement last month.

The Taliban’s deputy minister for border and refugees affairs, Abdul Zahir Rahmani, also told local media this week that Afghanistan had seen a sharp increase in refugee returns since this month’s 12-day air war in Iran.

Many said they had no say in the matter.

Ali said he was arrested at a construction site in Mashhad, Iran’s second-biggest city, lacking documentation during a crackdown on refugees by the Iranian police.

He and his wife, six children, two daughters-in-law and five grandchildren were deported in March.

“We were treated like criminals,” he said. “They didn’t care how law-abiding or in need we were. They just wanted all Afghans out.”

The extended family — 15 people aged 5 to 51 — is now packed into a two-room, mud-brick house on Kabul’s western fringes.

Ali said his Persian-accented Dari draws sneers from fellow laborers – another reminder he doesn’t fit in. But he brushes off their mockery, saying his focus is on feeding his family.

“We can barely afford to eat properly,” his wife Shahla said by video as she sat cross-legged on a worn rug.

“Rent is 4,000 afghanis ($56) a month — but even that is a burden. One of my sons is visually impaired; the other returns home every day empty-handed.”

For women and girls, their return can feel like a double displacement. They are subject to many of the Taliban’s most repressive laws, including restrictions on their movement without a “mahram,” or male companion, and curbs on education and employment.

Afghan burqa-clad women and their children, walk at a refugee registration centre after their arrival from Pakistan, in Takhta Pul district in Kandahar province on June 24, 2025. (REUTERS)

On Kabul’s western edge, 38-year-old Safiya and her three daughters spend their days in a rented house packing candies for shops, earning just 50 afghanis for a day’s work, below Afghanistan’s poverty level of $1 a day.

Safiya said they were deported from Iran in February.

“In Tehran, I stitched clothes. My girls worked at a sweet shop,” said Safiya, who declined to give her last name.

“Life was tough, but we had our freedom, as well as hope … Here, there’s no work, no school, no dignity. It’s like we’ve come home only to be exiled again.”

During their deportation, Safiya was separated from her youngest daughter for a week while the family was detained, a spat over documents that still gives the 16-year-old nightmares.

In Iran, said Safiya, “my daughters had inspiring dreams. Now they sit at home all day, waiting.”

Afghans are also being forcibly deported from next-door Pakistan – more than 800,000 people have been expelled since October 2023, according to Amnesty International.

Born in Pakistan to Afghan refugee parents, Nemat Ullah Rahimi had never lived in Afghanistan until last winter, when police barely gave him time to close his Peshawar grocery store before sending him over the Torkham border crossing.

“I wasn’t allowed to sell anything. My wife and kids — all born in Pakistan — had no legal documents there so we had to leave,” said the 34-year-old.

Rahimi now works long hours at a tire repair shop at a dusty intersection on the edge of Kabul as he tries to rebuild a life.

“I can’t say it’s easy. But I have no choice. We’re restarting from zero,” he said. 


Several arrested in Serbia as tensions mount ahead of anti-corruption rally in Belgrade on weekend

Updated 23 min 49 sec ago
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Several arrested in Serbia as tensions mount ahead of anti-corruption rally in Belgrade on weekend

  • Protesting university students have called Saturday’s rally to press their demand for an early election
  • Authorities made similar arrests back in March, ahead of what was the biggest ever anti-government protest

BELGRADE: Police in Serbia have arrested several people accused of allegedly plotting to overthrow the government as tensions soared ahead of a major anti-government rally planned this weekend in the capital Belgrade.

Police said six were detained on Wednesday evening, suspected of “preparing criminal acts against the constitutional order and security of Serbia” and “calling for violent change of the constitutional order.”

At least one other university student was arrested earlier this week accused of preparing “an act of terrorism” based on his private conversations over a mobile phone. Hundreds on Thursday demonstrated against the arrest in Belgrade.

Protesting university students have called Saturday’s rally to press their demand for an early election after nearly eight months of almost daily anti-corruption demonstrations that have shaken the populist government of President Aleksandar Vucic.

Persistent protests started in November after a renovated rail station canopy collapsed that killed 16 people and which many blamed on rampant government corruption and negligence in state infrastructure projects. University students have been a key force behind the nationwide movement.

Vucic and his right-wing Serbian Progressive Party have refused the students’ demand for a snap vote, instead accusing the protesters of planning to spur violence at Saturday’s gathering.

Police alleged the detained group met last week in a hotel in the central town of Kraljevo to plan a violent change of government and attacks on police and pro-government media outlets. One of the suspects had a gun and ammunition, they said.

No other details were immediately available. Serbian media reported that those arrested include an opposition politician, veteran of the wars of the 1990s, and others.

Authorities made similar arrests back in March, ahead of what was the biggest ever anti-government protest in the Balkan country, which drew hundreds of thousands of people.

Vucic’s loyalists also set up a camp in a park outside his office which still stands. The otherwise peaceful gathering on March 15 came to an abrupt end when part of the crowd suddenly scattered in panic, triggering allegations that authorities used a sonic weapon against peaceful protesters, which they have denied.

Vucic, a former extreme nationalist, has become increasingly authoritarian since coming to power over a decade ago. Though he formally says he wants Serbia to join the European Union, critics say Vucic has stifled democratic freedoms as he strengthened ties with Russia and China.


Europe rights court condemns France over racial profiling

Updated 26 June 2025
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Europe rights court condemns France over racial profiling

  • Police stopped Karim Touil three times in 10 days in the eastern city of Besancon in 2011
  • The court ordered the French state to pay him 3,000 euros ($3,500)

STRASBOURG: A top European court on Thursday condemned France for failing to protect the rights of a Frenchman who had accused his country’s police of racial profiling.

The European Court of Human Rights was unable to determine discrimination in the case of five other French plaintiffs.

But it found that the government had provided no “objective and reasonable justification” for police stopping Karim Touil three times in 10 days in the eastern city of Besancon in 2011.

The court said it was “very aware of the difficulties for police officers to decide, very quickly and without necessarily having clear internal instructions, whether they are facing a threat to public order or security.”

But in the case of Touil, it presumed “discriminatory treatment” that the French government was not able to refute.

It ordered the French state to pay him 3,000 euros ($3,500).

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International last year said racial profiling was “widespread throughout the country and deeply rooted in police practices.”

HRW said young men and boys perceived as black or Arab, some as young as 10, were often subjected to “abusive and illegal identity checks.”

The rights groups said they had lodged a complaint with the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

France’s rights ombudsman in 2017 found that a young person “perceived as black or Arab” was 20 times more likely to face an identity check than the rest of the population.


Philippine police face mandatory fitness training to stay in service

Updated 26 June 2025
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Philippine police face mandatory fitness training to stay in service

  • New program is called Pulisteniks, from ‘pulis’ – police in Tagalog – and ‘calisthenics’
  • Program mandates police units across the country to dedicate Tuesdays and Thursdays to fitness

MANILA: The Philippine National Police has kicked off a new fitness initiative for officers, vowing to get overweight personnel back in shape or out of the service.

Launched this week, the campaign is called Pulisteniks, from “pulis,” which means police in Tagalog, and “calisthenics.”

The program mandates PNP units nationwide to dedicate Tuesdays and Thursdays to fitness, including various physical activities such as running, walking, jogging, biking, Zumba, and combat sports like arnis – the national martial art and sport of the Philippines – aikido, boxing, karate-do, judo, muay thai, swimming, table tennis, and taekwondo.

“The directive of our chief PNP is clear. We need our police officers to be physically fit. This program has been in place for a long time, but now we’re putting more focus on it because we’re also aiming to meet our target response time,” Maj. Philipp Ines, Manila Police District spokesperson, told Arab News.

“What is happening now is just a reiteration of our ongoing programs. The good thing is we’re now being given time to focus on physical conditioning every Tuesday and Thursday from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. This is a good program to help our officers reduce weight and be able to keep up with the demands of public service.”

Under the Department of the Interior and Local Government Act of 1990 all PNP officers are required to keep their body weight within 5 kg – either above or below – a standard weight based on their height and sex.

“We undergo quarterly check-ups, where they check if our BMI – body mass index – is within the acceptable range. If it’s not, the health or medical officer tells our personnel to lose weight. That’s why now there’s a program in place to help with that because before it was hard for many officers due to the lack of time,” Ines said.

“The Manila Police District Health Service is monitoring our progress so we can track whether we’re able to comply. And every year, there’s a required physical fitness test that we all have to pass. If you fail those tests twice in a row, it could be grounds for separation from service.”

Philippine Police Chief Gen. Nicolas Torre III said that officers are given a target of six months to a year to lose weight.

“After a year, if they don’t meet the standards, they can be removed from the service,” he said in a radio interview.

The fitness program has already gained support from Filipino netizens whose comments on Facebook ranged from “I hope they lose weight to look better” to “It’s embarrassing to see all fat police officers these days,” and “your uniform doesn’t fit you.”

Remedios Borejon, retired National Police Commission public affairs officer, told Arab News the program should help improve how the police are seen.

“I’m in favor of the program. This is also to help make our police officers look prim and proper, like gentlemen. Because it really doesn’t look good if a police officer looks sloppy or overweight,” she said.

“In the past, you rarely saw overweight police officers. I support this. It helps improve their image and boosts professionalism.”


‘Thrown out like trash’; Afghans return to land they hardly know

Updated 26 June 2025
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‘Thrown out like trash’; Afghans return to land they hardly know

  • Forced back to a changed land that offers little
  • Refugees say they struggle to make ends meet

ISLAMABAD: Ghulam Ali begins his days in pain, his muscles aching from hauling grain on a rickety cart through the streets of Kabul, homesick for the country he called home for nearly four decades.
Ali is among more than 1.2 million Afghans deported from neighboring Iran since March 2024, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), after Tehran pledged mass deportations to counter mounting local discontent over refugees.
Thousands have also fled this month after Israeli and US airstrikes hit Iranian military targets.
For Ali, 51, whose family left Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion in the 1980s when he was just 10, Iran was home.
“I grew up there, worked there, buried my parents there,” he said during a midday break from work in Kabul, sipping green tea with a simple lunch of naan bread.
“But in the end, they threw us out like trash. I lost everything — my home, my little savings in cash, my dignity,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by video link.
Like many others, he has returned to a homeland he barely knew and one that has changed drastically.
Outsiders in their own country, many men struggle to support their family while women face severe restrictions on their daily life under the ruling Taliban.
Since late 2023, an estimated 3 million Afghans have been forced out of Iran and Pakistan, where they had sought safety from decades of war and, since the Taliban’s return to Kabul in 2021, from extremist rule.
Unwelcome abroad, they have returned to a homeland facing economic collapse and international indifference.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, in his latest report on Afghanistan, called on countries hosting Afghan refugees to protect those in need and abide by international obligations to ensure any returns to Afghanistan are voluntary.
“Returnees face immense challenges... in particular securing housing, employment and access to basic services,” he said.
Up to 10,000 Afghan women, men and children are taking the Islam Qala border crossing from Iran on a daily basis, according to the Taliban authorities. Inside Afghanistan, humanitarian aid agencies say conditions are dire, with inadequate shelter, food shortages and no road map for reintegration.
“They return to a homeland that is dramatically unprepared to receive them,” warned Arafat Jamal, the UNHCR representative in Afghanistan in a statement last month.
The Taliban’s deputy minister for border and refugees affairs, Abdul Zahir Rahmani, also told local media this week that Afghanistan had seen a sharp increase in refugee returns since this month’s 12-day air war in Iran.
Many said they had no say in the matter.
Ali said he was arrested at a construction site in Mashhad, Iran’s second-biggest city, lacking documentation during a crackdown on refugees by the Iranian police.
He and his wife, six children, two daughters-in-law and five grandchildren were deported in March.
“We were treated like criminals,” he said. “They didn’t care how law-abiding or in need we were. They just wanted all Afghans out.”
The extended family — 15 people aged 5 to 51 — is now packed into a two-room, mud-brick house on Kabul’s western fringes.
Ali said his Persian-accented Dari draws sneers from fellow laborers – another reminder he doesn’t fit in. But he brushes off their mockery, saying his focus is on feeding his family.
“We can barely afford to eat properly,” his wife Shahla said by video as she sat cross-legged on a worn rug.
“Rent is 4,000 afghanis ($56) a month — but even that is a burden. One of my sons is visually impaired; the other returns home every day empty-handed.”
For women and girls, their return can feel like a double displacement. They are subject to many of the Taliban’s most repressive laws, including restrictions on their movement without a “mahram,” or male companion, and curbs on education and employment.
On Kabul’s western edge, 38-year-old Safiya and her three daughters spend their days in a rented house packing candies for shops, earning just 50 afghanis for a day’s work, below Afghanistan’s poverty level of $1 a day.
Safiya said they were deported from Iran in February.
“In Tehran, I stitched clothes. My girls worked at a sweet shop,” said Safiya, who declined to give her last name.
“Life was tough, but we had our freedom, as well as hope … Here, there’s no work, no school, no dignity. It’s like we’ve come home only to be exiled again.”
During their deportation, Safiya was separated from her youngest daughter for a week while the family was detained, a spat over documents that still gives the 16-year-old nightmares.
In Iran, said Safiya, “my daughters had inspiring dreams. Now they sit at home all day, waiting.”
Afghans are also being forcibly deported from next-door Pakistan – more than 800,000 people have been expelled since October 2023, according to Amnesty International.
Born in Pakistan to Afghan refugee parents, Nemat Ullah Rahimi had never lived in Afghanistan until last winter, when police barely gave him time to close his Peshawar grocery store before sending him over the Torkham border crossing.
“I wasn’t allowed to sell anything. My wife and kids — all born in Pakistan — had no legal documents there so we had to leave,” said the 34-year-old.
Rahimi now works long hours at a tire repair shop at a dusty intersection on the edge of Kabul as he tries to rebuild a life.
“I can’t say it’s easy. But I have no choice. We’re restarting from zero,” he said.