South Asia

When Swara Bhasker announced last year that she was marrying Fahad Ahmad, I thanked her for being a lighthouse for Indian lovers. Her marriage...

Since the founding of Pakistan in 1947, not a single prime minister has served the full five-year term. If this fact betokens a country marked by instability and sudden changes in the political mood then last week’s remarkable elections have done little to change that reputation. The electoral analysts were proved wrong, as candidates loyal to the imprisoned former prime minister, Imran Khan, stunned outside observers – and even the country’s political elite – by winning the most seats. One thing can now be predicted with confidence: a new period of political turmoil.

India, the world’s largest democracy, recently concluded its six-week-long election and delivered a blow to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), whose leader, Narendra...

In India, women continue to face discrimination as job seekers because of their gender. This discrimination is reinforced by the more than 150 laws that prohibit or limit women’s employment in certain industries—the generation of petroleum, the manufacturing of products such as oils and rechargeable batteries, and in establishments selling or serving liquor—especially during night-time. In 2022, Prosperiti analysed more than 200 regulations to understand which kinds of work women are excluded from. We also reviewed 26 judicial rulings to study how such discrimination is handled by courts of law.

The Nobel peace laureate and microfinance pioneer Muhammad Yunus has said that years of fighting what he calls “dirty” politically motivated attacks on his work to alleviate poverty in Bangladesh have made life “totally miserable”. Yunus told the Guardian he had come under 20 years of pressure from the Bangladeshi government for his work, which is credited with improving the lives of millions of poor people, particularly women.