A world premiere presented by Factory International, The Accountants combines one tale of two auditing firms with another of friends who have connected British Indian and British Chinese heritages

Making a breakthrough in Tamil Nadu and Kerala is crucial to the BJP’s ambitions to gain an even larger parliamentary majority – but it won’t be easy

Under Tamil Nadu’s scorching midday sun, K Annamalai waved at the crowd gathered around his campaign bus. Some people stretched their babies upwards to be touched by him, others threw flower petals and passed gifts through the window. A sea of mobile phones vied for space as people tried to squeeze the candidate into their selfies.

Here in Coimbatore, an industrial city in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) has been working overtime. Over months, thousands of volunteers and party workers have taken to the streets – backed hundreds of locally-targeted WhatsApp groups and a highly-organised social media campaign across YouTube, Facebook and Instagram – whipping up a frenzy around Annamalai, one of the BJP’s most talked-about candidates.

Despite promises of reform, exploitation remains endemic in India’s sandstone industry, with children doing dangerous work for low pay – often to decorate driveways and gardens thousands of miles away. By Romita Saluja

Shyamol Banerji responds to an article by Mihir Bose on the country coming to terms with its colonial past

Mihir Bose’s experiences in the UK resonate somewhat with my own ( I came to Britain from India, fulfilled a dream, and I say this: we’re a great country, but a work in progress, 30 April ). In 1966, as a 14-year-old, I arrived at Tilbury Docks on a cold foggy morning aboard the SS Himalaya. My father, on temporary assignment in the UK, was able to get me admission to Westminster City grammar, a five-minute walk from Buckingham Palace. I was the only Indian; the racism I faced was not vicious but muted, often manifested through jokes and accent mimicry.

There is a certain advantage to being a minority of one versus a group. People are more accommodating. However, I still remember the first joke from school: “Did you hear about the Indian who lived with a cow?”

Congress party’s Arun Reddy held over fake video of interior minister Amit Shah

Indian police have said they have arrested the social media chief of the country’s main opposition party over a doctored video widely shared during the ongoing national election.

Arun Reddy of the Congress party was detained late on Friday in connection with the edited footage, which falsely shows India’s powerful interior minister, Amit Shah, vowing in a campaign speech to end affirmative action policies for millions of poor and low-caste Indians.

Inadvertent poisoning of scavengers across Indian subcontinent is forcing some communities to give up ancient custom

Traditional Zoroastrian burial rites are becoming increasingly impossible to perform because of the precipitous decline of vultures in India, Iran and Pakistan.

For millennia, Parsi communities have traditionally disposed of their dead in structures called dakhma, or “towers of silence”. These circular, elevated edifices are designed to prevent the soil, and the sacred elements of earth, fire and water, from being contaminated by corpses.

Prime minister said there were ‘credible allegations’ that India was behind the killing, leading to chilled relations between countries

Canadian police have detained members of an alleged hit team for their role in the assassination of Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar , the first arrests in a high-profile killing which officials believe was masterminded by India.

The arrest, first reported by CBC News, comes nearly a year after the prominent activist was killed in the parking lot of his gurdwara in the city of Surrey, British Columbia.

As the climate crisis forces people to abandon their land in Rajasthan, a new industry has sprung up in the desert state, with thousands of gaily decorated vans setting off to sell ice-cream across the country

The parched villages of Gangapur in the desert state of Rajasthan have a new season in their calendar. Between November and February , car workshops along the town’s dusty mile-long market open before sunrise, cylindrical stainless-steel food containers are put on display, and traders stock up on chocolate and strawberry syrups.

Come March, the villagers start preparing to migrate. In the workshops, thousands of vehicles are converted into vans for selling a variety of ice-cream, from plain condensed milk flavoured with cardamom to chocolate, vanilla and pistachio, while local farmers turned dessert makers have their old mini-trucks serviced in readiness for the drive to distant towns and cities, where they will sell the sweet treat for the next nine months.

US president says ‘immigrants are what makes us strong’ and criticizes countries, plus China and Russia, over migration policy

Joe Biden has called Japan and India “xenophobic” countries that do not welcome immigrants, lumping the two with adversaries China and Russia as he tried to explain their economic circumstances and contrasted the four with the US on immigration.

The remarks, at a campaign fundraising event Wednesday evening, came just three weeks after the White House hosted Fumio Kishida , the Japanese prime minister, for a lavish official visit , during which the two leaders celebrated what Biden called an “unbreakable alliance,” particularly on global security matters.