💪 Racing against the clock: Can Indian origin nurse Nimisha Priya be saved?
Time is running out for Nimisha Priya, the nurse from Kerala on death row in Yemen reportedly scheduled for execution on July 16. Can she be saved?
Time is running out for Nimisha Priya, the nurse from Kerala on death row in Yemen. The date for her execution has been set for July 16; it was communicated by the director general of prosecution to the superintendent of the Sana’a prison where Nimisha is lodged, according to media reports. It seems only a Hail Mary can save her.
That hasn’t stopped hectic negotiations and a frantic race against time.
‘Optimistic’ is how those negotiating on her behalf said they felt. On Friday, Samuel Jerome, an Indian based in Yemen who is on the Save Nimisha Priya International Action Council, a group of around 90 NRIs from some 30 countries and holds the power of attorney for Nimisha’s family, said he is ‘optimistic’ but could not reveal details of the crucial negotiations with the Yemeni representatives.
A day earlier on Thursday, a two-judge Supreme Court bench responded to an urgent petition filled by the Save Nimisha Priya Council and asked the government of India to inform it of the steps it is taking. The next hearing is set for July 14, two days before the scheduled execution.
Alone in Yemen
Nimisha was convicted of murdering Talal Abdo Mahdi, her business partner with whom she had set up a clinic. She says Mahdi was physically, sexually and financially exploiting her, claiming she had married him even though she was already married and had a daughter back home in Kerala.
There was no way for her to return home since Mahdi had withheld her passport. In 2017, she filed a police complaint but was instead arrested and jailed for six days. It was in jail, she says, that a warden suggested sedating Mahdi, so that she could retrieve her passport and leave. But an accidental overdose led to his death.
Civil strife had broken out in Yemen in March 2015 and the Indian government had issued a travel ban. Nimisha was stranded in a foreign country in 2020 when she was sentenced to death by a trial court. “She is a victim of war, denied justice, denied a lawyer and had nobody to assist her due to internal conflict in Yemen,” her lawyer and migrant rights activist K R Subhash Chandran said. She was made to sign several statements in a language she did not know.
The death sentence brought with it media attention for the first time. But in 2023 she lost her appeal in the Supreme Council and in 2024 Mahdi al-Mashat, president of the rebel Houthis’ Supreme Political Council signed her execution orders. There was one caveat: If Mahdi’s family accepted blood money she could be pardoned.
The Save Nimisha Priya Council has reportedly raised US$ one million, much of it thanks to the generosity of M A Yusuff Ali, chairman of the Lulu Group International. Another businessman, jeweler Boby Chemmanur is also reported to have promised to contribute financially to her release.
But, said Chandran, the offer of blood money has neither been accepted nor denied. “There is some difference of opinion within Mahdi’s family,” he said. “We are in touch with several Yemeni community leaders who are optimistic about the outcome.”
Babu John of the Save Nimisha Priya council who worked as a project manager for an oilfield in Yemen from 2000 to 2015 is also cautiously hopeful. “We are in talks with the family through tribal leaders who are mediating,” he said.
Nimisha Priya’s mother, a domestic worker who travelled to Yemen in 2024 with special permission from the Delhi high court, remains in Yemen, waiting and hoping.
Precarious position
On February 15 this year, Shahzadi Khan from Uttar Pradesh’s Banda district was executed in the UAE on charges of murdering her employer’s four-month-old baby in early 2023.
Shockingly, news of her death was confirmed only on March 3 after her father Sabbeer Khan filed a petition in the Delhi high court seeking information about her well-being.
The family had spoken to Shahzadi on February 15 and hadn’t heard from her since. “No authorities came forward to assist us. We have been tirelessly reaching out to local, state and central authorities for help,” her father was quoted in news reports. “We all failed to save her.”
Adds Subhash Chandran: “There is complete insensitivity of officials and politicians in these cases.” Exploitation of poor migrant workers is widespread and when they run into legal trouble, there are linguistic issues that become difficult to negotiate.
As of 2023, there were 13 million Indian migrants abroad, 8.9 million in the Gulf countries alone. Many have a kafala system in place under which employers retain passports and other important documents of their employees. Workers live in cramped dormitories, work long hours and cannot change jobs without their employer’s consent. The system leads to work conditions that the International Labour Organisation calls a “contemporary form of slavery”.
For women migrant workers, the conditions can be even more severe. Domestic workers often live with their employers and can be subject to unreasonable work hours with very little rest as well as violence, even rape. Reporting abuse can led to detention—which is what happened to Nimisha Priya—or deportation with salaries withheld.
“Too often we hear the same stories of extreme overwork and isolation, of degrading living conditions, and of cruel and criminal abuse—verbal, physical and sexual—at the hands of private employers behind closed doors,” a June 16 Human Rights Watch open letter noted of working conditions for women migrants in Saudi Arabia, a country where the kafala system continues to be followed.
In 2020, an Amnesty International report on migrant domestic workers in Qatar found that half the 105 women interviewed worked more than 18 hours a day and most had never had a day off. About a third described being insulted, slapped or spat at.
Overseas employment is supposed to be regulated under the Emigration Act of 1983 but this is clearly outdated. A proposed bill that promised better regulation and protection has been pending since 2021. Its delay underlines the priorities of Parliament.
In numbers
16%
Only 16% of rural female-owned establishments operated outside household premises, compared to 70.6% of their male counterparts.
Source: The Annual Survey of Unincorporated Sector Enterprises analysed by Ceda (Centre for Economic Data & Analysis for 2023-24 found just 0.5% of female-owned establishments used computers and only 9.4% accessed the internet. More here.
Going places
Priya Nair is set to become Hindustan Unilever’s first woman managing director and chief executive. Nair who began her career with the FMCG company in 1995 has filled several roles including executive director of home care. She is presently based in London where she heads the beauty and wellbeing division. Her appointment comes at a time when women hold less than 20% of C-suite positions in India, a sharp drop from entry-level representation, reports Reuters quoting a McKinsey report published earlier this year.
News you may have missed
The shocking murder of state-level tennis player Radhika Yadav allegedly by her own father has resulted in a great deal of speculation. Some say Deepak Yadav simply couldn’t stomach his daughter’s success as a rising star with a career-high ITF doubles ranking of 113 while also earning by giving individual lessons. He is reported to have told police that he was being ‘taunted’ for living off her earnings. Others say it was a music video that sent him over the edge. And still others whisper that the father was not happy with his daughter’s choice of a partner.
Regardless of the reason, the gruesome killing — he shot his daughter four times while she was cooking a birthday breakfast for her mother — goes to show that independent, successful women are still too often regarded as an aberration in a society that prefers them to be submissive. For too many women and girls the family is a source of violence.
Read more: Leena Dhankar, Modernity and patriarchy collide as murder shakes up Millennium City.
Not rape and not the uphill fight for justice seems to offends the Central Board for Film Certification that has objected to the title of a Malayalam film, Janaki v State of Kerala. Starring union minister Suresh Gopi, the film deals with the fight of a rape survivor for justice. So far, so good. The problem for the board lies in the name of the rape survivor, Janaki, which is also another name for Sita. It is the board’s contention that the name could hurt religious sentiments.
On Thursday, the film’s producers told the Kerala high court that they were willing to rename the film by adding a V to Janaki and also mute a trial scene. The board which had originally asked for 96 cuts seemed happy enough with the two.
News from elsewhere
Beef Wellingtons laced with poisonous mushrooms served in individual portions to her husband, estranged for eight years, his parents and an aunt was not a “terrible accident” as Australian Erin Patterson claimed in her defense. A jury in Australia found the mother of two with no criminal record guilty of murdering three of the relatives and intent to murder the husband who survived.
The case has gripped Australia and sentencing will be pronounced later this year.
Two years after her appointment as the CEO of X, Linda Yaccarino seemed to fall off the glass cliff after a series of disasters, including the latest when X’s in-house chatbot Grok heaped praise on Adolf Hitler. But the snafu is only the latest in a series that includes perhaps her biggest obstacle, X owner Elon Musk who famously told the platform’s biggest advertiser to “go f*** yourself”.
“It was clear from the start that she was being set up to fail by a limited scope as the company’s chief executive,” Mike Proulx, research director at Forrester VP told The Guardian. The fall was inevitable.
Four years after the Taliban take-over in Afghanistan resulted in one of the most repressive regimes for women and girls anywhere in the world, the International Court of Justice finally issued warrants of arrest for “supreme leader” Hibatullah Akhundzada and his chief justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani.
In a series of progressively restrictive measures, girls are banned from school beyond the sixth grade, women are disallowed from stepping out of their homes without a male guardian and their voices, even in prayer, may not be heard in public.
That’s it for this week. If you have a tip, feedback, criticism, please write to me at: namita.bhandare@gmail.com, or reply to this mail.
Edited and produced by Shashwat Mohanty.