The chief ministers of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu want women to have more children. In the past week, both N Chandrababu Naidu and MK Stalin expressed their concern over their state’s ageing demography and have publicly called for a reversal in this decline. I have news for them: Women do not need to be […]
Even the government concedes that a husband does not have a right to violate his wife’s consent. But to use the word rape to describe such a violation is “excessively harsh” and would “shake the institution of marriage”. The government was making its stand clear on the contentious issue of criminalising marital rape through a 49-page affidavit
The government will not recognise marital rape as a crime Read More »
The Supreme Court’s emphatic and welcome ruling that child pornography is illegal, even if watched in private, even if stored on a mobile or electronic device without being forwarded, is a tough and welcome stand that does away with any ambiguity in the law. In fact, the two-judge bench of justices DY Chandrachud and JB Pardiwala have
The 17-year-old girl is telling me about her life after being raped in a village in Haryana. The real problem, she says, is there is nowhere to go. A trip to the tailor sets off tongues. If she so much as smiles in public, eyebrows shoot up. And there are times when even her father,
Gisele Pelicot is changing the way we talk about rape Read More »
The first Indian woman to ever win a medal in the Paralympics Game is ready to fly, literally. She’s bought a business class ticket on KLM; the privacy of the flatbed in a cubicle means she will be able catherize herself as she is paralyzed from the waist down. Two days before departure, she emails
Not once did she refer to her gender or the historic possibility of becoming the first woman president of the United States. While referring to the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, not a word was said about the erasure of women’s rights in that country. Acknowledging Israel’s right to defend itself elicited an oblique reference to
Ever since public outrage and anger erupted in the aftermath of the rape and murder of a doctor at the state-run RG Kar hospital in Kolkata on August 9, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee has been calling for a mandatory death sentence. Now by unanimous vote, the West Bengal assembly on Tuesday passed the Aparajita
The death penalty cannot fix India’s rape problem. Here’s why Read More »
There are many ways in which you could choose to approach Neha Dixit’s first book, The Many Lives of Syeda X: The story of an unknown Indian. First, it is obviously the story of Syeda, the X in her name marking her as an Everywoman migrant, one of 35,000 who stream into Delhi everyday looking for
Neha Dixit on gender, the informal economy and the invisible work of women Read More »
Rarely has the sound of heads rolling sounded sweeter. The first to go after the lid was blown off the Malayalam film industry’s rampant sexual and other abuse of women were actor Siddique and filmmaker Ranjith. By Thursday, Siddique had been charged with rape, and Communist Party of India (Marxist) MLA Mukesh had to get
What after the Hema panel report? Answer lies with us Read More »
Nearly five years after Justice K Hema submitted her report on the working conditions for women in the Malayalam film industry to the Pinarayi Vijayan-led Kerala government, it has finally been made public. Through a two-year long examination of actors, directors, producers, cinematographers, script-writers, make-up artists, hairstylists, and costume designers, among others, the release of the report
The Malayalam film industry’s dirty, not-so-little, secret Read More »
News of a yet another ghastly rape and murder, this time of a 31-year-old doctor at the government-run RG Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata has led to massive protests, a nationwide strike by doctors, the trading of charges between ruling party TMC, Congress and the BJP, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi making an
All she wanted at the end of a 36-hour shift was to rest. Since Kolkata’s RG Kar Medical College and Hospital does not have such a designated space for doctors, she did what the others do, find a quiet place for a nap — in this case, a seminar hall. The complete facts are yet