Mind The Gap | The Indian woman’s search for agency

Hello and welcome to Mind the Gap, a newsletter that adds perspective to the gender developments of the week. Under Indian law, sexual intercourse with a minor girl (defined as 16 years and younger) is defined as rape (PTI) THE BIG STORY: Love, sex, and agency On the face of it, it’s an unusual order. The Delhi High Court judge has ordered the custody of a baby boy to his biological father, a man accused of raping the baby’s mother who is a minor girl of 16. Here’s the reality check: The Muslim girl, a class 9 student, told the…

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Mind The Gap | A corrosive crime that plays on loop

Hello and welcome to Mind the Gap, a newsletter that adds perspective to the gender developments of the week. Victims of acid attacks are almost always young women from socio-economic marginalised communities who have turned down men (Sanjeev Verma/HT) THE BIG STORY It’s a familiar tale. Man says he loves woman. She turns him down. In retaliation, he attacks her with acid, inflicting unimaginable pain and leaving her scarred for life. This horrific storyline played out twice in nine days in the National Capital Region. In the first incident on November 3, a 23-year-old married woman turned down the advances of her…

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Sensitise teachers on transgender issues

India’s laws and the highest court have provided the direction. The challenge is to get its institutions to fall in line with the law The bullying of transgender kids is routine despite the Supreme Court’s 2014 NALSA judgment that recognises the “third gender” as equal citizens (Shutterstock) By the time she was four or five, says Ranjita Sinha, she knew she wasn’t like other kids at her all-boys school. She didn’t want to play sport, preferring instead to dance and sing. “There was no word for me back then,” she says on the phone from West Bengal where she runs…

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Mind The Gap | Report card: What is it like for girls being back in school?

Hello and welcome to Mind the Gap, a newsletter that adds perspective to the gender developments of the week. As schools tentatively return to physical classes, the big questions are: How much learning has been lost? (HT PHOTO) THE BIG STORY Back to school Do girls face a disproportionate impact, given the existing gender gaps? What happens to them when education ends? (Waseem Andrabi / Hindustan Times) When K, the younger daughter of parents who work as household help near Solan, Himachal Pradesh, enrolled in 2019 to do her Bachelor of Arts (General) through the distance-learning programme of the Indira…

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Equal marriage rights for equal citizens

It’s time we celebrate love as the purest emotion between two individuals. It’s time we celebrate our Constitution for promising equality for all At its core lies a clash between constitutional guarantees and societal morality (Amal KS/HT PHOTO) In a week when the Delhi High Court (HC) is hearing a clutch of petitions seeking legal recognition of same-sex marriage, it is telling that Dabur recalled an ad celebrating Karwa Chauth. The ad gave fresh offence to the usual suspects with its new twist to the old festival where instead of a wife fasting for her husband’s long life, two women fast…

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Mind The Gap | Women leaders of India and the world

Hello and welcome to Mind the Gap, a newsletter that adds perspective to the gender developments of the week. Only 268 of 2,839 Congress candidates — just 9.4% — who have contested a state election since 2017 were women (ANI) THE BIG STORY Priyanka’s great gamble Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra’s promise to field 40% women candidates in the Uttar Pradesh (UP) assembly election has sparked hope in a political landscape stubbornly dominated by men. Priyanka’s announcement goes against the grain of the Congress’s own shabby record, write Gilles Vernier and Avishek Jha. Only 268 of 2,839 Congress candidates —…

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What it means to be a Dalit woman in India

Justice in one case does not signal the end of crimes against Dalit women. But it does signal one tiny step forward in a longer march against caste hierarchy. Dalit women face sexual abuse daily, said Manjula Pradeep, convenor, National Council of Women Leaders. When rape survivors try to file police complaints, they are accused of filing false cases. “They don’t see us as human beings. The impunity is widespread,” she said. (PTI) At 16, she wanted to be a teacher like her father and left home to enroll in a training course — the first Dalit girl from her…

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Mind The Gap | The cost of being a modern working woman

From regressive comments on modern women to an obvious — and widening — gulf between girls and boys, the gender divide at home and at work appears to be deepening in India and the world India is home to the world’s largest number of single women, but this is not a homogeneous group (Getty Images/iStockphoto) The Big Story: The dreaded modern woman “Modern Indian women want to stay single, are unwilling to give birth even after marriage and desire children by surrogacy.” With these remarks made on the occasion of World Mental Health Day, Karnataka’s health minister Sudhakar K, who holds a…

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Mind The Gap | From child marriage to MeToo, legitimising oppressive practices

This week saw child marriage back in the news. This and the Bombay High Court’s new guidelines on sexual harassment at the workplace are worrying developments. Child marriage is India’s enduring shame and we are home to the largest number of child brides in the world, with 1.5 million girls under 18 married every year, according to Unicef. Representative Image. (Manoj Kumar/Hindustan Times) This week saw child marriage back in the news when Rajasthan governor, Kalraj Mishra, sent back a bill for the registration of such marriages for further legal examination, reports Sachin Saini. The bill was passed by the assembly on…

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Mind The Gap | A week of triumphs, and trials, for women of the world

In India and parts of the world, women have had reason to celebrate this week. But systemic gender issues in a largely patriarchal society remain As of January 2019, women make up 3.8% of the Indian Army, billed as the second-largest in the world. (Hindustan Times) For 67 years, the National Defence Academy (NDA) has remained an all-boys military training ground for the Indian Army, Navy and Air Force. That’s about to change. Forward march This past week, the central government told the Supreme Court (SC) that the Pune-based military academy was ready to welcome its first batch of girls. But, it…

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The MeToo movement’s demand: A new deal at work

MeToo has a powerful message for women too, that of solidarity and a continuum. Feminist organising goes back to the reform movements of the 19th century. It has not always been united but we have seen its effectiveness through the anti-rape and anti-dowry movements of the 1970s and 1980s to the anti-rape upsurge in 2012. We know that we are linked with the past. We know that we are not alone. Was the movement flawed? Indeed, it was. In a country where over 90% of employed women work in the informal sector, where were the voices of the factory workers,…

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A tale of Afghan women, music, and freedom

Music was an act of resistance for the girls in Afghanistan’s first all-women orchestra. Some managed to leave the country, but others lie low, their future uncertain, as they await clarity from the Taliban Zohra, Afghan women’s orchestra, performs during the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit in New Delhi, in 2017. (HT Archive) When she came to India as part of the first all-female orchestra in the history of Afghanistan, Maram Ataee was just a girl of 15. The ensemble, Zohra, named after the Persian goddess of music, was performing at the 2017 Hindustan Times Leadership Summit and had already made…

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