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 lectured to by politicians, especially male politicians, on the number of children they ought to have. We are not walking wombs who reproduce (or not) to further national, or, in this case, state interest. It is simply not our cross to bear and is as…

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 submitted earlier this week to the Supreme Court. In a nutshell, the government wants you to know that raping a wife, or to use its gobbledygook, “violating her consent” is bad. However, the state will not make it a criminal offence; it won’t even call…

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 urged the government to change the legal definition of child ‘pornography’, since the word implies a degree of consent. They want it replaced with “child sexual exploitative and abuse material” or CSEAM. The landmark ruling authored by justice Pardiwala advocates for promoting positive sex education to create…

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, frustrated with legal proceedings, yells at her for bringing so much trouble. The family eventually moved out of the village and I lost touch with the girl. But I doubt the situation has changed very much. Violent sexual assault continues and so do social attitudes…

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 the airline, sends it her disability certificate and informs it of her special needs. On September 16, Deepa Malik checks in at the airport and is told she cannot travel on the seat she has paid for since it would be a “safety hazard”. She…

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 “far too many innocent Palestinians” being killed, but the full horror was hardly on display. Global woman icon? Hardly. Flawed? Definitely. And yet Kamala Harris might just be the voice the world needs right now. “The optics of a Harris win would certainly be very…

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 Women and Child (West Bengal Criminal Laws Amendment) Bill. Death penalty is already on the statute books as one of the punishments if rape results in death or leaves the victim in a persistent vegetative state. The other punishments are a life term or a…

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 work. Syeda is also Muslim, and while her preoccupation is survival, she lives in an India where religious identity has, post the 1990s, become increasingly important. Or you could look at this book, based on 10 years of research and work, as the story of…

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 a court order to protect him from arrest, for now. Some are calling this the industry’s MeToo movement. Certainly, events following the release of the Justice K Hema committee’s report on the working conditions for women in the Malayalam film industry have taken on a…

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 coincides with a renewed focus on workplace safety. The rape and murder of a 31-year-old doctor within the premises of the RG Kar hospital in Kolkata where she worked has caused national outrage and a suo motu hearing by the Supreme Court of India. The…

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 unprecedented Independence Day demand for harsh penalties, including death, as a deterrent against such “demonic acts”. “It’s good that there is so much public uproar and everyone is actively engaging in the discussion,” says Amrita Dasgupta of Swayam, a feminist organisation with 29 years of…

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 to emerge but the autopsy report makes for gruesome reading. There is evidence that she was raped and then killed. The police have arrested a civic volunteer, Sanjay Roy. How did he access the seminar hall? Was he alone? How could there have been such…