In the years to come, how will we remember Paris? The Games where for the first time as many women as men competed? Or the Games where an ugly gender row over a female boxer revealed the persistence of misogyny? A Games where women owned the headlines and made history? Or a Games where inclusion did not include hijab for French athletes? There was, for the first time, accommodation for childcare and breast-feeding—an acknowledgment that athletes can be pregnant—like archer Yaylagul Ramazanova from Azerbaijan and Egyptian fencer Nada Hafez—and still compete; that they can be mothers and still compete. On the day…

The night before, she has done the unthinkable — beaten a wrestler who has been unbeaten since the beginning of her international career. The night before, she is India’s great medal hope, a silver at the very least but gold is within kissing distance. The night before, she is the woman who took on the system and won. It all comes crashing down on the morning after. Vinesh Phogat, who should have been looking at the biggest fight of her career, is out. In an Olympics, where 5,000ths of a second has made the difference between gold and silver in…

It seemed fitting that India’s first medal in Paris was won by a woman. It seemed fitting too that the second medal in Paris was also won by a woman. Of course, it seemed entirely fitting that both were picked up by the same woman: Manu Bhaker, the first athlete in independent India to win two medals in a single Olympics. (In 1900, Norman Pritchard won two silvers for 200m sprint and 200m hurdles.) Manu’s double bronze haul, in the 10m women’s Air Pistol women’s event and in the 10m Air Pistol mixed event with Sarabjot Singh, is being hailed…

Four years after it passed a law ostensibly to prevent fraudulent religious conversions, the Uttar Pradesh government has decided to get tougher. The maximum punishment for marrying a woman by deceiving her or converting her religion is now life imprisonment, instead of the earlier 10 years. Earlier, only a family member could lodge a complaint, now anybody can. Bail conditions are at par with the Prevention of Money Laundering Act. Versions of the anti-conversion law have been passed by eight Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-ruled states where, according to Census 2011, 40.34% of our population lives. The laws require prior permission…

When Shashi Bala, the daughter of a farmer in Himachal Pradesh’s Garli village in Kangra district, saw an ad on Facebook for a drone programme, free for women at IIT Mandi, she assumed it was fake. So she cross-checked on another website, found it was correct and promptly signed up. Designed to train women to use drones for agriculture—spraying pesticide and fertiliser, for instance—the two-and-a-half-month Drone Didi programme equips women like Shashi Bala with the skills to operate and maintain drones. Not every girl who signed up for the course ended up in agriculture. Mrinalini Marh, the daughter of teachers…

Of course there will be medals. And headliners smashing records and setting new standards. Of course there will be tales of winning and, the vastly more heart-breaking, tales of nearly-winning. Beyond the medals, ranks and records what do these once in four years games represent? Back in Paris after 128 years, this will be the most gender equal Olympics with 5,250 women and just as many men participating. India’s 46 women athletes will make up 41% of the squad, a slight dip from the 53 of 120 (44%) from Tokyo. To understand how far we’ve come consider this: Women made their first…

Given that it is a project over seven decades in the making and a core promise of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) manifesto, you would imagine that post-Independence India’s first Uniform Civil Code (UCC) would be breathtaking in the scale of its imagination — or at least reflective of Constitutional values of equality and dignity. Uttarakhand’s UCC is neither. It does little to promote equality or inclusion, goes against the grain of more progressive judicial pronouncements such as the right to privacy, and fails to reflect a modern society’s changing social mores including the rising aspiration and desire for autonomy…

Earlier this week, the ghost of Shah Bano, lurking in the shadows for close to four decades, popped up again. A Supreme Court ruling that all women, including Muslim women who marry under their personal religious law, are entitled to maintenance, once again took on the old question of whether Muslim women can claim maintenance beyond what is mandated by their personal law. The answer is a resounding yes. The two-judge bench of justices B.V. Nagarathna, slated to become India’s first woman chief justice in 2027, and Augustine George Masih, was hearing an appeal against a Telangana high court order granting maintenance…

The only state in India with a woman chief minister has been grappling with an alarming problem of public vigilantism and moral policing. Earlier this week, a video of a TMC functionary called Tajmul Islam surfaced. In it he can be seen flogging a couple in public in daylight for having an alleged extramarital affair. Shot in West Bengal’s Uttar Dinajpur, the video went viral and following public outrage, Tajmul was arrested. Hours later another video clip emerged, this one of a teenage boy and his mother being assaulted in Ariadaha in North 24 Parganas. Six people have been arrested, but the…

Even though it happened 20 years ago, Sharif Rangnekar still remembers that assault. The pain, the fear, the shock, the shame. Back then, sex between men was illegal, and there was a whole lot of stigma attached to even talking about it. Moreover, men are supposed to be “big and strong”, so to admit to being a victim of sexual assault was to go against the grain of what was supposed to be masculine. But, he said, “I couldn’t even go to the police because what would I say? So, for years I couldn’t and didn’t talk about it.” On…

Tejbir Singh, 29, the son of a farmer, had been in love for two years with Meena, 28. She was the daughter of his maternal uncle’s brother-in-law, not a blood relation by a mile but still, out of bounds for marriage in Haryana. When the families refused to accept the relationship, Tejbir and Meena decided to elope. On April 22, they got married at the Arya Samaj temple in Ghaziabad. Meena’s family was so infuriated that they threatened to kill them both. The frightened couple moved to a police safe house in Hisar where they lived from May 1-4. According…

When I decided to quit my full-time job with this newspaper and go freelance so that I could spend more time with my then school-going daughters, my father-in-law was appalled. But he didn’t want to directly question my decision and, so, told a friend that he would make sure my children were well looked after at home. I knew that but quit anyway. When I wrote a 12-part series on women’s declining workforce participation that went on to win a national award, Baba, which is what we called Murlidhar Bhandare, couldn’t have been prouder — though he continued to believe…