The quiet subversion of women at leisure
Surabhi Yadav/women_at_leisure Sometimes they eat mangoes, in other places they chit-chat while cutting grass. Some lie on cool floors on hot summer days as they scroll through their phones, others have their hair oiled. There’s napping. A lot of it. What does women’s leisure look like? When Surabhi Yadav got on to Instagram in 2018 it was with one short objective: To really get to know her mother, Basanti who had died of liver disease in 2013 when Surabhi was 23. “Beyond being a housewife and a mother, who was she? I hadn’t really known her as a person,” she…
The importance of being Droupadi Murmu
Few would have heard of the 64-year-old Droupadi Murmu before the BJP announced her name as the NDA’s nominee for president of India. But few have been able to ignore the symbolism of her candidature. When she is elected on July 18, she will become India’s first tribal (and second woman) president. It’s a done deal. The NDA alliance headed by the BJP has 49% of the vote. In addition, Naveen Patnaik’s BJD and Jagan Mohan Reddy’s YSR Congress have already pledged support. Others are likely to follow the lure of the powerful optics of what her election will mean.…
Indian women’s unquenchable search for water
The woman in the purple sari climbs one agonising step after another, scaling up the wall of the well. At its bottom, another woman scoops a few cups of water into her bucket. This will then be hoisted by ropes by people waiting above, while she will clamber up the same perilous route, using iron level markers as steps. There is no safety net or harness. Shot by ANI in Gusiya village, Dindori, Madhya Pradesh, the now viral video is emblematic of the water crisis staring at India in one of the hottest summers in memory. This is not the…
Pride Month is as good a time as any to ask, what next?
By Saurabh Kirpal The summer of ’69, as the song by Bryan Adams proclaims, were the best days of his life. Sadly, life wasn’t quite as good for the LGBTQI+ community in the June of that year when, faced with consistent police brutality, riots broke outside the iconic Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York. The riots lasted six days and marked the first time that the queer community stood in the open and fought rather than hide in the shadows. That act of defiance in now commemorated as Pride Month not only in the US, but across the…
Mithali Raj’s impact went beyond cricket
Raj normalized the idea of girls at play in a deeply patriarchal society where the sight of girls on the field is still rare. Kitted out or not, she told these girls and their parents that it was ok for them to kick a ball or twirl a racket Mithali Raj bats during the Women’s Cricket World Cup match between South Africa and India at Hagley Oval in Christchurch, March 27, 2022 (AFP) When Mithali Raj made her debut in cricket in 1999, women role models in any field were hard to find. There was Indira Gandhi who remains an…
What the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard verdict tells us about the price of speaking up (and related cautionary tales)
The seven member jury, two women and five men, in a Virginia courtroom has reached a verdict after a six-week trial. Both actors are liable for defamation but Depp has been awarded a significantly higher amount of US$15 million (reduced to $10.35 million to conform with Virginia law) to Heard’s $2 million. Heard has said she is ‘heartbroken’ by the decision; her lawyers say she can’t afford to pay and will appeal. Here are some takeaways from the verdict. Can men be victims of domestic abuse? Yes they can, and are. Statistics tell us that one in three women worldwide,…
How sex workers won the right to dignity
Declaring that the ‘basic protection of human decency and dignity extends to sex workers and their children’, a three-judge Supreme Court bench of Justices L. Nageshwar Rao, B.R. Gavai and A.S. Bopanna has made a slew of recommendations to protect these rights. Beyond the recommendations, is the unequivocal recognition of adult sex workers as equal citizens deserving of the same rights as anyone else. “Sex workers are treated like non humans even though they are in work that is not illegal,” said senior advocate Anand Grover who represented the Darbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC), a sex worker collective based in Kolkata. “The…
Anatomy of a fake encounter
On the night of November 27, 2019, a 26-year-old veterinary assistant surgeon working at a state-run hospital was returning home in Shamshabad, Telangana when she called her sister at 9.22 pm to tell her that her two-wheeler scooter had a flat tyre. She was scared, she told her sister. That was the last time anyone ever heard from her. The next morning her charred body was found near the toll booth from where she had called. She had been raped and then murdered. The brutal crime caused a national uproar. It turned out that the police had not immediately responded…
He said/He said
Two Delhi high court judges, Rajiv Shakdher and C Hari Shankar could not agree on whether marital rape should be criminalised. What they did agree on, however, was that the case could move to the Supreme Court since substantial questions of law were involved. The judges were hearing a bunch of petitions first filed seven years ago to look at an exception in India’s rape laws that exempts a man from the charge of rape even if he forces his wife to have non-consensual sex. The question before the judges was whether this immunity to husbands went against the constitutional…
Dying for love
They studied in the same school and had known each other for 11 years. She is Muslim, he a Dalit from the Mala community. When they declared their intention to marry, her family said a flat-out no. On January 30, she left home and a day later married the love of her life at an Arya Samaj temple. Her family filed a missing person’s report at the police station. B. Nagaraju, 25 and his wife, Ashrin Sultana, 25, told the superintendent of police, Vikarabad district that they feared for their lives. The police told her parents to stay away from them. But…
How five Adivasi women and a Gandhian activist scored a huge win for anganwadi workers
After 21 years of service when Maniben Maganbhai Bhariya, an Adivasi women working as an anganwadi helper in district Dahod, Gujarat, retired on February 20, 2006 she was drawing a salary of Rs 1,250 a month. Based on this, Maniben was entitled to a one-time gratuity of Rs 14,423. Seven years later when even that sum hadn’t been paid to her, she filed an application to the prescribed authority. Yes, she was owed the money, the authority agreed. Yes, she was owed the money, an appellate authority confirmed. Yes, she was owed gratuity ruled a single judge bench of the…
Why women are missing out on jobs .
India needs a focused fight that involves government, the private sector, and civil society. The government can pass laws and policies such as expanding paternity leave and providing tax breaks for companies that promote inclusion (Shutterstock) In 2017, when I began a 12-part investigation on women and work, people were surprised when told that Indian women were dropping out of the labor market in droves. “But you see women everywhere,” was the response I often got. At that time, women’s labor force participation at 27%, according to the government, placed us just above Saudi Arabia among the G20 nations.