Menstruating Goddesses

WHEN IT WAS announced recently that the first batch of non-Brahmin students were being ordained for priesthood in Tamil Nadu, there was great reason to cheer and celebrate that priesthood has been “officially” thrown open to all the castes and that Brahmin exclusivity was set to break (at least theoretically). But what is disappointing is [...]

Operation Park: Moral Policing Disguised as ‘Empowerment’

GIVEN ALL THE advantages of having the National Commission for Women (NCW) and the State Commissions for Women (SCW), what can one make of a news story such as ‘Operation Park’? The SCW Orissa, with cameramen and police in tow, went to a city park in Bhubaneshwar and descended on the boys and girls sitting [...]

Childbirth and Choices

WHILE THE FEMINIST movement may have focused more on the right to abortion than other reproductive rights, there is a growing acknowledgment in the US and elsewhere that women’s right to safe, natural childbirth is being severely threatened by the imposition of the medical model. In the medical system, pregnant women are treated as ’sick’ [...]

Girl Friday at the University

She wanders like a flimsy ghost
in the two-hundred-year-old
university where love thrives
in large abandoned third-floor
classrooms, monkeys shag on
corridors, restless gossip piles up
like dirty dishes in the canteen,
and young women learn some
tough lessons.

16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence

THE DAY FOR THE Elimination of Violence against Women passed yesterday and kicked off 16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence, an international campaign originating from the first Women’s Global Leadership Institute in 1991. Sponsored by the Center for Women’s Global Leadership, the 16 Days Campaign has been used as an organizing strategy by individuals [...]

Domestic Violence: Why a New Law?

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE had been dealt with half-heartedly throughout the history of human rights mechanism in this country. Till about 2005, the only recourse for victims was a criminal law, which provided for punishment against the abuser (but no remedies or relief for the victim) and applied only to married women. Worse, the law failed to [...]

Whose Justice?

FOR THE LAST few years, I have been working on an Access to Justice programme or A2J (the cool new abbreviation for something civil society groups have been doing forever). Some questions pop up repeatedly in the course of my work: What is justice? Who defines justice? Whose prerogative is it to define justice? I’ve [...]

Policing Change: A Personal Perspective on Violence Against Women and Children

By Anasuya Sengupta
A well known TV news channel in English had a Women’s Day special recently, asking the question ‘Do we still need feminism?’ As someone who has worked with the Karnataka police for the past few years on issues of violence against women and children (and is a feminist), I found it startling and [...]

Shylaja Praveen: When Despair Replaces Anger

AT 24, Shylaja Praveen’s life was ahead of her — an untrammeled space to be explored, full of possibilities and promise. That’s not quite how it turned out though. Shylaja committed suicide last month, allegedly driven to despair by continual sexual harassment by the regional head of ING Vysya Financial Services in Bangalore where she [...]

“A Working Woman is a Housewife First”

A WORKING woman is a ‘housewife first’, said a recent judgement from the High Court (HC) of Karnataka. The HC was approached by a woman petitioner after her passport application was rejected by the Passport Office on the grounds that she had not disclosed her employment with SBI in the application form. The Court ruled [...]