Taxing the Taxed: The Case for Differential Taxes

WORLD OVER, tax is the highest source of government revenue. Even as the finance minister in India was raising the ceiling on taxable income for women, there was a petition in the Madras High Court questioning this. The petitioner alleged that the provision of taxing women less violates men’s constitutional right to equality. The HC, [...]

Women’s Land Rights and Peace at Home

FROM BEING an issue that was considered almost ridiculous just a decade ago, the campaign for land rights for women has gathered momentum in recent times, especially since the 2005 Amendment of the Hindu Succession Act of 1956. The Amendment establishes the rights of daughters and widows of sons to a share in ancestral agricultural [...]

Beyond Pro-Life and Pro-Choice: Abortion in India

NOT ALL OF US may agree on whether or not abortion is ethical. Some may feel that it is sinful, but a subjective choice nonetheless. Others may approve in theory but with a dose of “abortion guilt”, to use Naomi Wolf’s term. Still others, I realise, may condemn it altogether. But wherever we stand personally [...]

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 [...]

Patriarchy’s Brutal Backlash: Acid Attacks

KEROSENE, POISON and now, acid — the new weapon against women. Haseena, a 19-year-old girl from a middle class family was attacked with acid in 1999 by her boss because she turned down his marriage proposal and refused to continue working in his office. Two litres of pure sulphuric acid were poured on her. In [...]

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 [...]

The Long Journey: Moving from Morality to Justice

From ancient Hindu myths to the Bollywood masala movies, justice has always meant the triumph of ‘good’ over ‘evil’. The multi-talented ‘hero’ wins over the ever-scheming and notorious ‘villain’. Perhaps, the concept of poetic justice has been transferred from ancient epics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata to give the masses their money’s worth of [...]

“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 [...]