'Last year, when the Supreme Court ruled that women of menstrual age could enter the Ayyappa temple in Sabarimala despite a proscription against this, the Kerala government led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) decided to prove its social crusader credentials by backing women who wanted to exercise their constitutional rights to visit the shrine... But all it took for the Left government to forget about constitutional rights was one election.
'The 1.9 million people in Assam excluded from the August 31 final list of National Register of Citizens are scrambling once again to furnish documents to prove their citizenship to the government. Property deeds, birth certificates, educational records and spelling mistakes are all being called into question.
Amidst stories of physical and mental distress emerging once more from Assam, many have begun to question the state’s threat of statelessness that many say is also highly gendered in nature.
'A day after the Rajya Sabha passed the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, 2019, community representatives held a press conference at the Indian Women’s Press Corps to highlight their issues with the Bill, reiterating that it only serves to push the community further to the margins and reduce trans people to “mere bodies”...'
'A woman activist, who is part of a team headed for Sabarimala to offer prayers at the Lord Ayyappa Shrine, was allegedly attacked by a member of a Hindu outfit here on Tuesday. Bindu Ammini, who created history by visiting Sabarimala temple last year following the apex court order, was part of the team led by gender rights activist Trupti Desai. Ammini was attacked by a member of a Hindu outfit using pepper or chilli spray outside the police commissionerate...'
'The new version of the Transgender Rights Bill is undeniably an improvement over its predecessors. It has a comparatively expansive definition of the term ‘transgender’, and has done away with problematic provisions requiring a screening process and criminalising begging. Nevertheless, the new Bill leaves much to be desired – it presents a misplaced understanding of ‘gender’ and limited equalising potential. For starters, the Bill takes gender to be concrete and determinable.
'Twenty one people were arrested for allegedly parading an 81-year-old woman in her village after blackening her face and garlanding her with shoes on the suspicion that she practised sorcery, police said on Sunday. The police made the arrests only after the video of the incident, which took place on Wednesday, was widely circulated on social media and came to Chief Minister Jai Ram Thakur's notice, prompting him to direct police to register an FIR...'
'These are particularly interesting times for those keen on maintaining whatever shred of communal amity that Kerala still possesses. The debate on the State of India’s recent decisions regarding Kashmir and Assam — the scrapping of Article 370 in the former and the completion of the second round of the National Register of Citizens in the latter — has emboldened many xenophobic Malayalis. One prominent voice was of a woman called KR Indira. A programme officer at the All India Radio, Indira is also known for her Facebook posts on current affairs.
'...However, my area of particular interest in the Muslim dominated villages has been the married women, who seem to take up the bottommost level even within their community when it comes to literacy and a general awareness about their rights — both within and outside their homes. The partial draft of the updated NRC, published in December 2017, had left out 29 lakh married women across the state as they had ‘failed’ to establish blood links with their paternal families through relevant documents. Most from that consolidated figure had been married Miya Musssalman women.
'...Among those did not make it include several women and children, many of whose family members were counted as citizens. These women and children failed to convince the NRC authorities of their “linkages” with their family. Now, they have to face Assam’s dreaded foreigners’ tribunals to clear their names, failing which they risk being put into detention centres... Among those who was left off the list was nine-year old Kulsuna Khatun, also from Baksa district. Though she had made it to the NRC draft list published in 2018, her name was dropped in June.
'As members of the UP police were seen visiting schools across the town of Barabanki recently, one of the superintendent of police gave a long lecture to students of a school on women safety, and on need ‘to raise their voice against crimes’ for justice. From the audience, as reported, a Class XI girl in turn schooled the superintendent, asking, how can the UP police promise to assure safety for women if the ‘accused’ is a ‘powerful minister’, and the police administration remains complicit in protecting them.
