gender

'Shama Parveen was 28 years old and eight weeks pregnant when she died last week... Parveen was buried in the graveyard at the edge of Talheta village at 2 pm on October 22. At 6.30 the next morning, a neighbour, Premvati Prajapat, found the body lying outside the grave, five metres away and alerted the family. “I could not understand,” said Saifi. “I thought maybe an animal disturbed the grave and I went there to set it right.” It wasn’t the work of an animal.

As women concerned with combating violence against South Asian, Black and Minority Ethnic women and girls, we are writing to express our deep disquiet about your government’s approach to gender violence. When you were elected to lead India with a massive mandate from the people many had hoped that you would use it to try and improve women’s lives. Instead, your actions (and inaction) suggest that your government is not only indifferent to the increasing violence against women and rigid patriarchal control of their lives but often endorses and reinforces it. Recently, you the Prime Minister of India, along with top ministers of your cabinet, have reported to an unconstitutional authority, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), who have called you to account for your actions. We find this shocking, because the RSS is a paramilitary organisation modelled on the Italian Fascist and German Nazi parties and known also for its violent misogyny. And while we know that you yourself have been a life-long member of the RSS, we think that in a democratic country like India, it is crucially important that the government is answerable only to parliament and democratic procedures.

'A band of about 20 village women laid siege to the letter boxes at Patna's general post office. They came armed with 25,000 post cards, all addressed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. "This is the Save Mahila Samakhya-National Postcard Campaign," one of the women explained to the curious onlookers. "HRD minister Smriti Irani and Prime Minister Narendra Modi want to extinguish the most successful women's empowerment programmes in India. Mahila Samakhya (MS) has reached out and empowered countless numbers of women over the past 25 years.

"While Prime Minister Narendra Modi's #SelfieWithDaughter grabbed headlines across the globe, many in India point to the irony of a campaign for the girl child in the wake of drastic budget cuts for the Ministry of Woman and Child Development, cuts that even led woman and child minister Maneka Gandhi to shoot off angry letters to the finance minister. We're living in a market economy; if you make gender commitments, they need to translate into financial commitments, says economist Vibhuti Patel, who was involved in consultations with the government over its gender budget.