sexual politics

'On Wednesday, BJP’s Unnao MP Sachchidanand Hari Sakshi alias Sakshi Maharaj met rape accused party MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar at the Sitapur district jail to “thank” him after the general election. Sengar, a four-time MLA, is lodged in the jail for allegedly raping a woman who had visited him for a job on June 4, 2017. Speaking to reporters after the meeting, Sakshi Maharaj said, “Our ‘yashasvi’ (renowned) and popular MLA Kuldeep Sengarji is lodged here for quite some time. I thought it appropriate to thank him after the elections.”...'

'A few months ago, on the initiative of the Bihar government, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) conducted a social audit of children homes in Bihar. The Koshish unit of TISS visited 110 children homes in 38 districts of Bihar and submitted the audit report to the Department of Social Welfare on April 27, 2018. Koshish mainly works on urban poverty. The team constituted eight members—five men and three women.

'India has continued to make very little headway in improving the status of human development within the country, moving up only five notches on the United Nation’s recently released Human Development Index (HDI), a ranked list that measures various dimensions of human well-being. According to the report, which was published on Monday, India placed at 130 out of a list of over 180 countries and continues to remain in the ‘medium human development category’— a group of countries that includes Botswana (Rank 106), Iraq (Rank 121), and Cambodia (Rank 143)...

;Forget cuss words, now even the images of Indian goddesses have failed to make the cut in front of the Indian censor board. In the soon-to-be-released film Angry Indian Goddesses, amongst the 17 cuts that the Indian censor board wanted filmmakers to make, was the blurring of the images of two Indian goddesses -- a picture of Lakshmi in the credits, and later in the movie, a picture of Kali. Movie producer Gaurav Dhingra said that he had failed to make the cut in front of the revising committee.