Are we moving forward or thousands of years back vis-a-vis women’s rights? Iraq’s Parliament is discussing a proposal to reduce the women’s consent age from 18 years to 9 years. This means that, if the law is passed, then women in Iraq could be legally married off at the age of nine years, with equally serious implications on their custody, inheritance, and related personal laws, alongside education and health.
Women in India, like in most developing countries across the world, have suffered long-standing oppression to the point where taglines such as “striving for gender equality”, “women empowerment” and “women rights” are so popular and basic for any write-up title. In search of a unique and catchy title, I opened ChatGPT to send a prompt – “write an empowering and catchy quote on women who have discriminatory personal laws in India” and received the following response:
“Women are not just subjects of personal laws; they are champions of change, fighting for justice and equality in every corner of India.”
While we look at the statistics of the dismal number of female judges in India at subordinate judiciary level, High Courts and Supreme Court, we rarely investigate into how the subjective worldview of our own judges with a limited role for women in it, has a deep impact on promoting, and encouraging more women to join judiciary.
In this extremely candid and honest conversation, hear about the journey of Ms. Shamim Modi, who was a city girl, but then got engaged passionately in the fight of the Adivasis and workers. From her experiences of working on building a grassroots movement to choosing to enter into electoral politics, Shamim shares very interesting and heart-touching anecdotes from her journey.
The news of the Delhi police cyber cell registering FIR against an app for sharing pictures of women without their consent, had given some hope, that the wheels of justice, though slow, do turn afterall. It had taken several women, following up with the Delhi Commission of Women (DCW) and Swati Maliwal, as chairperson of DCW summoning the DCP of the Delhi Police Cyber Cell, for the FIRs to be eventually filed against several unnamed persons. A complaint was also filed by the National Commission of Women. A notice was also sent to the web platform that hosted this app – GitHub.
By Shivangi Sharma Madhya Pradesh Home Minister has announced recently to introduce the “Love Jihad” Bill in the upcoming state assembly session. The bill, to be called Dharma Swatantrya Bill,…