Bihar was the first state to enact an anti-witch hunting law. Yet it is doing little to stop the practice
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India’s women-centric policies were conceived mostly under global influence, until the rising women voter turnout in the country changed the trend.
When the Narendra Modi government introduced the Women’s Reservation Bill, it was seen as an attempt to polarise women voters towards the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), but, when it comes to polarising women voters, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar is way ahead.
The support for the Women’s Reservation bill reaffirms India’s faith in affirmative action even as it highlights its dichotomous allegiance to ‘meritocracy’ at the cost of inequity.
The Women’s Reservation Bill has been passed after 27 years. The struggle for a seat at the table has been long. We go to the table being us. As women who want to redefine, reconfigure and reset the narratives. We begin with lipstick and bindi.
Nostalgia is like wearing rose-tinted glasses but on some nights, it is good to return to the good old days when a condom could transform into a piglet and an antenna was the medium through which we saw the world outside of our little worlds
Updated: 01 Mar 2023 5:15 pm
It was a November afternoon last year. A crowd of about 1,000 people had gathered at Panchmah village in Gaya district of South Bihar, 30 km from Jharkhand border and surrounded by mountains.
A few villagers knocked the door of 45-year-old Arjun Das, a labourer and Mahadalit by caste. They asked him to accompany his wife, Rita Devi, 42, to the panchayat (village council).
