Mainstream Weekly

Recovering a Lost Chapter in History of Women's Movement

Pamela Philipose — 2015-07-31T16:33:35Z

book review
Charting A New Path: Early Years of National Federation of Indian Women by Gargi Chakravartty and Supriya Chotani; People's Publishing House, New Delhi; 2014; pages: i to xix and 360; Rs 300 (PB), Rs 450 (HB).
When I read excerpts of Geeta Mukherjee's speeches in Parliament in Charting A New Path: Early Years Of National Federation of Indian Women by Gargi Chakravartty and Supriya Chotani,it immediately recalled a spry compact woman with her hair tied severely in a bun and (…)

- 2015

Women's Victory: Justice Verma Committee Report and the Road Ahead

Pamela Philipose — 2013-02-15T22:00:14Z

If the gang-rape of a 23-year-old student—on a Delhi bus on December 16, 2012—led to a sense of both outrage over and despair about the entrenched violence women experience in India, the Report of the Justice Verma Committee —emerging exactly five weeks after that incident —came as a heartening glimmer of hope for reform and justice.
The response of women's activists to the Report was unanimous: It was, potentially, a game-changer and transformed the manner in which the issue has been (…)

- 2013

Hands Rise, Sparks Fly: Many Facets of One Billion Rising Campaign

Pamela Philipose — 2013-01-03T18:48:23Z

It was the night of March 29, 1978. A young woman in Hyderabad, Rameeza Bee, was subjected to rape by three policemen and her husband beaten to death for resisting them. Public outrage and frenzy brought the city to a halt the following day.
Rameeza Bee is just one more name in the long, never ending roll-call of survivors of violence against women in India. That egregious assault on her is only one among countless others—many of them unaccounted, unacknow-ledged, unpunished—that women in (…)

- 2012

Naroda Patiya to Nandigram: Distinctions and Similarities

Pamela Philipose — 2007-12-11T15:44:50Z

It is inevitable that when large-scale violence, which has the open or tacit support of the state, takes place, as in Nandigram 2007, Gujarat 2002 is recalled—just as Gujarat 2002 itself drew parallels with Delhi 1984. Such comparisons, by their very nature, are hasty, casual and therefore not wholly accurate, even though politicians belonging to the three major national parties, which have in their own ways presided over these three blots on India's recent history, are partial to making (…)

- December 8, 2007