The latest family code in Cuba, with its progressive provisions regarding LGBT+ rights, recognition of women’s household work, strong measures against gender violence and child protection, has the potential to usher in a democracy within Cuban families. This spirit of democracy will eventually have a considerable impact on the political dynamics and power structures within the country.
The pullback of the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 has nullified the multi-year efforts put in by various stakeholders that have gone into shaping the bill. The promise of a “comprehensive legal framework” to protect the citizens’ data is a hollow one, coming with no clear deadlines or underlying principles.
Politics of the Poor: Negotiating Democracy in Contemporary India by Indrajit Roy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, New York, US, Melbourne, Australia; New Delhi and Singapore: 2018; pp xxi + 521, price not indicated.
Reception of the reading down by the Supreme Court of Section 377 should be more circumspect, since there is much in the decision that offers reasons for concern. Rather than making a rupture with the contemporary majoritarian political climate, the decision is, in fact, a continuation of a longer nationalist project aimed at consolidating the ideal citizen subject of the Indian nation state.
The most important factor in increasing women’s employment is access to safe transport. In India, women often have no choice but to decline job opportunities that are far from home or that do not have proper transport connectivity. Forced immobility of women is a consequence of the violence and insecurity faced daily during the commute to and from work.
The partition of British India precipitated a set of instruments of governance that shaped occupations, land-use patterns, and forms of citizenship in urban hinterlands. This process is explored through an ethnographic and archival study of a village in Kolkata’s urban periphery, populated by an oppressed caste community called Namasudras, who had suffered repeated displacements. Namasudra refugee labour was crucial in the making of Kolkata’s suburban infrastructure, prompted by a process of state-led “deagrarianisation” and inter-community politico–economic competition that also displaced the local Muslim peasantry.
Asma Jahangir, a “human rights giant,” lives on as an inspiration and source of strength for millions fighting for rights and justice. This is a portrait of an incredibly courageous woman, lovingly drawn with a collection of memories and anecdotes.
Visually challenged participants at a workshop framed issues almost exclusively through the lens of their personal experiences and understanding of visual disability, while the articulations of the non-disabled participants revealed a more mixed perspective combining their understanding and assumptions about disability and gender in general. With regard to the connections between the women’s movement and disability rights movement, it was felt that being a part of mainstream society, the women’s movement has, with a few exceptions, also invisibilised disability.
The mob attack on a Muslim family and lynching of Mohammad Akhlaq Saifi at Dadri in December last year along with the Jawaharlal Nehru University sedition cases in early February have shifted the rhetoric and discourse of conceiving the Muslim in India. From the category of “religious minority,” which was passionately argued about throughout the periods of the Constituent Assembly debates, the Muslim question today is being increasingly constituted by “names” and food habit. The implications are far from merely rhetorical or symbolic.
How can we create just and non-discriminatory spaces in universities when the discriminatory practices are not obvious and apparent? The author suggests two ways—reporting and addressing indirect discrimination and a periodic discrimination audit of educational institutions.
