Nahrani, a 38-year-old in Lalitpur, a village 30km from Jhansi, has an all-too-familiar tale to tell: a recently deceased husband; the lack of a ration card which promises access to free or inexpensive food; and a village without water, power, schools or health centres. Not one child from the 50-odd families in this village goes to school. The menfolk are perennially drifting, looking for jobs. And no one has heard...

Not a quota within quota but a commitment to social justice and a proactive offer to field women from the subaltern strata. That is the way to silence the opponents of the Bill.  Fourteen years and one small victory later, the Women's Reservation Bill has again begun to look iffy. In all this time, a lot many things could have been done independent of the fate of the Bill. Those in...

YELLING dementedly, seven lawmakers mobbed the chairman of the Indian parliament’s upper house on March 8th and tore at the document, containing the women’s reservation bill, he was reading from. Yet the bill passed the next day, with the two-thirds majority needed to change India’s constitution. With broad political support, including from the Congress party that leads India’s coalition government and the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the bill...

Issues today have to be dressed up in ways certified by the corporate media. They have to be justified not by their importance to the public but by their acceptability to the media, their owners and sponsors.  That the terrible tragedy in Pune demands serious, sober coverage is a truism. One of the side-effects of the ghastly blast has been unintended, though. The orgy of self-congratulation that marked the media...

The bizarre politics behind the UPA's withdrawal of the controversial sugarcane price order. It was the quickest retreat that any government has made in recent times. It took just a day’s protest outside Parliament before the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government decided to withdraw the controversial provisions of a notification it had issued last month on the payment of fair and remunerative prices to sugarcane farmers. You may describe it as an...