-Open Democracy Were Ram Singh and his cohort simply claiming a notion of masculinity promoted every day by their role models in politics, business and the media? Ruchira Gupta writes of the steady creeping of a rape culture into the fabric of India, and what needs to be done to counter the idea that women are commodities Let us talk about Ram Singh, the chief rapist accused in the case of Damini,...

-The Hindu Business Line Indian society is yet to acknowledge the existence of rape culture – a set of beliefs that condones aggression on women. Perhaps no other event in India has received more international attention in the recent past than the brutal gang rape in Delhi and its tragic aftermath. The issue is widely covered in the Western media; the latest addition is the channel interview of the rape victim’s male...

-The Hindu Refusal by Dalits to work as agricultural labour and to perform menial duties plus their relative economic improvement have made them the targets of caste violence In the recent violence against the Dalits in Dharmapuri district in Tamil Nadu, about 300 of their houses were burnt down and other properties destroyed by the Vanniars, a numerically strong intermediate caste, sections of whom have been economically stagnant. The immediate cause for...

-The Hindu The old Penal Code exempts it as an offence if a wife is not under 16 Opposing the death penalty for those guilty of rape, women’s groups have demanded that marital rape, stalking and stripping be regarded as serious offences. The old Penal Code and the proposed amendments exempt marital rape as an offence if a wife is not under 16 years of age. This exemption, totally and unreasonably, ignores the...

-The Hindu While voices were rasied against the brutal gang-rape of the 23 year-old woman who tragically died on Saturday, what about the daily occurrences of rape and assault in the lives of Dalit Women? Who will listen to the voices of the margins? Margins mean those who are not in the capital, those who are not part of the urban middle-class, and those who are not in the gaze of the...