PINK LEGAL NAAZ

INVISIBLE CHAINS                                    BACKGROUND CONTEXT:  What year did you say it is? 2024 - Did I hear it right? After all these decades - exclusion, marginalization, underrepresentation, and discrimination - are still persistent. With these flaws in sight, how can one say that the wheel of progress is not punctured? Despite relentless fights and demands for representation, the disabled community still faces extensive disparities and barriers when it comes to political participation as well as representation. UN reports that women with disabilities are significantly underrepresented in national coordination mechanisms on disability matters. In 2017, data from 17 countries in the Asia-Pacific region revealed that organizations of persons with disabilities included nearly twice as many men as women, with men representing 21 percent and women only 12 percent of all mechanisms.  In other types of organizations, the disparity was similar, with men constituting

The Fading Song of the Peahen As Sandhya Joshi prepared for her final speech in the Lok Sabha, a flood of memories and emotions washed over her. For nearly four decades, she had been at the vanguard of the struggle for greater political representation for women in India. Her life's work was now coming to an unfulfilled end. Sandhya's mind travelled back to her childhood days in a middle-class household in Pune. Even as a young girl, she had been imbued with a fiery spirit of activism and gender equality by her grandmother, Vimala Tai. Vimala was a former foot soldier in India's freedom struggle against British colonial rule.  "Remember, beta," Vimala would say, "we women carried the weight of this movement on our shoulders just as much as any man. And we won our country's independence through the same blood, sweat, and sacrifice." Sandhya had grown up on a steady diet of stories about fearless women like Rani Laxmibai, Bhicaji Cama, Aruna

Shattering the Sari Ceiling: A Scalding Hot Tea on India's Glacial Gender Parity in Politics I hope you're all sitting down for this one because I'm about to take you on a wild ride through the comically archaic state of women's political representation in India. Fasten your proverbial seatbelts and prepare for some serious turbulence of the sarcastic and mocking variety. We're going full Mehra aunty at the hairdresser's with this scalding hot tea! But first, a quick primer on just how pathetically behind the times Indian politics is when it comes to uplifting female voices and leaders. Did you know that at the current glacial rate of progress, it will take a whopping 195 YEARS for India to achieve gender parity in political representation? I'll pause while you let that figure sink in... ...Got it? Good. Because I'm just getting warmed up, girlfriends!   You see, the powers that be in this country are doing a truly spectacular job of keeping