South Asia Citizens Web

Petition
To the US Secretary of State, UK Secretary of State for International
Development and the Foreign Ministers of Germany, Japan and Italy:

As concerned citizens across the world, we call on you to ensure strong guarantees for the protection of women´s rights in your pledge to provide aid to the Afghan government. We urge you to ensure that any financial aid to Afghanistan is conditioned on an end to the blatant impunity that has resulted in the rape, abduction and torture of Lal Bibi by the Afghan Local Police. Afghan officials must immediately bring her rapists to justice and work to protect women across Afghanistan.
http://www.avaaz.org/en/justice_for_lal_bibi_c/?bSvMibb&v=15757

In the last two decades, spaces for fun in public have been shrinking. Over the years in Mumbai the police have, at various intervals, rounded up couples on the streets and threatened to fine them or inform their parents. Not just couples, even people simply hanging out in public having a good time, especially at night, are suspect. Spaces of protest have been reduced to pretty much just Azad Maidan. The quest for the global city has also been one to move people from the streets to consumption spaces, marking off those who can pay to have fun from those who can’t. But even these spaces are not entirely unthreatened.

For two years now, thousands of nurses working in corporate hospitals across the country have been participating in demonstrations and strikes, protesting the fact that hospital managements – often alleged to have illegal connections with politicians and bureaucrats – blatantly flout the country’s labour laws.

On the face of it, the judgment seems to have upheld the right to choose one’s life partner. In light of recent controversies over Khap Panchayats and murders over marriages transgressing class, caste and religious boundaries, this might seem to be a progressive judgment. However, it only contributes to regressive forces. It upholds the practice of child marriage, which has several negative implications for the girl child. Child marriages in India are forced marriages, with this case being an exception where child marriage is interlinked with the agency of the individual to choose. In promoting child marriages, the court negates any agency a girl may have possessed and allows her family to marry her off according to the patriarchy designed to suit their caste, class and religious interests.

The reports of independent journalists have now prima facie established that 20 persons killed recently by the police and security forces ostensibly in an “encounter” in the Kotteguda Panchayat of district Bijapur in Bastar region were all local residents of the village. The dead include school going children and a woman and several members of one family. That this fact could be brought to light despite statements of the police authorities and even the Union Home Minister that “hard core” Naxals were killed in an encounter, underlines the repeated assertion of the PUCL that a free and independent press in conflict areas is vital to the protection of civil liberties.