Protesters in India are opposing new farm laws, passed during the din of the pandemic, that seem to hand over to the billionaires the keys of its agrarian sector. Women’s participation at the protest challenges the convenient narrative that the protest is only about angry men, dangerous and entirely unwilling to listen to reason
Author: Mallika Kaur
Mallika Kaur is a writer, lawyer and organizer who focuses on gender and minority issues in the United States and South Asia and teaches at UC Berkeley School of Law. She is the author of “Faith, Gender, and Activism in the Punjab Conflict: The Wheat Fields Still Whisper,” Palgrave MacMillan (2019).
Victims Must Not Be Lost in Domestic Violence and Policing Debates
If this year is about exposing hard truths, here’s another: We have too easily outsourced our domestic violence problem. Instead of responding and taking a stand in our families and communities, we have, over time relegated it to police and government systems.
How does “defund the police” envision responding to domestic violence—currently the single largest category of calls received by police?
Virginia Woolf in Sangrur: A Stitching Center of One’s Own for Impoverished Farm Women
Expounding on “women and fiction” (and indeed the several fictions about women), Virginia Woolf’s brilliant long essay, A Room of One’s Own, was first published in 1929. Woolf underscored the dependence of literary genius on freedom of thought; of freedom of thought on the free availability of space; and of space on financial freedom that […]
Domestic Violence Survivors and Allies: We Won’t Be Silenced
In an unfortunate coincidence, Ross Mirkarimi, San Francisco’s sheriff who was convicted of a domestic violence-related offense and suspended from official duty–successfully argued for his reinstatement during Domestic Violence Awareness Month, which ends today. The commentary around the Mirkarimi case, as well as around the sheriff himself, misrepresents domestic violence agencies’ everyday work. The success […]
The “Half-Widows” of Kashmir
September 6: Residents of Indian-controlled Kashmir began a massive general strike today to demand the release of political prisoners. In the course of a decades-long dispute in Kashmir, the contested region between India and Pakistan, thousands of Kashmiris have been “disappeared.” A U.S. diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks last year suggests that detentions and torture […]