(A version of this piece appeared in the Indian Express.)

(A version of this article first appeared in The Leaflet.)

(This article first appeared in the Indian Express on February 20, 2021 under the title ‘The right to her testimony’)

India Today has published a survey which claims to reflect the “Mood of the Nation”. This survey was conducted by a market research agency Karvy Insights between January 3-13, 2021. A total of 12,232 interviews were conducted - 67 % in rural and 33 % in urban areas - across 97 Lok Sabha and 194 Assembly constituencies in 19 states.

Throughout the extraordinarily cold night of 25 January, farmers at the protest sites at the Singhu, Tikri, and Gazipur borders remained awake till late in the night decorating their tractors and trolleys and planning and preparing for the parade.

Madhya Pradesh CM Shivraj Chouhan has proposed that every woman stepping out of her home be required to register herself with her local police station so that the police can track her for her safety.

The Modi regime which said it would never blink on the farm laws, has not only blinked, but bent, offering first to amend and then to “suspend” the laws, in desperate attempts to save the laws from outright repeal. But the farmers, who continue to camp at Delhi’s borders in the bitter winter cold, braving thunderstorms and rain showers, have told the Government that nothing short of an outright repeal of the Three Anti-Farmer Laws is acceptable to them.  

CPIML candidate Comrade Birendra Gupta won the Sikta seat in West Champaran. It was the only seat the MGB won in West Champaran. The candidate who polled a close second was Dilip Verma, an ‘independent’. Varma actually belongs to the feudal Shikarpur Estate which illegally holds hundreds of acres of land and oppresses the poor, and has in the past been a BJP MLA. The JDU candidate Khurshid Ahmad who was also the sitting MLA polled third. There was also an MIM candidate Rizwan Riyazi who polled some 8000 votes.

In the wake of the Delhi bus gangrape in 2012-13, hundreds of young Indians joined the anti-rape movement. Through their rage and exhaustion ran a bright thread of hope: a promise of social awakening and institutional change. For the first time ever, society was tuning into the women’s movement’s concerns about rape culture, victim blaming, and attacks on women’s autonomy in the name of safety.