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The recent revival of the discussion on enacting a Uniform Civil Code, which its proponents believe will give all women equal rights, overlooks the reality of the discrimination that Hindu women continue to face despite amendments in Hindu personal laws, including on issues of maintenance and inheritance. Rather than uniformity in law, women need an accessible and affordable justice system. Flavia Agnes (flaviaagnes@gmail.com) is a women’s rights lawyer and director of Majlis, which runs a rape victim support programme in Mumbai. An influential, senior criminal lawyer of the Bombay High Court, a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and, on his own admission, a close associate of the Prime Minister, spelt out the agenda of his party to enact the Uniform Civil Code at a recent lecture. He made it sound so simple: just abolish polygamy and triple talaq, and he added as an afterthought that Christians should be granted the right to divorce by mutual consent (they had already secure...

The budget has become a meaningless exercise with dicey figures and unkept promises. Within a week of the presentation of the Union Budget for 2015–16, the fizz that we saw around it, in a gushing media, has gone flat. When the layers of packaging are removed, there is little in the core. There are only incentives and promises to powerful interests, and mirages for the rest. That is how it has been in the age of media hype and Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley’s second budget is not very different from the smoke and mirrors that have come over the years to mark the central government’s annual financial statement. An intriguing question is the shape Budget 2015 may have taken if the Bharatiya Janata Party had not been brought to earth when it was routed in the Delhi assembly polls. Would there have been “big bang reforms,” whatever that may mean other than a large-scale withdrawal of the state from the public sphere and freedom to employers to hire and d...

BEIJING: China on Sunday said the border dispute with India has been "contained" and the Indian elephant and Chinese dragon should "do more" to strengthen the bilateral cooperation to facilitate its settlement. Addressing his annual press conference on the sidelines of the National People's Congress (NPC), China's legislature, foreign minister Wang Yi said a warm welcome awaited Prime Minister Narendra Modi when he makes his first visit to China later this year. "Last September, President Xi Jinping made an historic visit to India. Picture of the two leaders working at a spinning wheel in Gujarat, the home state of Prime Minister, has spread far and wide in China," Wang said in response to a question from PTI about the India-China relations at a nationally-televised crowded press conference. India, China bound by 'unbreakable bond', Narendra Modi says "Chinese people believe in reciprocating the courtesy of others. I am sure when P...

No country for women The national discourse since the December 2012 gang rape incident has largely been appreciative of the institutional response to the rape and welcomed the process of legal reform that it set in motion. But have empowering laws changed the ground reality for women? Thanks to the documentary  India’s Daughter  by British film-maker Leslee Udwin, the subject of sexual violence and attitudes towards women in India is back in the national headlines. Over two years ago, when the rape of a 23-year-old paramedical student in Delhi on December 16, 2012, shook the nation’s conscience, the Union government set up a committee to amend criminal laws pertaining to sexual violence in India. Some of the recommendations made by the committee led by Justice J.S. Verma were incorporated and stricter laws were put in place, expanding the scope of what constitutes sexual violence in India and the punishment for it. The national discourse since has largely been app...