BehanVox: Delhi’s Annual Ritual Of Lethal Winter Smog
Also in this week's BehanVox: the absence of Muslim women in Bihar's politics, Delhi HC's ruling on intercaste unions, and more
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter that brings you top stories, gender news from the world, and our team’s reading recommendations.
We have a favour to ask. We are reshaping our editorial strategy to make our work more meaningful and impact driven for you. May we ask you to spare five minutes of your time to please fill out this survey? Your insights will be incredibly valuable for us.
A pall of asphyxiating grey hangs over Delhi, the now annual ritual of lethal winter pollution. In the last couple of days, the levels have shot into the ‘severe’ zone and the numbers flying around do not seem to matter, 300, 400, 600, because this data now has little reliability. Having undertaken a disastrous and expensive cloud seeding experiment, sent out hopelessly inadequate water spraying trucks into the city’s roads, and announced the much-touted GRAP 3, the state government is now sitting back and watching the disaster unfold with no idea of how to move ahead, not just this year but ever.
Story So Far
The Bihar assembly election results are out and Nitish Kumar is all set to return as Chief Minister for a 5th term, joining the canon of some of the longest serving chief ministers like Pawan Chamling, Naveen Patnaik and Jyoti Basu. The National Democratic Alliance swept the polls securing 202 of the 243 seats. There is a marginal rise in women MLAs from 26 in 2020 to 28 in 2025. Once again, there is no Muslim woman MLA.
It was a particularly interesting election for us at BehanBox because it is now a widely acknowledged fact that women hold considerable electoral clout in the state’s electoral politics. With high levels of migration among men, it is the women who are the target of a lot of party campaigns. Consider Nitish Kumar government’s pre-poll promise of what is called the ‘das-hazari’ scheme, Rs 10,000 transferred to over 1.2 crore women in the state under the Mukhyamantri Rojgar Yojana. There have been interesting analyses of the role of the das hazari scheme in placing Nitish back in power (here and here). And a throwback to Nitish’s popular and empowering scheme of cycles for girls.
Predictably, the percentage of women contestants has also seen a rise from 6% in 2005 to 10% in 2025. As has the number of women elected as MLAs–from 17 (8%) in 2005 to 26 (11%), with the highest ever elected in 2010 (32). But even in this landscape, Muslim women are barely visible – in these years, only two Muslim women were elected to the legislature.
With a green gamchha bearing the lantern symbol of the Rashtriya Janata Dal draped over her head like a dupatta, Ishrat Parween rode pillion on a Royal Enfield through the villages of Pranpur assembly constituency in Bihar’s Katihar district. In the last leg of her campaign, she was determined to make every visit count. Starting early from her home in Malikpur Nimoul, she spent the day meeting voters across a dozen villages, listening, talking, and asking for their support. By evening, the heat and exhaustion would catch up with her, but she refused to slow down with the election just days away.
A hundred kilometers away, Shagufta Azim of the Janata Dal (United) crisscrossed the last remaining villages in Araria constituency.
Shagufta and Ishrat were the only two Muslim women candidates fielded by the two main alliances — the ruling National Democratic Alliance and the opposition Mahagathbandhan (grand alliance). Muslims make up 17.7% Bihar’s population, yet political parties have rarely offered proportional representation to the community.
Shagufta attributes Nitish Kumar’s decision to give fewer tickets to Muslim women to the pressures of coalition politics. “But it will be my focus to increase the representation of women and especially Muslim women. We will win and raise this issue in the cabinet. Inshallah,” she said.
They come from very different worlds and this is reflected in their campaign styles. Ishrat is deeply rooted in her rural community, while Shagufta’s outlook is shaped by her urban upbringing and education. Yet, their political journeys share a common arc– they rose from grassroots panchayat politics in the Seemanchal region to the high-stakes arena of state politics. Their struggle is to get even harder now – both lost the assembly election.
Tanzil Asif takes a close look at the political careers of the two women contestants.
Read our story here.
Kre is a millet that stirs nostalgia for Hamsniawpher Suchiang, a young farmer from Mulum, a village in the Jaintia hills. When combined with rice and served with potatoes, kre used to once make for a comforting dish in rural Meghalaya, the Ja Kre.
It was a comfort meal that her grandmother made just right. “It was sticky but also slightly chewy and crispy, like fried rice,” Hamsniawpher recalls. But Kre, like several other indigenous varieties of millet, beans and rice from the region, is becoming increasingly hard to find.
Hamsniawpher along with other nine women have now turned seed guardians of Mulum and are on a singular mission to preserve and increase the access of farmers to the seeds of indigenous grains. They use traditional knowledge of seed preservation to prevent the extinction of Kre and other such seeds. This year, hundreds of farmers from across Meghalaya gathered at an exhibition in Umiam to share and increase access to these seeds and local strains.
“Through such exchanges, farmers are exposed to hardy, myriad strains that have adapted to local conditions. This enhances the genetic diversity of crops,” says Hamsniawpher.
Why is this a critical story? Because informal seed banks can enhance crop diversity and with climate change looming over agriculture, crop failures are more likely when there is focus on a single, highly productive crop variety. Growing diverse crops, some highly productive and others resistant to droughts, pests and diseases, strengthens the resilience of the food system, and in turn, food security. And what better than seeds that have evolved in a location over time to survive and flourish better?
Read our story here.
Talking Point
In Solidarity: Intercaste unions must be protected from any kind of familial or communal interference because they are in national interest, ruled the Delhi high court. Granting police protection to an inter-caste couple, a bench of Justice Sanjeev Narula, observed a consenting adult couple’s right to marry or cohabit without social sanctions or threats. He said that the freedom to choose a life partner is an intrinsic part of personal liberty and privacy under Article 21 of the constitution.
AI Bias: This should not really surprise us. A new study published by the StanfordReport concluded that there exist “pervasive biases against older women in generative AI outputs”. For example, ChatGPT generates resumes for women presenting them as less experienced and younger while older men receive higher ratings even when based on the same initial information, says the report. How this bias creeps is hard to trace because, as the researchers point out, AI companies are secretive about their training methods.
No, We Didn’t: It was first headlined “Did Women Ruin the Workplace? And if so, can conservative feminism fix it?”; then it became “Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?” and finally, “Have ‘Feminine Vices’ Taken Over the Workplace?” Whichever way the New York Times spun its opinion piece of November 6 by Ross Douthat, it could not take away from the fact that the argument, as Ms pointed out, came from another era. While it said many things the nub of it was this: that the feminists are doing considerable damage to the workplace by being vocal and trenchant and that a softer “conservative feminism” could rectify this. As someone pointed out, ‘conservative feminism’ is an oxymoron.
Data Drop
Bihar is a curious case of the rise of women in politics. As voters, women have outnumbered men. In 2025, 71.6% women and 66.8% men voted – a gap attributed to male out migration. Over the years, women contesting elections has also increased from 6% in 2005 to 10% in 2025. Women MLAs have also increased from 17 (8%) in 2005 to 28 (11.5%) in 2025, with the highest ever elected in 2010 (32).
So how do women from marginalised communities find a place in Bihar’s politics?
While the proportion of women from SC and ST communities increased between 2000 and 2020, the representation is not proportional. SC communities make up for 15.6% of Bihar’s population, yet only 2.8% women MLAs belong to these groups. We are yet to get data on the latest elections. Muslim women fare worse, as we said above. For a state where 17.8% of its population is Muslim, only two women have been elected as MLAs in the last 20 years. There has been no Muslim woman MLA in the last 15 years.
BehanVox Recommends
Corruption at CoP: CoP is underway in Belem. In this podcast episode from Drilled, Kari de Pryck from the University of Geneva and Eduardo Viola of the Institute of International Relations in Brasil look at how COP and the IPCC get hijacked by those opposed to climate action, and what this year’s COP has in store for us.
The Pain of Water: This absolutely gorgeous essay by Mahdi Chowdhury, a lyrical meditation on the novel Titash Ekti Nodir Naam, where Adwaita Mallabarman and Ritwik Ghatak intertwine rivers, memory, and Bengal’s fractured history, is a must read.
The Lost Daughters of Bousbir: A haunting investigation into Casablanca’s colonial-era red-light district, Bousbir, where hundreds of Moroccan girls and women were trapped under French rule. Drawing on forgotten letters from desperate families, Catherine Phipps uncovers the coercion, surveillance and violence that kept them imprisoned.
Want to explore more newsletters? In Postcards, we send you missives on the places, people and ideas that brought Team BehanBox joy. Our monthly offering Postscript invites you, the reader, into our newsroom to understand how the stories you read came to be – from ideation to execution. Subscribe for more.
We believe everyone deserves equal access to accurate news. Support from our readers enables us to keep our journalism open and free for everyone, all over the world.
