BehanVox: Feeble Democracy
This week in BehanVox: myths about ideal victims, Parliament watch, and more
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Hello and welcome to BehanVox!
This was the Independence Day week and it should have been celebratory but the mood was as sombre as the monsoon skies over much of the country. In Jharkhand, the student agitation against the alleged irregularities in government recruitment exams has entered its third week. It is not getting quite the extensive coverage the Jantar Mantar protests did, but the student demands are the same – accountability in how examinations and recruitment drives to government jobs are conducted. Early in the week, thousands of agitators clashed with the police in Ranchi and there was a baton charge. Sadly, since Jharkhand is ruled by a Congress ally, the events have been spun into a gotcha moment by the NDA bloc and its supporters, still smarting under the very public pushback they got for brutal police action in Delhi. In all this political tu-tu-main-main what is getting drowned out is the desperate search for employment among the state’s young.
And if that was not enough, the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha were adjourned sine die having seen little transaction of business. There was no question hour and a total of 12 Bills were passed with no discussion as the Opposition dug its heels in demanding answers to the paper leaks, Ram Temple donations theft, and home minister Amit Shah’s response to the police action against students.
As part of our Feminist Election Newsroom, we’ve been running a Parliament Watch initiative to track and discuss proceedings. In Jawaab Do we put Parliamentary questions under the scanner, and in Arz Kiya Hain, we unpack the absurdity, wit, and theatrics that unfold inside the Houses. Our weekly wrap-ups are here.
This week in our care series, we look at how carework consumes the lives of women who look after family members with mental health issues.
Story So Far
Kothakottai village falls in the arid region of Pudukottai district of Tamil Nadu. Agriculture depends on rainfall and that means farm work is erratically available. Farm workers like Nallammal have few opportunities to earn a livelihood. She could be cleaning a field one day, plucking chillies the next or pounding tamarind. She is not quite in a position to turn down work but she does, and she will not take on work that keeps her away from home for a long stretch.
Ever since she married 17 years ago, her life has revolved almost entirely around caring for her husband who has had schizophrenia for decades. In all these years, she has been his sole caregiver and she is exhausted by the responsibility. “I can’t leave him but I need at least one night of peaceful sleep without any anxiety,” she says.
Eight hours of hard work earns her just Rs 170. Women farm workers earn no more than Rs 200 in this region, half what the men can demand. If her husband Thamizhselvan needs hospitalisation or medicines, she has to borrow from her neighbours. This has left her family in a state of constant precarity. The family also bears the stigma of mental illness and the isolation this brings.
Then a small shift occurred in this bleak cycle of adapting and calculating while being overextended, overexploited as an unpaid careworker doing what society expects Nallammal to do. An NGO, WORD, took on a project centred around careworkers focussed on mental illnesses in two blocks of Pudukottai. It extended small financial support that allowed beneficiaries to set up small businesses or earn a better livelihood and it facilitated something rare for women like Nallammal – showed them how to access government medical and other kinds of support for those with mental illnesses.
Read our story here.
Talking Point
Still Looking For Ideal Victim: Last week, the Goa bench of the Bombay High Court sentenced senior journalist Tarun Tejpal to 10 years in prison on the charge of raping a former colleague, overturning his 2021 acquittal in the case. Even though the discourse around consent, rape and sexual freedom has changed in the interceding years, the verdict saw some stunningly regressive responses. One of these that has drawn fire is filmmaker Anand Patwardhan’s allegation that the case is politically motivated and that the survivor looked “normal” just after the incident in video clips. As we have argued, this is one of the many rape myths women have to deal with routinely (here and here).
Workdays Fall: What we at BehanBox had feared about the impact of the withdrawal of the MGNREGS is now showing up in data. An Indian Express report says that employment generation under the government’s revamped rural job guarantee programme has fallen by 49.94% year-on-year in July. This happened as MGNREGA shifted to the Viksit Bharat – Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin), or VB-G RAM G, from July 1 this year. Only 7.67 crore person-days were generated under the VB-G RAM G scheme in July 2026, much below the 15.33 crore person-days generated under the MG-NREGS in the same month last year.
One Or None: Like all other political parties, Congress too came to power in Karnataka with the backing of women voters and on the promise of schemes aimed at women. But there is not a single woman in the state cabinet, neither under former CM Siddharamiah nor under the current one, DK Shivakumar. Apparently a seat in the cabinet has been “reserved” for a woman but various political factions in the Congress cannot come to a consensus on who this candidate should be, as per The Print. You could ask why they cannot have three women in the 20-strong cabinet but that would probably be asking for too much.
Trailblazer From Oman: An avalanche killed 10 mountaineers attempting to summit Broad Peak in the Karakoram range on July 30. There have been several tributes to the most celebrated of them, Nirmal Purja, who was also once accused of sexually harassing women climbers. But, we are hearing little of the one pioneering woman mountaineer who too died in the expedition. Nadhira Al Harthy was the first woman mountaineer from Oman to summit Mount Everest in 2019, becoming an inspiration to many Arab women. Says Manal Rustom, the first Egyptian woman to climb Everest in a tribute to The World: “So, normally, it’s not a very common thing to see a hijab-wearing athlete or hijab-wearing mountaineer. So, me and her had that much in common, and we’d always talk about trying to empower women who looked like us or women who wanted to choose to wear the hijab and still be athletes.”
Out of Public Life: A new UN report estimates that only half of all Afghan women leave their homes only once or twice a month in the face of the curbs placed on women’s mobility by the Taliban regime. Nearly three-quarters of the women surveyed said they felt unsafe going out without a male guardian. And only 7% of women are employed compared to 84% of men. Taliban has maintained that these restrictions are meant to keep women “safe’.
BehanVox Recommends
As you step into the weekend, let us recommend some fun, witty as well some sobering reading and listening.
Survivor’s voice: Tarun Tejpal’s conviction last week, brought forth once again, opinion makers of all shades, conspiracy theorists and apologists. The only voices we think should matter are those of the survivors. The survivor in Tejpal’s case writes a poignantly powerful account, which everyone must read along with this interview of Christine Marrewa Korowski, who fought a rape trail against the theatre personality Mahmood Farouqui.
The Cousin returns: Joseph Trinidad’s essay on an immigrant’s coming home and the expectation of gifts, even a box of Toblerone, will resonate with most of us who have waited for family or friends’ homecomings.
Nolan v. Homer: It’s officially past the one-month mark and you may have chanced upon this scathing critique of The Odyssey by translator Emily Wilson, whose version Christopher Nolan adapted to film. There’s much that worried Wilson — the writing, the freedoms of women, just the lack of play and whimsy. In this LRB podcast, she traces the legend of both men, where they meet and diverge, rooting in the end for an inspired, curious imagination of this timeless Greek epic.
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