#Women in politics in India

[votermood]

In the midst of talks women reservation in legislative bodies, mere 25 women have been given the tickets to contest in the upcoming Delhi assembly election by AAP, BJP & Congress party. These include Chief Minister Atishi Marlena, Women Congress Chief Alka Lamba, BJP's Shika Rai who will be contesting against AAP's Saurabh Bharadwaj and other leaders.

[divinum-pacis]

A villager prays in front of the idols of Hindu goddesses after special prayers for the victory of Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, on Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024, at Sri Dharmasastha temple in Thulasendrapuram, the ancestral village of Harris, in Tamil Nadu state, India. (AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi)

[billionbrilliantstars]

Kamala Harris moodboard!

[hussyknee]

Two weeks ago, female wrestler Vinesh Phogat became the first woman from India to make the Olympic finals—and was promptly disqualified for being 100 grams overweight.

On August 9, Vinesh Phogat announced her retirement from the sport of wrestling in a post on X. After the previous day’s incidents, it was a message that many had been expecting.

Vinesh experienced the highest of highs at the Paris Olympics. She defeated an unbeaten Olympic champion wrestler who was considered not just the favourite in her weight division but across every weight division at the quadrennial event. She became the first Indian woman wrestler to reach an Olympic final. However, Vinesh also faced the lowest of lows at the Olympics. No one had ever reached an Olympic final only to be denied the chance to compete because they had failed to make weight on the day of the competition.

Vinesh had taken her case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, seeking at least to be awarded a silver medal by virtue of reaching the final. If she had succeeded, she would have set a precedent, but, much to the disappointment of the nation, her appeal was turned down by the sole arbitrator, Annabelle Bennett.

...

Vinesh has always been a fighter. Tragedy has followed her, yet somehow, against the odds, she has emerged victorious.

When she was nine, her father was shot dead by someone in her village, believed to be a mentally disturbed relative, just outside their front door. Her mother, a young widow, refused the custom of marrying her husband’s brother. She battled cancer single-handedly. Through it all, she raised a firebrand daughter, who refused to back down.

Her cousins, who grew up near her home, were the more famous girls of the family. Geeta and Babita were among the first to win gold at the Commonwealth Games. They had a movie made about them — Dangal — which made the ‘Phogat sisters’ iconic in Indian sports.

Vinesh didn’t feature in that movie. The events described in it took place too early in her career. But she wouldn’t be satisfied with being one of the Phogat sisters — she would become ‘The Phogat’ sister.

Talk to any of her peers .— and even some of her rivals in Indian wrestling – and there is, in some cases, grudging, genuine respect. She is considered the most instinctive and natural wrestler India has ever produced in women’s freestyle wrestling.

Her career is as much a highlight reel as anything out of a movie. No one in women’s wrestling compares. No Indian woman wrestler has won three Commonwealth gold medals as she did in 2014, 2018, and 2022. No one has won an Asian Games gold medal as she did in 2018. No one has won two World Championships medals as she did in 2019 and 2022.

The one medal missing from her collection is the Olympic medal — which she fought bitterly for.

...

Vinesh has had terrible luck at the Olympics — the only competition that seems to matter to Indians. In 2016, she was one of the favourites in the Indian team before her knee was bent out of shape in the quarterfinals. In 2020, she was one of the world’s favourites to medal in the women’s 53kg weight class. Then, suddenly, a freak weight cut left her physically and psychologically broken, unable to coordinate her movements on the mat. She lost to a wrestler she had beaten comfortably just a month before. Now, in Paris, another poor weight cut left her at the lowest point of her wrestling career.

Her battles, though, haven’t been restricted to the mat. Perhaps the most significant one Vinesh has fought has been for the safety of young girls in the sport. In pursuing this fight, she took on one of the most powerful men in Indian sports — Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh.

When her rivals were preparing for the Olympics, Vinesh was fighting on the streets of New Delhi, where she, and few other fellow wrestlers, accused Brij Bhushan, a five-time member of parliament and the long-time president of the Wrestling Federation, of sexual harassment.

The longer she stayed on the streets, the slimmer her chances on the mat became. Yet, she continued to prioritise what she felt was right. In doing so, Vinesh showed the kind of courage almost uniformly lacking in most sportspersons in India. Most of them, as the saying goes, “crawl when asked to bend.” Vinesh’s spine has been ramrod straight. She had the courage to take on the system without caring about the consequences. She displayed it even though it cost her what she loved the most — the chance to wrestle.

Only when her protest was forced off the streets and entered the court did Vinesh finally get a chance to compete.

This article delves into her struggle to rein in her weight as the Olympic timeline unfolded. It's horrifying to read.

TW for fatphobia and people with eating disorders and body dysmorphia: fatphobia:

Even as she had been winning, Vinesh’s nutritionist had been nervously monitoring her food and fluid intake.

She had a celebratory glass of juice in the morning right after she had first made weight – 300 grams. She had another couple of litres of fluid to rehydrate herself before her bout - another 2000 grams of body weight gained. A couple of light snacks throughout the day to keep her energy up meant 700 grams more.

By the time Vinesh was done with her day’s competition, she weighed 52.7 kg.

August 7:

As the hours rolled into the night, it was clear that something had gone very wrong. After weeks of dehydration, the human body, once it gets rehydrated, simply refuses to give up water. Even urination becomes impossible.

Vinesh didn’t sleep all through the night of August 6. She was on the treadmill for six hours and in the sauna for another three. She didn’t consume a bite of food or drink a drop of water. Every few hours, she stood on a weighing scale. The numbers were getting smaller but not fast enough. In desperation, her coaches trimmed the elastic in the bottom of her costume. They thought of chopping her hair and then did it.

But the scale didn’t budge.

The function of weight classes is to prevent outsized mismatches in strength due to body mass and minimize injury. Pathologizing what is clearly water weight to this extent and subjecting athletes to this kind of psychological torture due to minute variables is simply making what is essentially a safety measure into a punitive arbitrary criteria that has huge implications for racialized fatphobia for female athletes and the reinforcement of toxic diet culture across the board. It's misogynistic, unscientific and fucked. This article goes into more detail about Phogat's career-long battle with her weight— a yo-yo of losing too much, and then too little. Indistinguishable from an eating disorder, only one imposed by the standards of international sports.

You will never convince me that a white athlete would have been disqualified in the lightest weight category for a weight less than a bar of soap. The disqualification retroactively places her dead last, which is added cruelty. The refusal to revise this and even award her a joint silver is just adding racist insult to racist injury.

Phogat spoke two days ago about her devastation at being disqualified by racism and fatphobia with a three page post on twitter.

And on top of all of this, because the Indian National Congress political party welcomed her with a road show that outshone the alt-right BJP's own planned welcome, the Hindutvas in her own country have launched a hate campaign against her.

This copy-paste has "disqualified in Rio 2016" trending on twitter. It's doubly cruel and fatphobic because she wasn't disqualified for being overweight, she sustained a knee injury.

After the witch hunt against Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting, I'm just so fucking done with the Olympics. The outsize importance of this competition is nothing but an anvil to break entire careers on and offers female athletes of colour on a platter for all the world's vultures.

[viratfc]

I doubt that I'll be able to recover from the recent events involving women in India 💔💔

[zoloftconnoisseur]

I'm not sure if anyone will see this, I don't know if anyone visits this little podunk blog at all, but if you are hurting or struggling with what's been going on lately, I hope you know that you can reach out to me. I will always stand behind those who feel targeted, those of you who are trans, those of you who are POC, those of you who are neurodivergent. All of you. I am behind ALL of you.

Do not let the tyrants dictate you. You are fucking beautiful, and I love you just the way you are.

Be safe, and stay strong.

[importantwomensbirthdays]

Droupadi Murmu

Droupadi Murmu was born in 1958 in Uparbeda, India. Murmu's political career started in local government in 1997 when she was elected a councillor in Rairangpur. There, she was frequently seen personally supervising sanitation work. Later, Murmu became a state lawmaker in Odisha. From 2015 to 2021, she served as Governor of Jharkhand state. As governor, Murmu was appreciated for keeping the governor's office open to those from all different backgrounds. In 2022, she was elected India's president, making her the first person from a tribal community to hold this role.

Image: President's Secretariat, 2022, https://www.presidentofindia.gov.in/ under a GODL-India license

[fluttershyybaby]

India and Independence- Part 1

Tomorrow, 15th of August, is when India celebrates her 77th Independence day and I'd like to rant on everything that should be brought in spotlight. Here we go:

Religion and its role in today's India: I expect we all know what's the current state of religion is in India. It has became no more than a political tool to gain votes. Nothing more. People kill, torture, rape, exploit in the name of religion. The united front this country once presented in the face of the colonisers has long been collapsed. People of different faith find themselves questioning their safety and rights in our country. Have we all forgotten? That in the struggle of independence, we didn't see eachother as hindu, muslims or Sikh, we were just Indians. That during the Jallian wala bagh shootings, the Britishers didn't discriminate between Hindus and muslims, they open fired at all. So why today we point fingers at eachother? Why does extremist parties still thrive in this country who spread religious hatred and entice communal violence? They put on a facade that 'blah blah religion is under threat' and naively everyone agrees. The higher ups plays with the religious beliefs so that they can remain in that position of power. We must remind ourselves this independence day that as long as we foster religious hate, we are never going to develop.

Deep rooted patriarchy and it's cruel effects on the women of this country: Oh I can never run out of words when speaking on this topic. Whether you're a man who has been told since childhood that "boys don't cry" or a woman who has experienced all the atrocities committed by people around you just because you're a woman. We all have experienced the toxic effects of Patriarchy in our daily lives. The mindset that men are superior, more logical, more capable, owner of the house, women are emotional, weak, should stay at home, lower their voices while talking to men, each and every one of this point mixes the poison of Patriarchy deeper into the rivers of this country. It is so deeply engraved that people don't even bat an eyelash when a husband treats his wife like shit. Domestic abuse is common in India. Violence against women is justified. "Husbands have a right to beat their wives", I heard this from the mouth of my own grandmother 2 days ago. This country got independence 77 years ago, but women don't have any in this country. From the second we step out of their homes, men eye us lecherously, we step into our workplace, the manager gives us a creepy smile, we go to schools and colleges, the principal teaches us "don't dress provocatively." Where are the morals? Rape has became so common that we don't understand how horrific it is. And how do the rapists get punished? Bilkis bano's rapists were bailed out and were felicitated with garlands and bouquets as if they did some great thing for the country. THEY GANG RAPED HER. Nirbhaya's case (Delhi 2012), changed nothing! The convicts were hanged yes, but what did the government do to lessen the chances of another nirbhaya? What did they do to protect the women of our country? Nothing. Prajjwal Revanna, a renowned politician, whose rally our honourable pm😍 himself attended, had raped women and had recorded sex tapes of him doing the act. What was the action taken against him? Nothing. The recent news that cut deeply through the medical community, The kolkata doctor's horrific rape and brutal murder. She had completed her 36 HOUR shift and had dinner with her juniors at 2 am. Then went to rest in the seminar hall. What are they doing to bring justice? Nothing, just false assurances. All this country does is sits back and wait for another Bilkis bano, another nirbhaya, another female doctor. When is this going to change?

I wanted to delve even deeper into the issues but the post is getting too long. So, wait for part 2 ig?

[iqmmir]

Helllo mimifans

[fatehbaz]

On May 28, 1914, the Institut für Schiffs-und Tropenkrankheiten (Institute for Maritime and Tropical Diseases, ISTK) in Hamburg began operations in a complex of new brick buildings on the bank of the Elb. The buildings were designed by Fritz Schumacher, who had become the Head of Hamburg’s building department (Leiter des Hochbauamtes) in 1909 after a “flood of architectural projects” accumulated following the industrialization of the harbor in the 1880s and the “new housing and working conditions” that followed. The ISTK was one of these projects, connected to the port by its [...] mission: to research and heal tropical illnesses; [...] to support the Hamburg Port [...]; and to support endeavors of the German Empire overseas.

First established in 1900 by Bernhard Nocht, chief of the Port Medical Service, the ISTK originally operated out of an existing building, but by 1909, when the Hamburg Colonial Institute became its parent organization (and Schumacher was hired by the Hamburg Senate), the operations of the ISTK had outgrown [...]. [I]ts commission by the city was an opportunity for Schumacher to show how he could contribute to guiding the city’s economic and architectural growth in tandem, and for Nocht, an opportunity to establish an unprecedented spatial paradigm for the field of Tropical Medicine that anchored the new frontier of science in the German Empire. [...]

[There was a] shared drive to contribute to the [...] wealth of Hamburg within the context of its expanding global network [...]. [E]ach discipline [...] architecture and medicine were participating in a shared [...] discursive operation. [...]

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The brick used on the ISTK façades was key to Schumacher’s larger Städtebau plan for Hamburg, which envisioned the city as a vehicle for a “harmonious” synthesis between aesthetics and economy. [...] For Schumacher, brick [was significantly preferable] [...]. Used by [...] Hamburg architects [over the past few decades], who acquired their penchant for neo-gothic brickwork at the Hanover school, brick had both a historical presence and aesthetic pedigree in Hamburg [...]. [T]his material had already been used in Die Speicherstadt, a warehouse district in Hamburg where unequal social conditions had only grown more exacerbated [...]. Die Speicherstadt was constructed in three phases [beginning] in 1883 [...]. By serving the port, the warehouses facilitated the expansion and security of Hamburg’s wealth. [...] Yet the collective profits accrued to the city by these buildings [...] did not increase economic prosperity and social equity for all. [...] [A] residential area for harbor workers was demolished to make way for the warehouses. After the contract for the port expansion was negotiated in 1881, over 20,000 people were pushed out of their homes and into adjacent areas of the city, which soon became overcrowded [...]. In turn, these [...] areas of the city [...] were the worst hit by the Hamburg cholera epidemic of 1892, the most devastating in Europe that year. The 1892 cholera epidemic [...] articulated the growing inability of the Hamburg Senate, comprising the city’s elite, to manage class relationships [...] [in such] a city that was explicitly run by and for the merchant class [...].

In Hamburg, the response to such an ugly disease of the masses was the enforcement of quarantine methods that pushed the working class into the suburbs, isolated immigrants on an island, and separated the sick according to racial identity.

In partnership with the German Empire, Hamburg established new hygiene institutions in the city, including the Port Medical Service (a progenitor of the ISTK). [...] [T]he discourse of [creating the school for tropical medicine] centered around city building and nation building, brick by brick, mark by mark.

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Just as the exterior condition of the building was, for Schumacher, part of a much larger plan for the city, the program of the building and its interior were part of the German Empire and Tropical Medicine’s much larger interest in controlling the health and wealth of its nation and colonies. [...]

Yet the establishment of the ISTK marked a critical shift in medical thinking [...]. And while the ISTK was not the only institution in Europe to form around the conception and perceived threat of tropical diseases, it was the first to build a facility specifically to support their “exploration and combat” in lockstep, as Nocht described it.

The field of Tropical Medicine had been established in Germany by the very same journal Nocht published his overview of the ISTK. The Archiv für Schiffs- und Tropen-Hygiene unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Pathologie und Therapie was first published in 1897, the same year that the German Empire claimed Kiaochow (northeast China) and about two years after it claimed Southwest Africa (Namibia), Cameroon, Togo, East Africa (Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda), New Guinea (today the northern part of Papua New Guinea), and the Marshall Islands; two years later, it would also claim the Caroline Islands, Palau, Mariana Islands (today Micronesia), and Samoa (today Western Samoa).

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The inaugural journal [...] marked a paradigm shift [...]. In his opening letter, the editor stated that the aim of Tropical Medicine is to “provide the white race with a home in the tropics.” [...]

As part of the institute’s agenda to support the expansion of the Empire through teaching and development [...], members of the ISTK contributed to the Deutsches Kolonial Lexikon, a three-volume series completed in 1914 (in the same year as the new ISTK buildings) and published in 1920. The three volumes contained maps of the colonies coded to show the areas that were considered “healthy” for Europeans, along with recommended building guidelines for hospitals in the tropics. [...] "Natives" were given separate facilities [...]. The hospital at the ISTK was similarly divided according to identity. An essentializing belief in “intrinsic factors” determined by skin color, constitutive to Tropical Medicine, materialized in the building’s circulation. Potential patients were assessed in the main building to determine their next destination in the hospital. A room labeled “Farbige” (colored) - visible in both Nocht and Schumacher’s publications - shows that the hospital segregated people of color from whites. [...]

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Despite belonging to two different disciplines [medicine and architecture], both Nocht and Schumacher’s publications articulate an understanding of health [...] that is linked to concepts of identity separating white upper-class German Europeans from others. [In] Hamburg [...] recent growth of the shipping industry and overt engagement of the German Empire in colonialism brought even more distant global connections to its port. For Schumacher, Hamburg’s presence in a global network meant it needed to strengthen its local identity and economy [by purposefully seeking to showcase "traditional" northern German neo-gothic brickwork while elevating local brick industry] lest it grow too far from its roots. In the case of Tropical Medicine at the ISTK, the “tropics” seemed to act as a foil for the European identity - a constructed category through which the European identity could redescribe itself by exclusion [...].

What it meant to be sick or healthy was taken up by both medicine and architecture - [...] neither in a vacuum.

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All text above by: Carrie Bly. "Mediums of Medicine: The Institute for Maritime and Tropical Diseases in Hamburg". Sick Architecture series published by e-flux Architecture. November 2020. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Text within brackets added by me for clarity. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[avirafertilityhospital]

AVIRA FERTILITY HOSPITAL GIVEING YOU IVF/IUI 50% DISCOUNT

[rehamasr]

Winter coming.. my family need you to survive.

[billionbrilliantstars]

Slightly different version of the Kamala Harris Moodboard!

[nando161mando]

Fourth, leaked Pakistani intelligence reveal that the far-right Hindutva government in India has an extensive assassination program and death squads with a global reach to kill Sikh separatists and other opponents of the Hindutva regime.

[votermood]

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has joined the growing trend of offering cash handouts to women voters, a strategy increasingly shaping elections across India. As political parties leverage financial incentives to attract women voters, this move highlights the evolving role of targeted welfare programs in influencing electoral outcomes.

[lechusza]

Women light the way

Yes, there are other concerns in the world. Members of the women's activist group Meira Paibis hold torches during a protest in Imphal, India. The group is urging the Indian government to refrain from arresting Korounganba Khuman, the leader of the activist organization Arambai Tenggol, and to find the missing person Kamal Babu, who some believe was taken by militants. #womensrights #india #globalnews #culture #activist