India Insight

(Any opinions expressed here are those of the author, and not necessarily those of Thomson Reuters)

India took 50 years to come up with a definition for what constitutes sexual harassment in the workplace, courtesy of a Supreme Court judgement 12 years ago.

It makes you wonder where parliament has been, considering that there is no law to deal with the offense.

This may change soon. The Lok Sabha in September 2012 passed the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Bill. If approved by the Rajya Sabha, the law would give women a way to seek help from the government when confronted with predatory practices at work.

But here’s the funny part: the bill takes for granted that all potential offenders are men. That’s understandable, considering that sexual harassment usually begins with a man and is aimed at a woman. While the empirical evidence of sexual harassment against men may not be prominently reported and thus hard to ascertain, it does not mean that men cannot be victimised by other men or women at work.

(Any opinions expressed here are those of the author, and not necessarily those of Thomson Reuters)

Talk of a trust vote, foreign direct investment in retail, and 102 bills pending overall – this is what the agenda for the winter session of parliament could have been. It was, actually, but sometimes things just get in the way.

Day one of the winter session started in the same way that the last session ended: opposition parties protesting over various contentious topics. Also, on the first day, the speaker rejected a motion to trigger early elections with a no-confidence vote.

(Any opinions expressed here are those of the author, and not necessarily those of Thomson Reuters)

It seemed like a typical Wednesday, at least till the morning calm was shattered by the din of television channels announcing the execution of perhaps India’s most hated villain — Mohammad Ajmal Kasab.

On the morning of Nov. 21, India hanged Kasab, the only surviving member of a militant squad that attacked Mumbai in 2008. His hanging, just days before the fourth anniversary of the attacks, was done amid great secrecy, perhaps fearing a violent backlash.