While a large number of women voters were struck off the rolls, the R.G. Kar rape case and the teachers’ recruitment scam created an outpouring of public opinion against Mamata Banerjee
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West Bengal
NWMI Bengal chapter organises discussion on political turmoil in Bangladesh
By Uttara Gangopadhyay On August 9, 2024, the Bengal chapter of Network of Women in Media, India (NWMI-Bengal) organised a panel discussion on the political turmoil in Bangladesh. The objective was to better understand the situation following the quota reform movement...
Follow the leader: West Bengal’s 11 women MPs ready for battle
By Shikha Mukerjee West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s handpicked contingent of newly elected women Members of Parliament (MPs), inspired by her, are ready to take the fight into the enemy camp. Of course, it will be easier in the 18th Lok Sabha, in which the...
A price on her head – How men value women in West Bengal
By Shikha Mukerjee Between hype and reality, the status of women is an expanse of hypocrisy in West Bengal. Abhijit Gangopadhyay, the newly hatched politician who is the Bharatiya Janata Party’s candidate from Tamluk in East Medinipur, was asked by the Election...
Women on Top
By Sushmita Goswami Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress party (TMC) is all set to retain power in West Bengal, for the third consecutive time. The chances are that India will therefore continue to have at least one female chief minister. The country had started the...
Sex Workers’ Rights and the Democratic Process
By Kajal Bose and Smarajit Jana (Guest Post) Editors' Note: The NWMI condoles the untimely passing of Dr Smarajit Jana (68), founder and chief advisor of Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC), on 8 May 2021. A pioneer of the sex workers' rights movement in...
The young and the restless: New age election campaigns
By Uttara Gangopadhyay Do you remember the jingles, ‘Surobhito Antiseptic Cream Boroline’ or ‘Washing Powder Nirma’? Jingles that went viral (in the days when the term was used for medical purpose only) and resulted in the coin box jingling for their manufacturers?...
How have Bengal’s women fared under Mamata Banerjee?
By Rina Mukherji “Sobaar kintu maa bon aachhe. Vote-taa bhebe dibi.” (Everyone has a mother and sister. Think before you cast your vote.) These remarks by Trinamool Congress (TMC) candidate Kaushani Mukherjee during her campaign trail kicked up a lot of dust....
Reaching out to women voters
By Utsa Sarmin (guest post) The ongoing 2021 Legislative Assembly election in West Bengal has spawned a campaign called ‘No Vote To BJP’, which includes messaging meant specifically for women in the state. The campaign was launched by ‘Bengal against Fascist RSS-BJP’,...
‘Roadside Romeos’ play follow the leader in Kolkata
By Shikha Mukerjee Following the examples set by their elders and betters, would-be Romeos on the streets of Kolkata have begun harassing women with catcalls that mimic Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent routine of calling out to Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee...
Bengali protest songs, past and present
By Shrabonti Bagchi Growing up in a Bengali household in the 1980s, cassette tapes were as essential a part of ‘learning about culture’ as bound volumes of Tagore’s works and novels by Sharatchandra Chattopadhyay and Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay – many of them wedding...
Regarding the Pain of Women
By Shikha Mukerjee “Indecent, politically irrelevant and gender illiterate,” is the succinct assessment of a distinguished feminist scholar in Kolkata about the reaction of the political opposition and the media to the injury suffered by Trinamool Congress founder and...
Will Nandigram’s daughters choose Bangla’r meye?
By Rajashri Dasgupta Nandigram is no ordinary village in West Bengal. Located about 150 kms from Kolkata, it was the epicentre of the agitation by farmers against land acquisition in 2007. Today it is once again in the eye of the storm: the state’s Chief Minister,...
Mamata Banerjee and the battle for Bengal
By Manjira Majumdar Every five years, the Assembly elections in West Bengal (WB) turn very critical. This year it is all the more so due to the fact that communal politics, which Bengal has never seen nor accepted – despite the experience of Partition based on...
“Security for journalists a foundation for fair election reporting”: NWMI
The attacks on journalists and press photographers covering the panchayat poll process in West Bengal is reprehensible. Such intimidation and violence adversely impacts free and fair reporting of the electoral process, and also impinges on the public’s right to know, says the NWMI