Asia

Around 40 goons of the `Sri Ram Sene´ entered a pub, assaulted people there, dragged women by the hair, molesting them and lifting up their blouses and skirts.

“I want acid thrown on his face and body”, said Maria Shah, aged 25, a lady health worker from Shikarpur, some 500km from Karachi.

The victim of an acid attack for refusing to marry a man, Shah sits on a bench outside the Burns Centre of Karachi's Civil Hospital, shooing away flies with her bandaged arms. Her half-burnt face betrays signs of once beautiful features.

How should we in the women's movement understand and respond to the cluster of assaults by the Rama Sene, Bajrang Dal and other fundamentalists; the targeting of minorities and their places of worship; the harassment and molestation of women of all classes in the name of nation, culture and religion; the fear and anger spreading through villages and towns in southern-coastal Karnataka?

Attracted by loud bickering, a small group of people surround a rickshaw near a market in Islamabad. Two women dressed in ‘burqas' are arguing with the rickshaw driver.

"They said they wanted to be taken to the shops. Now they are not paying me enough for bringing them here,” the driver complained. The fact that the two women only spoke Pashto, spoken mainly in northern areas, compounded the problem.

Sonia Gandhi, Jayalalithaa Jayaraman and Mamata Bannerjee will be some of the most influential women in India after the elections. But women are still underrepresented and the criminalization of politics in the country is highlighted as a deterrent to women's participation.

In 2002, Gujarat was the site of one of the worst communal riots in India's history, with tensions between majority and minority communities continuing to simmer long after the immediate violence. Complicity of the state in the violence and systematic hate campaigns against the minority community were so blatant that commentators often use the term 'pogrom' to describe the events of those stormy days.

UPA government, in its new beginning, reaffirmed its commitment to women's empowerment by promising not just early passage of the contentious women's reservation bill but also replication of Bihar's landmark measure to reserve 50% of seats in panchayats and urban local bodies for members of the fairer sex.

More than a thousand Nepalese women married to Bhutanese refugees fear they may be left out of the third country resettlement programme and end up separated from their families.

The health problems faced by internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the over 20 camps in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province (NWFP) are being made worse by a combination of lack of funds, a lack of women doctors and cultural constraints which dictate that it is not appropriate for male doctors to tend to women or girls.

Walson Teron, 51, who belongs to the Karbi tribe and lived in Langmili village in the Karbi Anglong Hills District of Assam, has gone through many a nightmare. But the worst was when his 12-year-old daughter, Prativa, was gang-raped in October 2003. Teron had to carry her on his back across a 14-kilometre-long hilly route to the district headquarters of Diphu to get medical assistance.