Suhasini Raj is a journalist based in India. At Cobrapost she conducted Operation Duryodhana, aired on Aaj Tak news channel in India on 12 December 2005, wherein she bribed eleven members of the Indian Parliament to ask questions in Parliament that were ostensibly meant to be lobbying for small scale industries [1] [2] [3] . Currently she works with the south Asia bureau of The New York Times in Delhi.
On October 18, 2018, Suhasini Raj attempted to visit the Sabarimala which is a famous Ayyappa pilgrim centre located in Kerala. It was following the Supreme Court verdict to allow entry of all women to Sabarimala irrespective of age. [4] However devotees stopped her midway with prayer chants as it was against Sabarimala tradition for ladies between 10 and 50 years of age to enter Sabarimala, and she was escorted back down hill. She alleged that the protesters manhandled her and pelted her with stones. She is facing online abuse and threats ever since the incident. [5]
Indian Union Muslim League is an islamist political party primarily based in Kerala. It is recognised as a State Party in Kerala by the Election Commission of India.
The Sabarimala Sree Dharma Sastha Temple is a Hindu temple dedicated to the god Ayyappan, who is also known as Dharma Shasta and is the son of the deities Shiva and Mohini.
M. Fathima Beevi was an Indian judge who was a justice of the Supreme Court of India. Appointed to the apex Court in 1989, she became the first female judge to be a part of the Supreme Court of India, and the first Muslim woman to be appointed to any of the higher judiciaries in the country. On her retirement from the court, she served as a member of the National Human Rights Commission and later as the Governor of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu from 1997 to 2001. In 2023, she was honoured with Kerala Prabha Award, the second-highest honour given by the Government of Kerala. In the 2024 honours list, she was posthumously awarded the Padma Bhushan.
The status of women in India has been subject to many changes over the time of recorded India's history. Their position in society deteriorated early in India's ancient period, especially in the Indo-Aryan speaking regions, and their subordination continued to be reified well into India's early modern period.
Suhasini Maniratnam is an Indian actress who works in Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada films.
Jayamala is an Indian actress and politician. She served as the Minister for Women and Child Development and Empowerment of Differently Abled and Senior Citizens in the Government of Karnataka, by virtue of being a member of the Karnataka Legislative Council. She served as the female president of the Karnataka Film Chamber of Commerce between 2008 and 2010. Her popular Kannada films include Premada Kanike, Shankar Guru, Antha and Chandi Chamundi among several others. She has produced and acted in the award-winning Thaayi Saheba.
Dhananjaya Yeshwant Chandrachud is an Indian jurist, who is the 50th and current chief justice of India serving since November 2022. He was appointed a judge of the Supreme Court of India in May 2016. He has also previously served as the chief justice of the Allahabad High Court from 2013 to 2016 and as a judge of the Bombay High Court from 2000 to 2013. He is ex-officio Patron-in-Chief of the National Legal Services Authority and the de facto Chancellor of the National Law School of India University aka NLU BANGALORE & many other National Law University like NLU MUMBAI etc. He is also the Designated Visitor of National University of Study and Research in Law aka NLU RANCHI.
Shobhana Bhartia is an Indian businesswoman. She is the chairperson and editorial director of the HT Media, one of India's largest newspapers and media houses, which she inherited from her father. She has also recently taken charge as the Chancellor BITS School of Management and Pro-Chancellor of BITS-Pilani which was founded by her grandfather G. D. Birla and is the current chairperson of Endeavor India.
Tehmtan R. Andhyarujina was an Indian lawyer and jurist. He was a designated senior advocate and practised at the Supreme Court of India.
Indu Malhotra is a retired judge and senior counsel of the Supreme Court of India. She was the second woman to be designated as senior advocate by the Supreme Court. She was the first woman advocate to be elevated as a judge of the Supreme Court of India directly from the bar. She also authored the third edition of The Law and Practice of Arbitration and Conciliation (2014).
Janam TV is an Indian Malayalam language news channel owned by Janam Multimedia Limited. It was launched on 19 April 2015. The channel is headquartered in Thrissur, Kerala.
Rahul Easwar is an Indian public policy commentator, philosophy author, advocate and activist from Kerala.
Trupti Desai is an Indian social activist and the founder of the Bhumata Brigade & Bhumata Foundation, a Pune-based organization. Desai has campaigned for allowing women to religious places like the Shani Shingnapur Temple, the Haji Ali Dargah, the Mahalakshmi Temple, and the Trimbakeshwar Shiva Temple, all in Maharashtra, and most recently the Sabarimala temple in Kerala. In 2012, she was an Indian National Congress candidate for the Pune Municipal Corporation elections. In 2021, she participated in Bigg Boss Marathi 3 as a contestant and evicted on Day 49.
Mahua Moitra is an Indian politician and former investment banker. She won the 2019 Indian general election as an All India Trinamool Congress (AITC) party candidate from Krishnanagar and served as a Member of Parliament, Lok Sabha from 2019 to 2023 until being expelled. She was re-elected to parliament in the 2024 Indian general election. She was noticed nationally and internationally for her ‘Early signs of fasicism’ speech address to Indian Parliament.
The Ready To Wait campaign is a social movement initiated in September 2016 by a group of female devotees of Hindu deity Ayyappan, as a response to a petition filed in the Supreme Court by women's groups to demand the right to enter the Sabarimala temple, located in the southern Indian state of Kerala, which traditionally restricts entry of women of reproductive age. The campaigners of "Ready To Wait" asserted their willingness to respect the traditions regarding entry to the Sabarimala temple. It started as a social media campaign with the hashtag #ReadyToWait and soon gained momentum as Hindu women from all over the country took to social media to show their support.
Sabarimala is a temple dedicated to Shasta, in Pathanamthitta District, Kerala, India. Women and girls of reproductive age have traditionally not been permitted to worship there, as Shasta is a celibate deity. The Kerala high court provided a legal justification for this tradition, and since 1991 onwards, women and girls were legally forbidden to enter the temple.
Vanitha Mathil was a human chain formed on 1 January 2019 across the Indian state of Kerala to uphold gender equality and protest against gender discrimination. The wall was formed solely by women and extended for a distance of around 620 kilometres from Kasargod to Thiruvananthapuram. Around three to five million women participated in the event.
Rehana Fathima, also known as Suryagayathri, is an Indian women’s rights activist from Kerala.
Bindu Ammini is an Indian lawyer and lecturer at Government Law College, Kozhikode, and a Dalit activist. She is one of the two first women between the age of 10 and 50 to enter the Sabarimala Temple after a Supreme Court of India decision allowed women of reproductive age to enter the temple.
Events in the year 2019 in Kerala.