Kudos to the Telegraph for calling out such persecution. Prof Dalwai must immediately approach the Supreme Court to have it quashed. It’s also worth remembering that she is the daughter of a Congress MP who has always opposed the communal agenda of the BJP (Hussain Dalwai) so that is another reason for targeting her.

https://epaper.telegraphindia.com/calcutta/2023-12-31/71/Page-6.html

She’s India’s Claudine Gay. Are attacks against her motivated by politics ? Yes. Does that make them

Untrue or unworthy of being taken seriously ? No.

If you get beyond political tribalism- you realise this person had no business teaching law students. And she had no business at all teaching them that nonsense bumble stuff. She got the job because she was someone’s daughter- why shouldn’t she lose the job because she’s someone’s daughter?

Why? She is qualified and has done research in the fields of sexuality, gender and law, which is exactly what she was teaching. It is a different question whether this content/course should be in the syllabus at all, but if we accept its inclusion, she is well placed to teach it regardless of whose daughter she is

We have different standards for what qualifies as good research I suppose. Claudine gay also had decent research until someone looked under the hood and found a lot of plagiarism. I hadn’t heard of Sameera Dalwai until this happened and I work in womens rights and allied fields- she’s not some leading scholar by any metric.

I don’t mind gender and sexuality being taught in the classroom. I do mind the methodology this teacher used. Instead of asking the class to collectively participate in judging their peers as potential dates - she could have asked them to write a reflective essay. She could have discussed studies on dating behaviour. It seems a small insignificant point that she was trying to make which I for one don’t find controversial at all. Of course people want to date and marry those most similar to them or those who have more status/power. I don’t know what person thinks the best way to illustrate this was to literally open a dating app and get students to be mean girls.

What are we supposed to do about human dating preferences anyway ? What does all this talk mean except to guilt women into dating men they don’t desire ? Because the men won’t be forced into anything… this exercise was pure woke posturing by this person. And she rightly got caught out for it.

A one-sided article by the Telegraph. Does not say that she used the word ch****a in class on more than one occasion. Even if I take her point that the word means fool in Haryana, it is not meant to be used in class by a teacher. Also, outside the Hindi belt, the word has only one meaning (the vulgar one). My good friend is a Bengali from Kolkata and he confirmed this. He said that no one in Bengal understands the word to mean fool, like in Haryanvi. So she should also be sensitive to students outside North India

P.S. Sameena herself is from Maharashtra, not Haryana!!

It's interesting how so many people have so many opinions about what 'true' human rights activists would do and that human rights leaders do not share this opinion. Given the disproportionate attention to the hostages, human rights activists are trying to also communicate the completely ignored suffering of the Palestinian people and to stop the ongoing murder of the people including children. While what happened to the hostages is appalling, there has been no shortage of attention and no refusal to acknowledge their humanity. Maybe you don't consider the murder of Palestinian babies as urgent and in need of everyone's attention but that is probably why you are not a human rights activist and shouldn't be telling them what to do or say.

OP didn’t say anything at all to indicate they weren’t sympathetic to civilian Palestinians. The fact that you want to obfuscate the horror of the crimes committed on oct 7 by saying “ what about Palestinians?” Indicates you think they’re simply a pawn to be used to win the moral high ground in internet arguments. Maybe you’ve got some bigotry you need to work on ? Why can’t we ever discuss oct 7 without a thousand disclaimers about Palestinians ? Why two days after the attack - before any response by the IDF were college students and professors and woke folks of all varieties trying to “offer up some context” ? In what context is raping a woman, cutting off her body parts and then slitting her throat appropriate ?

If you do actually care about Palestinians - why aren’t y’all protesting Hamas ? The ceasefire will only happen if Hamas agrees to it no ?