Media Release
Mangaluru, Dec 13: Indira Jaising, distinguished lawyer and former additional solicitor general of India, will deliver a BV Kakkilaya Inspired Oration – 2018, titled Gender Justice in India, on Monday December 17 at University College, Hampanakatte, in the city at 5.00 pm.
The annual BV Kakkilaya Inspired Orations are organised as a tribute to the life and work of BV Kakkilaya (1919-2012), who was a freedom fighter, leader of Karnataka unification movement, leader of Communist Party of India and All India Trade Union Congress, member of the first Rajya Sabha and Karnataka State Assembly, award winning writer and thinker and to promote alternative thought and approach to the problems of the suffering masses of our country.
Indira Jaising (born 1940) is a very distinguished senior lawyer at the Supreme Court of India, working for more than half a century for social justice, human rights and equality for women. After early education in Mumbai, she completed her BA from Bangalore University and in 1962, completed LLM from Bombay University and a fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, London in 1970.
She started her career in Mumbai as a labour lawyer and in 1975 set up an NGO, Workers Law Centre, taking up the case of the striking railway union workers. In 1980, with eminent lawyer Anand Grover, she founded the Lawyers Collective, which has been doing pioneering work on civil rights, rights of workers, women and LGBTQ, legislations against domestic violence, sexual harassment at workplace etc. It has also been publishing the Lawyers Magazine since 1983. In June 2018, along with Anand Grover, she founded the online legal news portal 'The Leaflet' (https://theleaflet.in).
She is the first woman to be designated as senior advocate by the Bombay High Court (1986), to be appointed Additional Solicitor General of India (2009), to represent India at the UN committee for elimination of all forms of discrimination against women (2009-12). In May 2017 she was appointed head of the UN mission to investigate alleged atrocities on Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. In April 2018, she was the only lawyer to be named, at number 20, in Fortune's '50 Greatest Leaders' of 2018, as ‘the voice of the poorest in India, dedicated to battling injustice’.
Indira Jaising has indeed been the voice of the poorest and vulnerable, successfully arguing several cases with regard to pavement-dwellers’ rights, equal inheritance for Syrian Christian women, mother’s right to guardianship of the child under Hindu law, sexual harassment at work, victims of the Bhopal gas leak and more recently, the cases of triple talaq, women’s right to enter the Sabarimala temple, Hadiya’s fight to choose her faith and many more. She was also actively involved in drafting the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005.
She has penned several books and has been a visiting scholar at Pen Law University and Columbia University. She was awarded the Padma Shri in 2005.
The oration is being organized by Hosatu Monthly, Bengaluru, MS Krishnan Trust, Bengaluru and Samadarshi Vedike, Mangaluru, in association with department of PG Studies in Journalism, English and Social Work, St Aloysius College, Mangaluru.
All are invited to the programme.