Kancha Ilaiah

After the beef festival in Osmania University, Hyderabad, on April 15 — in which 1,500-2,000 students belonging to SC/ST/OBC communities and some faculty members participated — was attacked by the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) and Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) activists, food culture has become an issue of national debate.

The ABVP and RSS attacked the students who ate beef, burnt media vans covering the festival and a bus on the Osmania campus. Predictably, they used only SC/ST/OBC students to get the job done. Osmania students, leaving behind their image as agitators for a separate Telangana state, became the harbingers of social reform that could protect the Muslims, who often face hostility sparked by the notion that it is ungodly to eat beef, even in this region.

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Dr. Bhalchandra Mungekar

Introduction

It must be mentioned in the beginning that, though Dr Ambedkar took oath in Yeola (in District Nasik of Maharashtra) in 1935 that, though 'he was born a Hindu, he would not die a Hindu', and he fulfilled his mission after nearly 21 years, by formally embracing Buddhism on 14th October, 1956 on the occasion of his historic conversion in the city of Nagpur, he was attracted towards the Tathagata since his childhood. The incident was of his passing of the Matriculation, when Shri Keluskar, his esteemed and learned teacher, gave him a complimentary copy of the Tathagata's biography written by the teacher himself. A brilliant and inquisitive student that the young Bhimrao was, got attracted towards the Buddha's message and came under its influence since then and remained so throughout his life.

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Kancha Ilaiah

The backward class politicians failed in forcing the government to undertake a caste-wise census of all sections.

The Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in the country have had two setbacks in the recent political manoeuvring of Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh. The pushing of the Women's Reservation Bill in the Rajya Sabha and also starting the process of census without initiating the caste-based enumeration of population that gets released in 2011.

On both these issues the OBC leadership of the nation has not shown enough strength and imagination to counter the strategies of the ruling Congress. The Congress party was clever enough to work out its strategy around a bill that has a national moral appeal to various sections of people in the country to counter the rise of the OBC political forces.

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Anand Teltumbde

(First published in September 2011)

What has been the impact of reservations for women, scheduled castes and scheduled tribes in panchayati raj institutions? In case the reserved seat is for a woman, it is usually the wife or daughter in-law of the old sarpanch who is made to sign papers, while the husband or the father-in-law is de facto in control. In the case of reservations for the SC/STs, it is the bonded labourer of the sarpanch who becomes a proxy for his rule. In exceptional cases, where dalit sarpanches have dared to exercise their powers in the public interest, the dominant castes have unleashed terror against them.

We must not forget that these idyllic village-communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism...

– Marx

What is the village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism?

– Ambedkar

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Gail Omvedt

(An excerpt from her book 'Ambedkar: Towards an Enlightened India')

Less than two months after the huge conversion ceremony, Bhimrao Ambedkar was dead, found on the morning of 6 December, slumped over the papers he had been working on late at night. His death was followed by outpouring of grief as great as the mobilisation of hope that had appeared with the dhammadiksha. Dalits throughout India but especially Maharashtra wept as if it were their own father who had died, and people from all over the world sent their tributes.

Ambedkar left behind him a massive collection of notes and books on a variety of themes. His project of writing on the Bhakti Sants of Maharashtra was never ever begun, but his unfinished manuscripts, including 'Revolution and Counter Revolution in ancient India' and 'Untouchables: The Children of India's Ghetto', were extremely significant. In his last studies he was projecting an alternative sociocultural history of India. As in a Marxist interpretation, his would emphasize conflict and contradiction; but in contrast to Marxism, this would be seen in primarily ideological-religious terms, the mortal conflict between Brahmanism and Buddhism.

Ambedkar's life had spanned the first part of the twentieth century and all the decisive phase of India's freedom struggle. However, he had fought for a correlated but different freedom struggle, one for the liberation of the most oppressed sections of Indian society. This was a liberation movement wider and deeper than that of fighting colonialism, focusing on the kind of new nation that was to be built.

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Gail Omvedt

(First published in May, 2002)

The publication of a collection of English translations of the writings of Jotirao Phule, the nineteenth century social radical, by LeftWord publications marks, hopefully, a transition in the attitude of the left towards the struggle against Brahmanism.

It also marks an increasing recognition of the importance of Phule, who has become next to Ambedkar a growing focus of interest for low-caste movements throughout India. This recognition takes on intensified importance in the aftermath of the "humanquake" of Gujarat, when the question is of rebuilding a national identity not on the foundation of an empty "secularism" uniting people of two religious communities both defined in terms of faith, but rather on the foundation of a common Indianness that finds its cultural definition beyond religion.

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