Kima

And from the Heavens above, fire rained down upon the heathens, spreading death, mayhem and destruction everywhere.

A heathen, because he was born in a land that had belonged to his people for generations. A heathen because he refused to bow down to the draconian law of an occupying force.

Yet there was nothing the heathen could do. His voice was silenced by the majority, all acts of transgression erased from history. India never bombed Mizoram (back then, the Lushai Hills district of Assam), and stories about the mass bombings that killed many innocent citizens, razing towns and homes to the ground are just... hearsays, rumors. No, India is a democratic country, the land of Mahatma Gandhi who believed in peace and non violence. How can India ever do that. And yet, the irony is, it was another Gandhi who ordered that very bombing.

"The use of air force was excessive because you cannot pinpoint from the air who is loyal and who is not loyal, who is an MNF and who is somebody pledging allegiance to the Mizo Union, the ruling party in the Mizo district," DD Nichols Roy, an MLA from Assam said.

"But we air-dropped only rice and potatoes", Indira Gandhi supposedly said, when confronted by the media.

"Then dear PM, please tell us how to cook this type of rice!" survivors of the bombing replied, sending empty bomb shells dropped by Hunter and Toofani jetfighters deployed from Tezpur IAF base on March 5th and 6th, 1966.

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Senganglu Thaimei

It is with a compelling urge to let out my angst that I sat down to write in Tulihal, the airport in Imphal. A stringent curfew had been announced, and news of burning vehicles and sounds of tear gas or perhaps gunshots were welling up in the Imphal valley. This was because of the Meitei led (upper caste Manipuri community) protest against the assault on the Meitei actress Momoko - she was allegedly slapped and dragged by the hair during a fundraiser event - by a Naga man belonging to the National Socialist Council of Nagalim NSCN (IM), which is an armed 'revolutionary' organization. This is the 23rd of December 2012, and Manipur is burning yet again.

Unlike many of my co-passengers I have the privilege of a cousin who arranged a room for me in the Airports Authority of India guest house. While I am thankful, it is very weirdly mixed with extreme sadness. And the moment I got to sit down, my fingers punched away on my laptop as though to beat away my fear.

After endless phone calls and advice against coming home for Christmas the previous night, I had whimsically decided to brave the crisis. "After all I am only going home to meet my aging parents" I reasoned. Moreover, it was just a 15 minutes' drive from the airport to my house. The protest against the assault on the Manipuri female actor had reached its peak and would end soon, or so it seemed. But that was to be proven wrong as things only got worse.

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Prachi Beula

The National Dalit and Adivasi Women's Congress 2013 was something that was long overdue. I am yet to absorb the 'explosion of knowledge and power' that I experienced and when Anoop bhai said we could share our experiences I was glad to sit down and reflect.

Many people asked questions like why the need to organize separately for Dalit/Adivasi women, how will it contribute to the betterment of women and what after the congress, where will it lead to? But as I see it, the Congress was not just a meeting of Dalit/Adivasi women, rather it was a socio-political act. While the Congress denied the agency of privileged (read upper-caste) feminists and men to speak for Dalit/Adivasi women it simultaneously asserted and reclaimed the legacy of Savitri Bai, Rama Bai, Babasaheb, Birsa Munda, Phule within the women's movement. It was also a platform to forge solidarity and strengthen the fight against caste and patriarchy.

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Dr. P. Kesava Kumar

Continued from here.

Assessing the Political Thought of Ambedkar

About Ambedkar there are diverse opinions. Upper caste nationalists has tried to brand him as a 'British agent'. For instance, Arun Shourie, the Hindu nationalist and the "intellectual hero" of the upper castes at the time of the anti-Mandal agitation and the Minister for Disinvestment in one of the BJP-led governments, puts all his efforts to depict him as an anti-national collaborator with British imperialism in his book 'Worshipping False Gods, Ambedkar and the Facts which have been Erased' (1997).¹³ He charged that in the 1940s, Ambedkar never took part in any freedom movement. Instead, he was collaborating with the British. The motive of the Brahminical Hindu nationalists is quite clear. They want to prove that Ambedkar does not have any political credentials to be worshipped as a god of 'social justice'. This attitude has to be understood in the wake of a strong Dalit movement and its confrontation with Hindu nationalism and caste hegemony. Ambedkar is the symbol and source of philosophy for Dalits in pursuit of their struggles. In response to this, the upper caste Hindu nationalist thinker Arun Shourie, through his writings, consciously tried to neutralize the influence of Ambedkar in post-independent Indian politics in general and among Dalit masses in particular.

The Naxalite party CPI (M-L) [People's War] tries to place him as liberal bourgeoisie/ democrat.¹⁴ Ranganayakamma, identified as a Marxian writer, argues in her book that neither Ambedkarism nor Buddhism has the real potential to liberate Dalits. Only Marxism has the capacity to liberate them totally.¹⁵ Some would like to see him as a conservative, because of his leanings towards religion, Buddhism. However, there is an immediate emotional response to all the above remarks from the conscious Dalit scholars and masses. On the other side, Dalit parties like Bahujan Samaj Party, or some Dalit scholars, argue that Ambedkar is the only radical thinker of the nation. For liberation of the Dalit masses, Ambedkar is the only solution. They took him to the level of a god. In this regard, Dalit scholar Anand Teltumbde comments, 'in making Ambedkar as a demigod, we are missing his essential message.' One may encounter similar kind of problems in theorizing Ambedkar's philosophy.

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Ajith Kumar A S

Suddenly caste seems to take center stage of Malayalam cinema and the public sphere in Kerala. Everyone seems to be against caste as if all the progressives suddenly understand caste now. The CPM's youth wing DYFI conducts a march to build up a "caste-less, secular" Kerala. The congress organizes "Gandhigram' marches to "adopt" Dalit colonies. CPM organizes "land struggles" (it is bhoomi samrakshana samaram which means protest to protect the land we already have!!) and forms SC, ST welfare forums. Movies have been made on caste. Awards have been given for films "against caste". If we closely observe these developments we can see it is a form of restructuring or crisis management of the modern-secular–liberal upper castes. All this points to the dilemmas and disturbances that the Dalit, Adivasi and Muslim political assertions have created in the political /cultural sphere in Kerala.

I am trying to talk about the other side of this recent "visibility" and "audibility" of caste. This I think is also an effort to render invisible/silence the voices of the Dalits, Adivasis and Muslims. When the marginalized communities started to organize and develop their political thoughts and practice outside the conventional left/right divide in the state it certainly marked a break that disturbed the political sphere.

The eighties witnessed the emergence of Dalit political assertions in Kerala and this gained strength and visibility/audibility in the nineties and became an unavoidable presence after 2000. The historic Adivasi sit-in strike before the secretariat (even before people started thinking about "occupy movements"), Chengara, Muthanga, and many other land struggles shook the political sphere. The mainstream media tried to show their patronizing sympathy towards the cause but tried to delegitimize these political movements. The left/right "progressives" sensed that their leadership was in danger. The independent assertions by the marginalized communities opened up new political discourses outside the so-called left/right divide. The caste locations of the left and right parties, their power on land and resources were all exposed.

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Jenny Rowena

I think this Rosy Memorial Lecture is a historically significant move for two important reasons. First of all it gives us a chance to remember and commemorate P K Rosy, the Dalit Chrisitan woman, who was the first heroine of the first film in Malayalam, Vigathakumaran, which was made and released by J C Daniel in 1928 in Trivandrum. This lecture series in her memorial will surely help us pay our tribute to this pioneering woman who came forward to act in cinema at a time when untouchable communities could not even walk on the road and enter other public spaces. This is even more important in the context of Dalit groups struggling to gain recognition for Rosy and in the context of the Chief Minister of Kerala promising to install an award in her name and going back on his word about it.

However, we must also remember that Rosy's pioneering step was met with instant violence from Nair caste lords. On the very first day on which her film was released, men from the uppercaste Nair community tore the screen and broke up the show, unable to bear the sight of a Dalit woman in the role of a Nair woman acting out love scenes with another man. After this they started attacking Rosy. J C Daniel who made the film, tried to get her protection from the King, but the Nair landlords came in large numbers and burned down her hut and chased her out of the village. She was forced to run away from Kerala, never to return to the field of cinema.

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