Bushra Afreen

We celebrate Women's Day every year with different themes. This year, the theme is #chooseTochallenge so I #chooseTochallenge. If marriage is a vehicle, where male and female are two equals, why is dowry given by the bride's family? While both males and females make equal efforts to nurse their families; in married life, the first sacrifice comes from the bride's side, she changes everything: from her identity viz. name, place, and priorities to everything to make the marriage a success. Logically, this is enough from the bride's side.

Now it’s the groom's responsibility to fulfill his side of the commitment. Instead, you force or traumatize the bride and her parents for money and goods. It is getting ugly day by day, ransoming expensive gifts and vehicles from the girl's family. Due to this, many innocent lives are being ended. In the recent sensational case of Ayesha, a young lady committed suicide diving in the Sabarmati River due to dowry demands. Her last helpless words have awoken us. Many such cases were unseen. In 2019, dowry death cases in India amounted to more than 7.1 thousand (Published by Statista Research Department).

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Pranav Jeevan P

This article is about an occupation protest that happened in Mexico last year which didn’t get the attention it deserves in media. 2020 witnessed a lot of occupation protests from Shaheen Bagh to Farmers occupation of Delhi borders. Just like those in Shaheen Bagh, this occupation protest in Mexico was by led by women. It started with the spontaneous takeover of the Office of Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) in response to rising femicides in Mexico.

11 women are killed in the Mexico every day. Femicide rates have increased in Mexico each year for over a decade, their characteristics consistent and gruesome with many cases where perpetrators have mutilated and abused their victims’ bodies, then disposed of them on roadsides or in fields. Over 66 percent of Mexican women report having experienced some type of sexual violence. Victims find themselves caught in endless bureaucracy where they are denied justice for years and 98% of all reported crimes go unresolved.

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Greetings from, Dr. Ambedkar Memorial Lecture Series Team 2021, Tuljapur Campus

On behalf of the AML 3rd National Conference organizing Team, we are pleased to invite you to participate in the National Conference on "The State and Democracy Today: Remembering Ambedkar, (Re-)Imagining India and Rights of the People".

Date and time: 16th April 2021 -10 am
& 17th April 2021 - 4 pm.

The sub-themes are as follows

1. Ambedkar's idea of Indian constitution and citizenship

2. Constitutionalism and its challenges in India

3. State, Media, and Democracy today

4. Democracy during the Post-Truth era

5. Judiciary and the citizenship rights in contemporary times

6. State, Minority and Citizenship

and

Any other related sub-theme related to Ambedkar, Constitution

and Social justice, not mentioned above.

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Pranav Jeevan P

Begumpura ("land without sorrow") is a stateless, classless, casteless society imagined by poet Guru Raidas in his poem around 500 years ago in India. It was possibly the first imagination of an anarchist utopia in Indian literature. It became the guiding light for anti-caste intellectuals for imagining the society that they aspire to create.

 The Poem

 The regal realm with the sorrowless name:
they call it Begumpura, a place with no pain,
No taxes or cares, none owns property there,
no wrongdoing, worry, terror, or torture.
Oh, my brother, I've come to take it as my own,
my distant home where everything is right.
That imperial kingdom is rich and secure,
where none are third or second – all are one;
They do this or that, they walk where they wish,
they stroll through fabled palaces unchallenged.
Oh, says Ravidas, a tanner now set free,
those who walk beside me are my friends. [1]

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Bobby Kunhu

Despite the extensive work by historians like K. N. Panikkar, the general consensus that the 1921 Malabar rebellion was a peasant rebellion and the fact that the Government of Kerala awards pension to those who participated in the rebellion and their spouses – there are strong attempts to portray the events of 1921 as communal violence. This also has to do with how the contemporary non Malayalee North Indian leaders of the Independence movement reacted to the events without even a primary investigation. While there were Hindu – even savarnas – who sided with the rebels, the feudal savarnas – who never were part of the independence movement – nor claimed any loyalty to the idea of India were the ones that were desperate to portray 1921 as a communal frenzy. The letters written by people like the Samoothiri and the Rani of Nilambur whose feudal caste antecedents are well established is proof enough. The rare non-Malayalee who diagnosed 1921 correctly was Saumyendranath Tagore.

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Vara Lakshmi Swaero

To
Mr. Challa Dharma Reddy, Honorable MLA, Parkal, Telangana,

Re: Rebutting your recent public statement on 'upper castes' not securing jobs while "others" without merit were getting positions through reservations

Dear Sir,

As a citizen of India and a resident of Telangana, I am writing to express my extreme opposition to your recent remarks aimed at humiliating the marginalized communities.

Firstly, I would like to tell you that, the word "others" that you refer to in your speech is the word coined by the so-called upper castes, who are not willing to treat humans as humans. Further, to justify the false inhuman hierarchy "you" people have written the book called Manusmruti and I am sure you are aware of the status of it.

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Vinod Kumar

Early afternoon hours, say about 12ish and I was being driven through the Singhu border, the site of the present farmers’ protest in India. Makeshift tenements on both sides of the road, tents, kitchens, trucks and tractors converted into shelters. Farmers and their families moving around. Young boys, athletic and fit-built, holding each other’s hands and roaming around with a smile on their faces, full of life and youth. The glow on their faces, their smiles, the carefree demeanour, they were different from those of city boys. I looked at them and could tell that they were cut from a different cloth, had grown up in a world different from the urban, they gave off courage, exuberated honesty and simplicity not to be mistaken for foolhardiness. A certain kind of naivete in their deportment that I was willing to call a raw character burnished in nature, one which had still not assumed the trick and way of the city life. 

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