For An Informed Ambedkar Age
Kancha Ilaiah The Sangh Parivar is conducting the so-called “ghar wapsi” programmes all over the country. According to a newspaper report, about 8,000 people have been brought back to “ghar” from Christianity in newly formed Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. The reconversion of some dalit Christians in Kerala is also widely reported. Nobody knows when …
Yogita Naruka Review: Caste on the Menu Card (2014) | 21 min The documentary film Caste on the Menu Card (2014) starts with the embeddedness and pervasiveness of caste in social life. At the outset, I feel it is important to highlight that the documentary film is significant not just because it revolves around …
Yogesh Maitreya Let me first declare before proceeding any further that this piece of writing is based on my experiences, observations, and reflections on caste (something that has been infused into religions other than Hinduism in South Asia) and its trajectories. These are my thoughts on how caste works and manifests itself spontaneously at …
Rakesh Ram S 26th December 2014. Today Chithralekha, the Dalit woman autodriver, entered the 64th day of her night and day dharna (to death) in front of the Kannur collectorate. She has been fighting the CPI(M)/DYFI/CITU in Kannur since 2005. Despite numerous protests and resultant promises from the government attacks continue to happen on Chithralekha, …
Ajith Kumar A S & K Ashraf Certain debates are constructed around the deceptive dialectics of progressive versus retrograde. The scheme of either/or motivates us to fall in line on the point of saying either an unequivocal yes or a categorical no. Fissures in the society and politics are sometimes rendered invisible through such …
Era Sezhiyan As the Supreme Court has ruled that conducting a caste-based census is against the law, the people would like to know what steps the Prime Minister will take to sustain the policies of reservation. By Era Sezhiyan In its judgment of November 7, 2014, the Supreme Court set aside two orders of …
Gopal Guru On October 14, 1956, Babasaheb Ambedkar, along with several hundred thousand “untouchables”, embraced Buddhism. The moral and ethical strength of Ambedkar’s embrace of Buddhism lies in its cultural and intellectual capacity to sustain among the ex-untouchables a growing association with it. Conversion as a cultural-intellectual movement that took off in October 1956 …
Kancha Ilaiah No Shudra-OBC can be a priest either in a Ram temple, a Krishna temple, or a Shiva temple. But he can be the Prime Minister of this country. Today, when a Shudra-OBC is PM, it’s not because of the Gita, but because of Ambedkar’s Constitution. The Other Backward Classes are a historically …
Rupesh Kumar The five month long Standing Struggle (‘Nilupu Samaram’) of the Adivasis of Kerala has just ended. The Adivasis protested by standing in front of the Kerala Secretariat in Thiruvananthapuram all these months. The government has now agreed to the Adivasi demands and the movement is a historical success. This Adivasi Standing Struggle was …