Pranav Jeevan P The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has deemed Affirmative Action AA) programs in Harvard and University of North Carolina which regard race as a factor for admissions to be unconstitutional. Affirmative action is a policy initiative in which a person’s nationality, sex, religion, race, and caste are considered by an …
EWS Reservation: A Violation of Constitutional Protection for Dalits
Soma Mandal In the recent ruling on the EWS verdict on November 07, 2022, the Supreme Court decided to enforce the 103rd Amendment, which grants 10 per cent reservation to some communities who are poor to uplift their social status. However, according to recently published data on November 02, 2022, by Sanyukta Kanwal, 45 million …
Caste Discrimination In India’s Urban Private Sector
Preeti Chandrakumar Patil Sukhadeo Thorat and Katherine Newman in their article ‘Caste and Economic Discrimination: Causes, Consequences and Remedies’ have defined Social Exclusion as a process by which certain groups are denied full or partial access to the economic, educational, and social institutions that determine social membership. Exclusion in India is defined by systems that …
Social Justice: Judicial Anxiety and Judicial Foreshadowing
Abhishek Juneja In this article, I attempt to unpack the vanguardist anxieties of Indian Judiciary and examine its role in the perversion of the Indian Constitution’s design for social justice. The rigid, hierarchical social order with the Brahmin on top, or the caste system, has traditionally been understood and normalized by the knowledge apparatuses as …
Affirmative action in workspaces – the tick box phenomenon
Dr. Sylvia Karpagam Large organizations working on human rights and development programs have a massive amount of resources and the luxury of separate departments for each aspect of administration and program implementation. These organisations are often proverbial ‘ivory towers’ that maintain strict overt and covert codes of gate-keeping that either allow a warm and …
Exiling Intellectuals: From HCU to JNU
N Sukumar & Shailaja Menon In 1962, Paulo Freire created culture circles in Northeastern Brazil to support 300 sugarcane workers to teach each other how to read the word and their world in 45 days, which enabled them to register to vote. These Culture Circles that began with Sugar Cane workers, catalyzed thousands more. Each …
Reserved about Reservation
Periyar Bhim Vemula I had an interesting conversation on Facebook, triggered by a small LinkedIn post that I shared on the social media website. The article was related to how Tina Dabi, the first rank holder in India’s qualifying exam for its civil services, was a beneficiary of ‘reservation,’ a mode of positive discrimination …
The Question of Reservation and the Future of the Dalit-Bahujanas in India
Mahitosh Mandal Everyone who feels moved by the deplorable condition of the Untouchables begins by saying: ‘We must do something for the Untouchables’. One seldom hears any of the persons interested in the problem saying: ‘Let us do something to change the Hindu’. ~ B R Ambedkar, ‘Untouchables or the Children of India’s Ghetto’ …
Bolstering Privilege: Reservation Debates During Elections 2014
Indrajit Roy As political commentators celebrate or bemoan the supposed change in the Indian polity with the ‘advent’ of Narendra Modi, it is important to highlight the fact that political parties were largely silent about social justice during the just-concluded elections. In fact, two of the largest political parties- the party that won the …