Dhamma Darshan Nigam The COVID-19 pandemic has made clearly visible the deep chasm of inequality in the Indian society: it is our Bahujan folks who are suffering the most. However, for the Brahminical media and academia (BMA), their suffering is just a “poverty” issue, they portray that people are suffering just because they are poor. …
Discipline and Punish: A History of Impalement in Kerala and Tamil Nadu
Umar Nizar The brutal murder of P. Jeyaraj and his son Beniks in police custody in Sathankulam in Tamil Nadu invokes the Nirbhaya case in its brutality, the only difference in this case being that the perpetrators were policemen. The atrocious and horrific nature of the torture and the brutalities inflicted upon the victims …
Learnings from Assam in the context of NPR/NRC/CAA
Naaz Khair The Council of Europe reports that there are more than 680,000 stateless people in Europe today, a large number of them being ethnic Roma with no basic documents to prove their identity, legal status and citizenship. They are all individual stories of deprivation of rights, with their statelessness caused by, “discrimination in …
An Enquiry Beyond Citizenship Amendment Bill
Veewon Thokchom The question of migrant population in the “Northeast” – Land of the rising sun, Land of festivals, Scotland of the East, Jewel of India – has always remained elusive in the popular discourse of the country, just as the question of occupation in Kashmir – a Paradise on Earth. These artfully contrived …
In the name of fear: Deconstructing dominant discourse of Left in JNU
Akash Sulochana Here I wish to deconstruct the ‘Narrative of fear’ used as a part of the dominant discourse of left in JNU as a part of their political propaganda: a. If you do not vote for us, ABVP will come.b. If you vote for BAPSA, the vote will be split, and ABVP will …
May we tell our children that they can’t be stopped
Pranjali Kureel May we tell our children about our history, our family histories that our ancestors were treated worse than animals were denied basic dignity and that it still hasn’t changed much. May we tell our children that the histories they read in school are conveniently manipulated and distorted to extend the propaganda of those …
The Cost of a Poor Brahmin: Notes from History
Nidhin Donald E.A.H Blunt in his book The Caste System of Northern India spends an entire chapter on how castes governed themselves in everyday lives. Based on the U.P. Census Report of 1911, he describes the functions and forms of punishments instituted by jaati panchayats. Blunt points out that feeding the brahmin or paying …
Buried Stories
Veewon Thokchom As a boy who grew up in Manipur in the 1990s, living in gruesomeness had become a way of life. When I tell stories about those days I feel that telling stories constitutes an act of resistance, an act that reaffirms our existence. Why it is essential to tell these stories is because …
Modern Historiography fits Maharaja Ranjit Singh in Indian Nationalistic Perspective
Jaspal Singh Sidhu “That history always has a purpose. That history is always about power. That history is never innocent but always ideological.” ~ Keith Jenkins, ‘Rethinking of History’, Routledge Classics. Of late, a majority of historians including those subscribing to the Left ideology have attempted to portray Maharaja Ranjit Singh, a 19th century …