For An Informed Ambedkar Age
The Guilty Warrior To begin with, I work in the so-called “Corporate” sector in India. I was brought up in a small town, in a Mahar stronghold in Maharashtra and grew up under the strong influence of the philosophies of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar. I was fortunate in academics to do well, mostly with the …
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’ …
Sthabir Khora The patel agitation has reignited the anti-reservationists. The anti-reservationists thrive on popular, superfluous, ahistorical arguments about merit, justice and the state. The demand by well-off communities like Patels, Jats and others has created a sort of desert storm – that everyone deserves reservation. I will take up the following principal ahistorical arguments …
Pankaj Kumar Naik Dear Self-Proclaimed Pandits and Descendants of Manu, Greetings from Trivandrum, the soul of supposedly God’s Own Country, since the Asura king Mahavali is yet to resurrect from the grave to see broad daylight! I am writing this to you both with immense pleasure and pain. Pleasure, because you proved my ‘conviction’ regarding …
Gowd Kiran Kumar On August 7th, 1990, V.P. Singh tabled the Mandal Commission report in the Parliament which resulted in 27% reservations for the Other Backward Classes (OBC). This decision was followed by the Kamandal or the anti-Mandal agitation in the country. Right wing forces, led by upper caste elite sections, participated in the …
Sudhanshu K. Singh The Jat-Patel agitation and the anti-reservation protests of the 1990s are of the same pattern of angst against the grotesquely wrong conception of injustice that is attributed to Affirmative Action made possible through the Reservation policy. In a modern egalitarian political economy, one of the primary aims of the State should be …
Mahitosh Mandal Often I notice people degrading, sometimes publicly, the SCs, STs, and OBCs as inefficient at their workplaces. Be it an SC doctor or an SC professor or even an SC student, the person in question is not an individual human being but a ‘reserved category candidate’, and hence promptly to be dismissed …
Dilip Mandal They are not socially or educationally backward people, not at all. They are not a community on the margins of history, politics or any other social matrix. Rather, they belong to a community which is looked upon with envy by people from other communities in India as they are known to be …
V.T. Rajshekar (Dalit Voice) In the past 68 years that India has been independent, we have spent all our time quarreling. Something is seriously going wrong with country’s uppercaste rulers. They are in terrible confusion. They are afraid of their own shadows. This ruling class or caste may be small in numbers (less than …