For An Informed Ambedkar Age
Sudha K. F. Walter Benjamin, the famous Marxist critic, in an essay on Franz Kafka wrote that there is “plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope—but not for us”. Benjamin, a Jew, took his own life fleeing from the Nazis, when he lost all hope of survival, by swallowing a handful of morphine …
Gurinder Azad for Neel Kranti Media The Joint Action Front for Democratic Education has been agitating against the new Four Year Undergraduate Programme (FYUP) introduced by the Delhi University. The Front held a public discussion on 31 May, 2013, in Delhi, at which a number of eminent teachers and intellectuals spoke against the new …
Raj Kumar Amidst furores generated by the proposed changes in Delhi University, of late an evidence of brahmanical ingenuity is on grand display. When the FYUP course was announced, some say way back in 2008, there was no supporting argument that is for the benefit of SC/ST/OBCs, and it was never claimed to be …
Neel Kranti Media Delhi University is well known for its caste based discrimination against SC/ST/OBCs. To loot the seats of dalit-bahujans is its every year program. Not just this, several vacancies pertaining to SC/ST/OBCs are lying vacant for several years. The heap of backlog has gone high. Roster system is another area where obstacles …
Anoop Kumar (First published in The Indian Express in March, 2012, we’re reproducing this article on Dalit and Adivasi students’ suicides in India’s premier higher educational institutions to commemorate the death of Senthil Kumar, a student of University of Hyderabad, on 26th February, 2009) Suicides by Dalit and tribal students is a story of …
[Via Shanker Sampangi] Caste signifies social deprivation in the society and disability signifies physical and psychological deprivation. The condition of disability is prone to double oppression in the case of socially deprived sections including women. The layers of oppression need to be seriously understood and enough care should be taken to provide appropriate provisions …
Dalit Camera: Through Un-Touchable Eyes [In this interview Duddu Prabhakar, veteran Dalit rights activist and President of the ‘Kula Nirmoolana Porata Samithi’ (‘Struggle Committee for Eradication of Caste’, roughly), traces the history of the Dalit movement in Andhra Pradesh from Karamchedu in 1985 to Lakshimpeta in 2012, and says the movement now has to decide …
(This is the second part of the article ‘The compulsive need to oppose reservations’, continued from here) Kuffir What does Pratap Bhanu Mehta really want? He wants ‘alternative paradigms‘ other than caste based reservations to be considered. Why? To build a sense of ‘common citizenship’. His worry is ‘we are also about to do that to …
Dalits in Nepal: Politically Manufactured Karma The facts on the ground Suresh Singh (First published in Insight magazine in 2005) Dalits are groups of people considered as ritually impure and imagined as living apart from the “mainstream society”. This poorly understood community is called untouchables or Dalit, a term borrowed from India. The literal meaning …