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 …
Let’s skim the upper caste creamy layer
(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 …
The compulsive need to oppose reservations
Kuffir Pratap Bhanu Mehta wants to break down the ‘tyranny of compulsory identities‘. Shouldn’t reservations be the last place to begin then? Reservations happen when the state finally decides to pay attention to what caste has done to a lower caste individual. A whole life precedes it: a life spent facing and struggling against, …
Caste isn’t efficient or capable
Kuffir Aakar Patel explains why Brahmins and Vaishyas dominate India’s corporate boardrooms: My view has long been that these are our only two capable castes. It is largely from merit that they dominate. Pitted against such sheer unabashed racism, the arguments of the Sangh Parivar ideologue Gurumurthy, who has long been an advocate of caste …
It’s caste policing, not plain ‘moral’ policing
Kuffir An article in The Times of India a couple of days ago, titled ‘Missing the point on policing the moral police‘, expresses anger over the fact that instead of commiserating with the victims of the recent attack by Hindutva goons on a private party in a resort in Mangalore ‘a section of society …
Historian of the Lions
Karthik Navayan ‘Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter’ an African saying tells you. This is the age when indigenous tribes and castes are rewriting their histories. This is the age when new historians, digging deep into the raging conflagrations of untouchability and humiliations of their pasts, are …
The angry young man wasn’t an outcaste
Kuffir ‘I am not a believer in the caste system‘ says Amitabh Bachchan. This is not the first time that he has repudiated caste. He had spoken out against the caste census earlier when he said his caste was ‘Indian‘. It is another matter that the Kayasthas aren’t willing to let go of him. …