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 …
Are SCs, STs and OBCs less talented?
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 …
Making sense of the Patel Agitation: Democracy and its discontents
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 …
Caste can be destroyed only through caste war: V. T. Rajshekar
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 …
Do ‘The Hindu’ newspaper’s Photo Captions have Caste too?
Anoop Kumar (This article was first published on 27th July, 2009, on Insight blog) Today, while reading one of our national English dailies, The Hindu, I came across a news item regarding the rekindling of the Gujjar agitation in Rajasthan, demanding Scheduled Tribe status. They are holding a three day caste-panchayat to support their …
Caste Diversity in Indian Development Sector: Does it Exist?
Karthik Navayan Gramsci uses the analogy of civil society as a system of trenches and redoubts surrounding the state1. All political attempts by the underprivileged classes–castes in Indian context–to overcome the barriers are drowned by the development sector that claims for itself the status of the civil society. Does the civil society, popularly understood …
A case for caste census
Era Sezhiyan As the Supreme Court has ruled that conducting a caste-based census is against the law, the people would like to know what steps the Prime Minister will take to sustain the policies of reservation. By Era Sezhiyan In its judgment of November 7, 2014, the Supreme Court set aside two orders of …
Gender Outlawed: The Supreme Court judgment on third gender and its implications
Gee Imaan Semmalar Justice KS Radhakrishnan Panicker and Justice AK Sikri delivered a Supreme Court judgment on April 15,2014. That is all that can be said clearly. Who the judgment includes or excludes in its understanding of transgenders, whether transgenders can identify as male/female or third sex, what is being guaranteed to us as …
Oppose the modalities of reservation adopted by Delhi University
Balancing Interests: Two reasons to oppose the current modalities of reservation adopted by Delhi University Hany Babu M.T. Delhi University teachers are witnessing a peculiar phase. On the one hand, a large number of teachers who have been relegated to the status of “adhoc teachers” for years on end see some glimmer of hope …