Kuffir How are you going to break up Caste, if people are not free to consider whether it accords with morality? ~ Babasaheb Ambedkar The saddest joke is Modi’s promotion of a cash-less economy among the ‘poor’. To add insult to injury, the Congressis and the left have again been strengthening the tired narrative …
Vegetarians only
Sky Baaba He sat on a throneand made my Dalits sit on the groundtold my Adivasis to stay at his feetwe folded our hands and stood,bringing palms together was all he ever taught my people;changing religion was a rebellionmy people stood shoulder to shoulderand entered mosques and churches; The above excerpt from Sky Baaba’s …
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 …
The representation gap
Christophe Jaffrelot, Gilles Verniers Decline in number of OBC MPs shows that the classic tropes of backward class politics — quotas and simple descriptive representation — no longer work. The 2014 Lok Sabha elections produced an assembly where many voices can hardly be heard. The representation of Muslims, for instance, is at a historical …
How can we exclude the storyteller from the story being told?
Gaurav Somwanshi One of the grave problems with Indian academia, and the general discussions involving upper castes, has been that although we have had our share of Spivaks, Roys, Srinivases, Dipankar Guptas, Andre Beteilles and Gudavarthys, we’ve never really had any Peggy McIntosh. The one thing common among the former and latter is that …
The caste density of my beard
Arvind Boudhh India, my country, is the eternal abode of castes and discriminations. Here, in one instant, you can see people boasting about the floral, faunal and cultural diversity of their country, while in the next instant, you can see people being discriminated against and exploited because of their caste, creed, religion, color or …
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 …
Analyzing the ‘OBC-Minority’ Sub-Quota–Part II
Khalid Anis Ansari Continued from here. [II] The Muslim Quota Debate The recent lower caste movements within the non-Hindu religions like Islam, Christianity and Sikhism have foregrounded the presence of caste-based differentiation and discrimination within these communities in the public sphere. As far as the Muslims are concerned the caste cleavages within them were duly …