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Caste

EWS Quota Creates Narrative: Politics Pitches Poverty Against Caste

It is crucial to critique the Economically Weaker Section (EWS) reservation scheme for what it intends to do—push out caste-based reservations and replace them with economic criteria. But one should approach this not the way BJP expects one to do it. There has been much-needed critique and large-scale reaction to how EWS questions settled Constitutional provisions for Social Justice, but there are other essential issues one needs to raise about the EWS that have gone missing.

Contours of Caste-Class in Bengaluru Floods

When I was a kid, I remember my home in Bengaluru flooding repeatedly, especially during the monsoons.

This was strange as we were in Chamarajpet, a well-planned neighbourhood developed by the visionary Dewan Sheshadri Iyer, along with Malleshwarm and Basavanagudi neighbourhoods, to settle those who lived in the petes (trading and living zones combined) of the old fort town that Bengaluru was then as the bubonic plague had ravaged and decimated the population as the 19th century rolled into the 20th.  

Democracy Deficit : Dalit boy killed for drinking water from pot and stabbing of Rushdie

The assaults on Salman Rushdie and the Rajasthan Dalit boy both stem from democracy deficit.

Two recent assaults, the attempted killing of Salman Rushdie in a New York town, and the killing of Indra, a small boy in a Rajasthan village, for daring to drink from his school master’s water pot, point to deep failings of Indian democracy, without addressing which Indians cannot hope to be truly free.