The process for finalising the parameters for the 2011 Census is on, and a key question is yet to be answered. In response to a question in Parliament, Union Minister of State for Home Ajay Maken said that the census exercise would be conducted between February 9 and 28, 2011. But there was no word on whether information on caste would be elicited. India’s decennial census is the largest data...
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Resistance a strategy for staying alive: Binayak by Rahi Gaikwad
One-third of India is starving. In fact, this population has been in a state of chronic hunger, a factor which should be taken into account while evaluating the poverty situation, human rights activist and eminent doctor Binayak Sen said in a lecture at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences here on Monday. As a physician, “it’s been my privilege to read the politics of the bodies of my people,” said Dr....
More »Caste, gene and history wars by Deepak Lal
In my July 2002 column and the preface to the revised and abridged version of my 1988 book, The Hindu Equilibrium, I noted the astonishing post-modern turn in Indian history, whose canonical book Imagining India by RB Inden claimed that caste was an invention of the colonial British Raj. This ran contrary to the central theme of my book that the caste system arose in ancient India in the Indo...
More »Victims always by Venkitesh Ramakrishnan and Ajoy Ashirwad Mahaprashastra
The S.C. and S.T. (Prevention of Atrocities) Act has failed to make Dalits any safer. THE ascent of the Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) to power in Uttar Pradesh on May 13, 2007, was seen as a defining moment in the politics of Dalit empowerment in the country. The Scheduled Caste (S.C.) leader of an avowedly “Dalit assertive” party had been Chief Minister earlier too, but the difference this time...
More »The anarchical society by Deepak Lal
Ever since Gunnar Myrdal’s Asian Drama, which castigated India as a “soft state”, western observers, as well as many members of the Nehruvian wing of Macaulay’s children, have failed to understand the anarchical society which has existed in India for millennia. A recent review (Journal of Economic Literature, September 2009) by Lant Pritchett (a former World Bank official in Delhi) of Financial Times’ former India correspondent Edward Luce’s book In...
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