Men from subaltern communities must confront the violence that tears apart some of their homes and families The two books under review are quite dissimilar in what they set out to do. Dalit Women Speak Out comprises a detailed review of a set of related studies carried out in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh on the violence endured by Dalit women. It revisits the notion of ‘atrocity' both...

Why has there been such a silence from dalit leaders over the Bathani Tola judgment acquitting all those accused of killing 21 dalits? At the same time, what explains their loud protests over the Ambedkar cartoons in the textbooks? Has the elevation of Ambedkar as an icon relegated the dalit leadership to a politics of empty symbolism? Is the issue of a lack of accountability in the judicial system towards...

Row over cartoon demeans the Dalit movement in general and Ambedkar in particular The intellectual-rational capacity of the current brand of Congress leadership has always been in doubt. In the latest episode of fast-track community appeasement by banning a controversial Nehru-Ambedkar cartoon in an NCERT textbook, the ruling elites of our country hit a new low in their political opportunism. Kapil Sibal is, in general, not a popular figure among Dalits,...

One tweet that had many cracking up was: “Dear Mamata, normally the cartoonist tries to capture the subject. Not vice versa.” The allegation was that Professor Ambikesh Mahapatra has used email id of his neighbour Subrata Sengupta (70) to forward an e-mail containing a graphic with a humorous reference to Mamata Banerjee for replacing Dinesh Trivedi with Mukul Roy as Railway Minister. The graphic uses photographs of the three Trinamool...

-The Hindustan Times   On the night of February 5, a woman, on her way back from visiting a nightclub in Kolkata’s Park Street area, was raped inside the vehicle in which she had been offered a lift. Horrifying as it is, the violence perpetrated was not unique in the annals of urban crime. A mother of two, the 37-year-old was alone, her companions having already left. She had been drinking for a...