Category: Special Column

Home Special Column
Kashmir Is India’s Palestine, Palestine Is “Israel’s” Kashmir
Post

Kashmir Is India’s Palestine, Palestine Is “Israel’s” Kashmir

India’s revocation of Kashmir’s relative “autonomy” embodies everything that its new “Israeli” ally wishes it could do to Palestine such as eliminating its separate political status and giving non-residents of the UNSC-recognized disputed territory the right to buy property there as part of its long-term plan to wage demographic warfare against the locals, yet few...

Why the Shudras are lost in today’s India- Final Part
Post

Why the Shudras are lost in today’s India- Final Part

This hurts their performance and their post-graduation prospects. Proficiency in only a regional language also restricts them to regional opportunity and discourse. For better or worse, the highest levels of Indian business, bureaucracy, diplomacy, media, education and so much more function primarily in English. A great number of global institutions do so too. Shudras have...

Why the Shudras are lost in today’s India- Part 3
Post

Why the Shudras are lost in today’s India- Part 3

In bringing them to where they are today, MK Gandhi and Ram Manohar Lohia were crucial not just as politicians, but also as thinkers who shaped Indian mores. Both were organic intellectuals of the Banias, both had prestigious Western educations and mastery over English, and both wrote and published extensively. They gained immense stature amid...

Why the Shudras are lost in today’s India- Part 2
Post

Why the Shudras are lost in today’s India- Part 2

NARENDRA MODI BECAME PRIME MINISTER in 2014 on the back of proclamations that he belonged to the Other Backward Classes, implying that he was a representative of the Shudras. Many accepted the proclamation without the scrutiny it deserves. Looking closely at Modi’s caste group, the Modh Ghanchis of Gujarat, we should be skeptical of his assertion...

Why the Shudras are lost in today’s India- Part 1
Post

Why the Shudras are lost in today’s India- Part 1

When the government implemented the Mandal Commission recommendations, in the early 1990s, it was meant to be a watershed moment for the Shudras. The measure reserved positions in government employment and public higher education for the Other Backward Classes—a category made up overwhelmingly of disadvantaged Shudra castes, traditionally labourers and craftspeople. The commission had identified...

What Is Fascism And ‘How Does Fascism’s Vicious and Grotesque Ideology Work’?
Post

What Is Fascism And ‘How Does Fascism’s Vicious and Grotesque Ideology Work’?

MD IRSHAD AYUB The term Fascism refers to “the aggressive, radical and ultra-nationalist ideology as well as right wing political system, which believes in the ideas of totalitarian, authoritarianism, centralised and corporate state.” The word fascism comes from fascio, the Italian word for bundle, which in this case represents bundles of people. Its origins go...

The case for peace
Post

The case for peace

By Dr Mohammad Manzoor Alam A few weeks ago I had written a piece, “Let’s give peace a chance.” In it I had argued for co-operating with the Supreme Court-ordered Ayodhya mediation committee that seeks to find an amicable out-of-court settlement of the dogged Babri Masjid-Ram Janambhoomi conflict. I had argued for a settlement of...