Sirgapoor Sahil Reddy - Week 7


DALIT LITERATURE AND CULTURE READING SUMMARIES
AMBEDKAR JAYANTI
Sirgapoor Sahil Reddy
20161245
BA LLB Section A
14th April 2020 marked the 129th birth anniversary of Dr B.R. Ambedkar, the father of the anti-caste discrimination movement in India. There were two other important news pieces that emerged on Ambedkar Jayanti this year. The first was the arrest of Anand Teltumbde and the other was the coming together of thousands of Migrant workers at Bandra station, in order to get home due to the Coronavirus situation. Both these incidents are purely indicative of how, despite Ambedkar’s several efforts, the lower castes are still oppressed in the country.
Most of the migrant workers who collected at the Bandra Station were part of India’s most vulnerable workforce that mainly comprises of untouchables. These workers have been forced to walk home from metropolis cities like Delhi and Mumbai, been made to face the wrath of disinfectants on arriving in Uttar Pradesh and have had to face the wrath of Police violence during this time. Similarly Anand Teltumbde’s real crime cannot possibly be hatching a plan to assassinate the Prime Minister, but rather the fact that his writings on caste, sexual violence and labour problems is so good that the present government feels threatened by it and they would hence go to any extent to not let India get a bad name from such scholars all over the world.
These two incidents further Ambedkar’s understanding of democracy. According to him Democracy can only be effective if social equality can be achieved, which refers to not each person having one vote, but ensuring that each person who is voting is on an equal footing in society.
Hence even Ambedkar’s vision of women appears as a constitutive feature of modern Indian feminist thought (evolving since early 20th century) that goes beyond the need to enable women, in their independent effort, to break through social, cultural patriarchal norms, imposed by Brahmanical codes, to ensure equality in social status

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