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Showing posts from October 23, 2013

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India's Mindset Towards Dalits Is a Stark Contrast to What Gandhi Symbolised How would Gandhi have responded to the glaring contradictions in India today? Gandhi C. Uday Bhaskar Gandhi collecting funds for Harijan work. Credit: Wikimedia Commons Even as the Indian state celebrates Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday today, in a high-visibility, made for TV manner – the mismatch on the ground with what the Mahatma stood for and how far India has drifted from his core tenets, is cause for deep anguish and calls for collective action. Ironically, in Gujarat, where Gandhiji was born, a young 21-year-old Dalit man was reportedly beaten to death by upper-caste men from the Patel community on Sunday. And the crime that warranted such murderous vigilantism? The young Dalit man and his cousins had dared to ‘watch’ the local garba dance that was being performed in Anand district and the socially superior Patel youth objected to this ‘defiance’ of the lower castes. The accused is reported to h...