Articles by Anand Teltumbde

On 5 September 2017, the bullet trail of the Hindutva forces devoured one more precious life. Personally speaking, this was my third loss of a comrade or friend—Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare and now, Gauri Lankesh. The man on the street, too, broadly knows who their killers are.

Non-Dalits in India would have considered July 2017 to be a month of glory for Dalits in general. A Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)-zealot and Dalit by caste, Ram Nath Kovind became the 14th President of India.

.

The verdicts in the Swami Aseemanand and G N Saibaba cases expose the roguery of the Indian state. The former was let off despite clear and close links with saffron terror and mass murder, while the latter was sentenced to life imprisonment for being sympathetic to a people’s resistance to state oppression. While such fascistisation is visible across the globe, in India, it finds resonance with the hegemonic, ruling-class ideology of Brahminism, which the current regime seeks to uphold.

The basic question that the Rohith Vemula case raises is about the existence of the rule of law in India. If his mother Radhika Vemula was rich, there would have been no issue about Rohith’s caste and all people named in the FIR for abetting his suicide would have been in jail. But her fault is that she lived off the pittance that Rohith sent her from his paltry fellowship!