India’s oldest Socialist Weekly!
Editor: Dr. G.G. Parikh | Associate Editor: Neeraj Jain | Managing Editor: Guddi
The gross abuse of the tool of ‘interview’ to deliberately deny entry to aspirants from marginalised sections in educational institutions and public sector employment on the pretext that they lack even minimum merit is not a new phenomenon, it has been blatantly used for decades.
India’s graded educational system mirrors the country’s stubbornly rigid social hierarchies. The poorest children attend the free government-run schools and those from the highest echelons of Indian society increasingly attend elite schools, with the rest of the society caught in between.
In the past 12 years, a group of 51 Dalit women in Ahmedabad district have converted around 36 acres of the government’s “non-useful” wasteland into fertile farms that yield two crops a year. They are now demanding that the state govt. grant them ownership of the land under Gujarat’s Santhani scheme.
Hindus can be vegetarian and non-vegetarian. The obsession with reducing Hinduism to a single behaviour is common amongst two groups of people: loud Hindutva radicals and their sworn enemies, the Hinduphobes.
Reservations are — wrongly — blamed for encouraging mediocrity in the medical profession. The historical record shows that the floundering foundations of the profession were laid by doctors who came ‘purely through merit’.
It is not only atrocities on the marginalised groups that tells us the truth about a brutal system but equally its everyday workings as experienced by its most marginal sections.
The Pothumallee case led to reservations in Tamil Nadu’s anganwadis. Ten years later, caste hurdles to recruitment have given way to other challenges.
In a country where Dalit teachers have been slapped, Dalit students called “bloody bastards” and their “merit” frequently questioned, a Dalit scientist won her rights after a 11-day hunger strike. But that is a rare instance; casteism continues to pervade academia.
If education in India is to serve its true purpose, then it must have a content oriented towards serving India’s needs. But globalised capital would like the educated middle class, from which it employs its personnel, to be as alike everywhere as possible. Modi’s NEP is seeking to serve its needs.
Some of the biggest names in Indian poetry have come from Bengal. And yet there are few like Binoy Majumdar. He questions confinement, poetic horizons, the fear of a life without laughter, and ignorance of the minute details of every day that become a part of his poetry – and, also, life as a rebel.
Janata Weekly is India’s oldest independent socialist weekly.
Ever since its founding in 1946, Janata has voiced its principled dissent against all conduct and practice that is detrimental to the cherished values of nationalism, democracy, secularism and socialism, while upholding the integrity and the ethical norms of healthy journalism. For more than seventy years now, week after week, it has continued to analyse the changes taking place in the country and the world from a socialist standpoint, and thus promote the spread of socialist ideology in the country.
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