'Even as the total number of the people testing positive for COVID-19 rose to 335 in Uttar Pradesh (UP) , in the first such case all over the country, a Dalit youth committed suicide on Wednesday after he was allegedly beaten up by the UP police for breaking quarantine rules. A resident of Fariya Pipariya village which falls in Lakhimpur district, the Dalit youth, Roshan Lal worked as a daily wage worker in Gurugam...'
'The journalist who wrote about members of the Musahar community eating grass in villages around the prime minister’s parliamentary constituency Varanasi has been served a notice by the district administration for spreading misinformation. Vijay Vineet, news editor of Jansandesh time, a 16-page newspaper which has five editions in the state, had filed a report with his colleague Manish Mishra about families in Koiripur village (Baragaon block) subsisting on the grass on March 26. The report was accompanied by pictures of children eating grass.
'Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday announced a complete lockdown of the country for a period of twenty-one days. All work, except that of essential service providers, is to be stopped. Daily wage workers nationwide are suffering under the lockdown because of the nature of their work. Hunger and poverty are looming over their heads. The prime minister’s Lok Sabha constituency, Varanasi, is no exception. On Wednesday, a group of children were seen sitting cross-legged and eating grass, called “akri” in the local language.
'In his new book, Sebastian & Sons, TM Krishna tells of Parlandu, the “greatest mrdangam maker ever”. Parlandu was Dalit, as all makers of the mrdangam, a percussion instrument made with cow hide which is integral to Carnatic music, are. He was employed by Vaidyanatha Ayyar and, later, by his legendary pupil, the revered Carnatic musician Palghat Mani Iyer. Both teacher and disciple, as almost all mrdangam players, were Brahmin.
'The State-level committees meant to monitor the implementation of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 of 25 States and Union Territories had not met even once in three years — 2016, 2017 and 2018, according to information provided by the Union Social Justice and Empowerment Ministry to Parliament on Tuesday...'
'The Narendra Modi government is in the final stages of creating an all-encompassing, auto-updating, searchable database to track every aspect of the lives of each of India’s over 1.2 billion residents, previously undisclosed government documents reviewed by HuffPost India establish. If the plans of Modi’s bureaucrats and advisors are realised, this system will automatically track when a citizen moves between cities, changes jobs, buys new property, when a member of a family is born, dies or gets married and moves to their spouse’s home.
'Something sinister is cooking, looking at the urgency with which the Bhima Koregaon case has been shifted from the Pune Police to the Centre, under the National Investigation Agency (NIA). The arrests that have happened under the current regime are neither random nor to do only with resisting the current regime. The Supreme Court’s rejection of bail pleas by Gautam Navlakha and Anand Teltumbde has serious consequences not just for human rights but also signalling the changing landscape of political discourse.
'Rajinikanth Vellalacheruvu, a popular news presenter and host from TV9 Telugu, found it appropriate to tweet these poetic lines “Keeping aside the bad things of Maruthi Rao, he has a father's love that is capable of killing and dying” when news broke on Sunday about the death of the prime accused in a brutal caste killing. T Maruthi Rao was allegedly the mastermind behind the murder of 24-year-old Pranay Perumalla, a Dalit man who was hacked to death in broad daylight in 2018 for marrying Maruti Rao's daughter, Amrutha.
'In India, on average, at least 10,600 people are impacted by each ongoing land conflict. The number crosses 21,300 in the land conflicts involving mining projects, reveals a recent study released last month. The study revealed that investments worth about Rs 13.7 lakh crore were found embroiled in 335 of the 703 ongoing land conflicts, which is equivalent to about 7.2% of the revised estimate of India’s gross domestic product for 2018–’19.
'Caste discrimination hit Dr K Srinivasmurthy of the JD(S), a Dalit, when he contested his first election in 2008 from Nelamangala that he lost. “During canvassing, a man said that Nagaraj (my opponent of the BJP) was a touchable and hence, he should be allowed inside homes and given votes. He said I was untouchable, so I shouldn’t be allowed inside. This was the same man who had broken his hips and got operated by me at a cost of Rs 15,000-20,000. This is my experience,” Srinivasmurthy told the Assembly on Friday...'
