Description

It was in 1932 that Gandhi took up the cudgels for India’s dalits, for long ostracized as untouchables, and as if to make them feel like devas, he rechristened these hapless souls as harijans, children of god. Whereas British Raj’s 1935 India Act clubbed these untouchables under a schedule for political purposes, the sovereign democratic republic of India, under the aegis of Ambedkar, not only adopted them through its 1950 constitution as schedule castes, SCs in popular parlance, but also obligated the state to engage itself in a ‘positive discrimination’ of them for their social emancipation and moral upliftment. Not