The Bihar police has trained its guns on Dr Vilakshan Ravidas, a noted Dalitbahujan thinker. At a press conference on 4 August 2022, Pankaj Kumar, the Superintendent of Police (SP) of Lakhisarai district, levelled several serious charges against Dr Ravidas. The SP said that Ravidas had instigated youth to indulge in violence during a protest against the Agnipath scheme in Lakhisarai on 17 June 2022. He said Ravidas had used his mobile phone to mobilize the youth. The district police chief’s accusations were based solely on the statement of one Manshyam Das, who was arrested on 4 August 2022 on the suspicion of being a Naxalite. Even as the police are trying to implicate Ravidas, many Dalitbahujan intellectuals and social activists have come out in his support. They include former Rajya Sabha member Ali Anwar, according to whom this is a conspiracy to silence a powerful Dalitbahujan voice.
Related Articles
‘Raakh’ revisits a dastardly crime of the 1970s and a continuing everyday crime
Beyond revisiting the crime, the series Raakh provides a powerful portrayal of Jayprakash Jatav (JP), a Dalit police officer tasked with the investigation, who...
Remembering Prof Imtiaz Ahmad: A scholar, teacher and humanist
Whenever I found myself struggling with an intellectual, emotional, or moral dilemma, he would ask me to quietly walk into his personal library, take...
Beyond welfare and reservations: The unfinished business of social justice in Tamil Nadu
Ultimately, for a welfare-based system to withstand the volatile pressures of a digital attention economy, it must evolve from a mechanism for ensuring material...
When will we, the truly despised cockroaches, create a viral campaign?
Every decade produces brilliant Dalitbahujan voices who critique power with precision and then watch power ignore them, not because the critique was wrong, but...
CJI’s ‘cockroach’ comment reveals a new version of Supreme Court’s pre-existing attitude
It can be said without an iota of hesitation that in terms of social background, the present CJI belongs to the establishment and, as...