Peoples Telangana

In India's current political dispensation, fear has proven a more reliable tool than hope. A coordinated machinery of organisations is deploying ten interlocking narratives to manufacture permanent crisis and consolidate a majoritarian electoral base. The method is systematic, the damage cumulative. Hyderabads  |  Nagesh Bhushan Fear, as any competent political strategist will tell you, travels faster than policy. It requires no evidence, demands no accountability, and — critically — leaves no fingerprints. In India today, a coordinated machinery involving the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Vishva Hindu Parishad, the Bajrang Dal, and the Bharatiya Janata Party has industrialised the production of communal fear with a precision that deserves sober, analytical scrutiny. The strategy is not improvised. It rests on ten interlocking narratives — each individually plausible enough to circulate, collectively powerful enough to define an entire political reality. Together they const...

 In 1910, Edward Albert Gait , the Census Commissioner for India, issued a highly significant circular ahead of the 1911 Census . This circular was a watershed moment in the history of Indian social and political classification, as it was the first formal attempt by the British Raj to distinguish "Untouchables" (now Dalits/Scheduled Castes) as a group separate from the "Hindu" majority. The Objective of the Circular The primary goal of the circular was to identify and group together castes that were traditionally included under the "Hindu" umbrella but did not adhere to standard Brahminical or orthodox Hindu practices. Gait proposed ten tests to determine if a community was truly "Hindu" in the orthodox sense. The 10 Tests (Questions) in the Circular Gait asked provincial superintendents to report on castes and tribes that satisfied any of the following conditions: Denial of Brahminical Supremacy: Castes that did not acknowledge the religious s...

“Hindu” is related to the Arabic term “al-Hind,” which was used to designate the region around Indus river by travelers to the subcontinent. Before the 19th century, the term Hindu simply didn’t refer to religion, but to a loose collection of peoples who happened to live on the subcontinent and who were neither Muslim nor Christian. The term Hindu began to be used in the 19th century, when European Indologists were trying to codify a religion. But Indologists work only with texts, and texts are the basis only of upper-caste culture. So the upper castes acted as native informants for these Indologists, and as a result, what was conceived as religion at that time was only the upper-caste religion. With the 1872 British census, a new dimension came up, which was that communities were going to be enumerated, and that’s when the upper castes began to consider their category. For the longest time, they always continued to think of themselves in terms of caste rather than the category of reli...

https://shs.cairn.info/journal-esprit-2020-6-page-123?lang=en By   Divya Dwivedi   and   Shaj Mohan Pages 123 to 133 T he contemporary image of India is that it is the land of the people who gained independence from British colonial rule through a great freedom struggle under the leadership of the Congress party and the spiritual guidance of M. K. Gandhi. Today, India projects and propagates its culture as the sum of Hindu religion, yoga, peace, and Gandhi as their mascot. This image was produced through concerted efforts such as the Oscar winning propaganda film  Gandhi  made by Richard Attenborough and the National Film Development Corporation of India in 1982. We know that everything gets complicated once we begin to wander the texts and the streets of each country. Behind this image is hidden away and continues, unopposed, the millennia old oppression of nearly 90 per cent of the population in India, the lower castes people by the nearly 10 per cent upper ca...

భారతదేశ జనాభా లెక్కల చరిత్రలో 1921 నివేదిక ఒక ఆసక్తికరమైన వాస్తవాన్ని వెల్లడి చేసింది: ‘“హిందూ” అనే పదం తన మతానికి వర్తించే విధంగా ఏ భారతీయుడికీ తెలియదు.’ ఈ పదం, ఈ రోజు మనం సాధారణంగా ఉపయోగించే ఒక గుర్తింపుగా, అప్పట్లో అంత స్పష్టమైన అర్థం కలిగి లేదు. 1911లో, జనాభా లెక్కల కమిషనర్ ఇ.ఎ. గైట్స్, ‘హిందూ’ అనే మతం విభిన్న కుల సమూహాలను ఒకే తాటిపైకి తీసుకురాగలదా అని నిర్ధారించేందుకు ఒక సర్క్యులర్‌ను జారీ చేశారు. ఈ సర్క్యులర్‌లో కులాల మధ్య విభజన గోడలను అర్థం చేసుకోవడానికి సంబంధించిన ప్రశ్నలు ఉన్నాయి. ఉదాహరణకు, దిగువ కులాల వారికి ఉన్నత కులాల ఆలయాల్లో ప్రవేశం ఉందా? వివాహాల వంటి వేడుకలకు బ్రాహ్మణ పూజారుల సేవలు అందుబాటులో ఉన్నాయా? ఉన్నత కులాల దేవతల గురించి వారికి తెలుసా? ఈ ప్రశ్నల ద్వారా, విభిన్న కుల సమూహాలు కనీసం కొన్ని సాంస్కృతిక రంగాలను పంచుకుంటాయా అని తెలుసుకోవాలని గైట్స్ భావించారు. అయితే, సమాధానాలు ఆశ్చర్యకరంగా ఉన్నాయి. ఈ సమూహాల మధ్య సామాజిక, సాంస్కృతిక ఐక్యత లేదని, ఉన్నత కులాలు ఉపఖండంలో చిన్న మైనారిటీగా ఉన్నాయని స్పష్టమైంది. ఈ వాస్తవం ఉన్నత కులాలకు ఆందోళన కలిగించింది. వారు ఈ సర్క్యులర్‌కు వ్యతి...

The 1921 Census of India Report noted that ‘ No Indian is familiar with the term “Hindu” as applied to his religion’. In 1911, the census commissioner E. A. Gaits issued a circular with certain questions to help the census officers to determine the viability of ‘Hindu’ as the religion common to all those disparate groups. Most of these questions pertained to the wall of separation between the castes. For example, the circular asked all castes to answer if they had access to the upper caste temples; whether they had access to a Brahmin priest for the ceremonies in life such as weddings; whether they were familiar with the gods of the upper castes. If it could be demonstrated that the disparate caste groups shared, at least occasionally, the same cultural spheres and activities, then there could be a case for a single religious category encompassing them all. The answers recorded for these questions made it obvious that this was not the case, and that the upper castes were then a small m...

This is the final resting place of Darius I of Persia (b550 – d486 BCE) at Naqsh-e-Rostam near Persepolis. He was the great Achaemenid king who gave us our name. In a panel he is described as an Aryan of Aryan lineage. He called the people who lived along the Indus "Sindhugosh", which in course of time became Hindu. Quite ironically it gives Pakistan a better claim to be known as Hindustan. Historically the area east of the Indus was known as "Bharat". Thats why the Indian Constitiution begins: "We the people of Bharat, that is India........"