Minority

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In India’s 85-year-long Test history, only four of the 289 male Test cricketers have reportedly been Dalits. While concrete steps have been taken to address a similar under-representation of non-white players in South Africa, Dalit under-representation in Indian cricket has received scant attention. There is a need to understand this as a function of systemic barriers arising from corporate patronage post-independence and the urban stranglehold of the game, instead of attributing it to choice, inherent inability or upper caste “tastes.” The grass-roots development approach of Cricket South Africa can serve as an example to address this anomaly.

Bhiwandi, the power loom town close to Mumbai, is reeling from several challenges that threaten its existence. Labourers, power loom owners and local people, predominantly Muslims, are struggling to cope with the financial and logistical problems of the power loom industry. 

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The BJP's electoral victory in Gujarat last year has further cemented the grasp of the Hindu right in all aspects of the state's social and political domain. The rise of reactionary politics was itself an outgrowth of different socio-political movements that Gujarat was witness to since the 1970s. It is the absence of any progressive class/caste movement or a new social movement, this paper argues, that has made Gujarat susceptible to experiments with and sustenance of right wing ideologies, especially the politics of the Hindu right.