Representing the Khawas

Bhotani Devi Khawas is the only member representing the Khawas community in the CA. Bhotani Devi came from a politically and socially aware family. Her uncle was a deputy Pradhan Pancha during the Panchayat and her father-in-law, who was also affi liated with the Panchayat, once gave shelter to the landless on public land. He joined the Nepali Congress in 1980 and was jailed for seven days with Nepali Congress leader Krishna Prasad Bhattarai.

Parenthood planning for mother-child wellbeing

ASMITA MANANDHAR-When Sabeena Parveen, 28, wanted a sibling for her five-year-old daughter, she was concerned about her chances of conceiving for the second time. Due to the complications in her first pregnancy, she was worried about added difficulties she might face. To add to her woes, she wasn’t able to conceive despite numerous efforts for six months. It was then she and her husband decided to have an expert’s supervision for her pregnancy planning.

“We decided to plan from the beginning. So the doctor checked my menstrual cycle and advised on the right time for me to conceive,” says Parveen, who is now a happy mother of a nine-month-old toddler.

Restorative justice

Gopal Dahit/Sakun Sherchan- Agradhikar literally translates as “pro-original rights” and prescribes not “preferential rights” but “restorative justice” for citizens who have been oppressed and subjugated with forced nationalism causing the destruction of the original practices of communities and leading to discriminatory and unlawful human rights practices. Agradhikar as restorative justice has been the touch word in the language radar of the Adivasi Janajati expression of self-determination. Agradhikar can be defined as reclaiming the inheritance of wasted social, symbolic, cultural and economic values.
The Adivasi Janajatis are evaluating through dialogue and expressing by story-telling their experiences of discrimination, marginalisation and exploitation and how they can be partners in the state building process as equal citizens. They reminisce about the sequential and structural discrimination of Adivasi Janajatis, Dalits and other marginalised groups demanding social, political, economic and educational opportunities. Such rights as these marginalised identities have been demanding are specified in the declaration of UNDRIP, ILO Convention 169, CERD and CBD Convention 1992.

Learning to Loathe

CK LAL- Before Mysore Narasimhachar Srinivas (1916-1999), it was popularly believed that there was no way of upward mobility in the phenomenally rigid Hindu caste system. Backing his hypothesis with meticulous observations and rigorous analyses, Srinivas claimed that a slow but perceptible process in India allowed “low” Hindu castes, tribal and other peripheral groups to change their customs, rituals, ideologies and ways of life in the direction of high—the so-called “twice-born”—Varnas. The perceptive Kannadiga termed the process ‘Sanskritization’ in the early 1950s. He also came up with catchphrases that encapsulate complex processes of society and politics, such as ‘Brahmanization’ and ‘vote bank.’