Chandrabhan Prasad
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Chandra Bhan Prasad is a Dalit writer whose main claim to fame is as the first Dalit to have a regular column in an Indian English newspaper.
Prasad started writing a weekly column titled Dalit Diary in 1999 for The Pioneer, an English daily with a limited circulation in Delhi and Lucknow. Recently | Navayana published a compilation of all the articles in this column from 1999 - 2003 as a book of the same name.
Prasad was born in September 1958 in a village in Azamgarh district of Eastern Uttar Pradesh. Both his parents were illiterate, but the family had sufficient agricultural land. Prasad went to JNU, for his MA in International Politics, and enrolled for a Ph.D.which he did not complete. Chandra got involved in student politics during his BA studies, and joined the CPI[ML] party [1]
At JNU Prasad read Ambedkar and Marx, becoming heavily influenced, and subsequently threw himself into the activities of SC/ST student associations and radicals. In May 1983 in Prasad was arrested along with 600 other JNU students during an agitation. Prasad organised pro-Mandal agitations in JNU and elsewhere Delhi in 1990.
In 1991 Prasad left JNU and launched Dalit Shiksha Andolan, which spread to a few districts of Uttar Pradesh. But he left the Andolan and shifted his base to New Delhi, reasons for which are not known.
Since then Prasad has been advocating for the upliftment of dalits and lower OBC'S arguing that they should align with the upper castes to fight the "hegemony" of the higher OBC's, who, he contends, are the real adversaries of the Dalits. His political analysis proved prophetic when Mayawati swept the 2007 election to the UP assembly riding on the back of a massive Dalit-Brahmin consolidation in her favour.
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- Quota benefits should go to new social proletariat By Chandra Bhan Prasad
