This term literally means how easy it is to reach or use something. From a social justice viewpoint, accessibility means gauging how meaningful or useful a piece of information, an activity and / or environment is — is is accessible for a few people or for a lot of people?

It’s also about identifying and responding to conditions of a lack of access: for example, by providing equitable opportunities, regardless of a person’s abilities or circumstances. Accessibility for a visually challenged person would include considerations like font size of written matter, usage of high contrast colours, whether the matter is available in Braille, etc. Similarly, usage of a sign language interpreter implies greater accessibility for a hearing impaired person. 
But accessibility isn’t just about consideration of people with disabilities. Accessibility is also linked to language, culture, caste, age, economic status or technological aptitude. An elderly, non-digitally savvy person may find it hard to access information that is provided only through an app on a phone. A person of lower economic status may also face internet quality issues. Language / comprehension access issues may arise while accessing an app that assumes that everyone can read and understand English.

activism consists of efforts to promote, impede, direct or intervene in social, political, economic or environmental reform with the desire to further social justice. Such activism is grounded in the notion that no action is ever “apolitical”, that everything we think, do, say, is meaningful and can have intended or unintended consequences.

To advocate usually means to publicly support the interests of an individual, or a group or a cause. It is about educating people on their rights and legal options, social options, crisis interventions, etc, and support through research, writing petitions, protests, fundraisers, workshops and awareness programmes, and fighting legal battles. Social media nowadays plays a key role in advocacy through raising awareness and facilitating participation. Doing advocacy can be part of building solidarity.

This is a proactive system of social justice that aims to iron out past and current inequities across different sections of society. In India, this affirmative action is known as “Reservation”, which is just the start of the challenge against the invisible reservation of privilege and entitlements by the historically privileged castes (Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya castes). Reservation has nothing to do with “merit” — it is a way to repair historical social inequities (see entry on equity). Also, “merit” itself is a problematic concept (see the resources here). The unpacking of the term ‘general category‘ by IndiaInk and Sagar’s discussion on the history of reservations are useful starting points to unpack the fog created by the language used by the privileged groups in India to contest affirmative action and keep their privileges intact.

Allyship and solidarity are related, but not the same. Key differences are:

• allies tend to “help” someone who is disadvantaged, while solidarity recognises that our collective well being is interwoven;
• allyship work is public and performative, while solidarity is long drawn out, behind the scenes and intense;
• allies focus on the interpersonal while solidarity is about dismantling social structures.

Jaime Grant explains this well in the context of racism.

In our experience, understanding allyship and solidarity happens through practice, making mistakes, un-learning and persisting (praxis). One way to do this is by practising Mansi Bhalerao’s five ways to be an ally without Savarna Saviour Complex. As Mansi writes: “true solidarity demands one to re-fix the condescending gaze and work towards deconstructing the very caste system that facilitates Brahmanical supremacy.” There are no shortcuts here – it will be hard work but worth every effort one makes.

Casteism is a mindset that values the lives of different people differently, the lives of a few are valued over and above the lives of many. Being casteist means believing in the caste system, a birth based social stratification existing in Indian Hindu society. However, given the pervasiveness of the caste mindset across all spheres of life and its determinising role in occupation, the caste system also exists among social groups that follow other religions. In the main, the societies in the subcontinent that functioned outside and continue to resist their adverse inclusion into the caste society today (e.g. through ‘Ghar Wapsi‘) are the indigenous tribal societies of India, for example Adivasi societies.

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Civil rights are guarantees of equal social opportunity and protection under the law, irrespective of race, religion, gender, etc. As these are rights under the law,  they have resulted from  positive government action. Civil rights are an essential component of democracy such as: the right to vote, right to education, etc. 

Colonialism refers to the systems and practices that “seek to impose the will of one people on another, and to use the resources of the imposed people for the benefit of the imposer” (Assante, 2006). Colonialism can operate within the political, sociological, cultural values and systems of a place even after the physical occupation by colonisers has ended. 

Settler colonialism is a form of colonisation in which large groups of people migrate to lands already inhabited, and claim it as their own in perpetuity, building permanent, self-supporting settlements. Many such examples are touted as “discovering new lands”. Perhaps one of the best examples of this is when the English, Scots and Irish arrived at different parts of America, and decimated the Native American population, many of whom still continue to live on reservations. This means that settler colonialism is not just a vicious act of the past; it exists as long as settlers continue living on appropriated land. Yet another example is the currently ongoing Hindutva settler colonialism project in Kashmir.

We are also concerned with internal colonialism in india & me. While it is well recognised that India was colonised by the British, the French, the Portuguese and the Dutch (in no particular order), there is less familiarity with internal colonialism. Both before and after the spread of colonialism in India by European countries, an informal but tacitly acknowledged and implemented policy of oppression of a vast group of people in India based on the caste system prevailed and continues to prevail. One exampe of internal colonialism in India is of the Adivasis/tribal people, who continue to be driven away from their land in territory after territory for mining or development etc by corporates and rich, urban upper-class/oppressor caste Indians.

As defined above, colonialism is not restricted to physical control of land and people. For example, even though the Irish “might have been colonised by the English”, they were “very good at being colonisers themselves, at least when they were in India”. So what’s more interesting to us is “the colonisation of the mind”, how “an entire intellectual apparatus was created for representing the other”. The consequences of this colonialism continue to be felt today.

How we view the world is learned throughout our lifetimes from many influences, both formal and informal. These include the state, the law, religion, our families, our neighbourhoods, public opinion, mass media and of course social media. This process is known as socialisation, and it is ideologically reinforced through school education, what Paulo Friere calls the banking model of education. When you layer this with colonisation, you get colonialism. Indeed, the “conquest of knowledge, the colonisation of the mind” is the most “critical component” of “colonial rule”.

In 1835, Thomas McCauley wrote that “literature in Indian languages is worthless, so English should be brought into India”. Along with this, “anthropology, botany, geology, history … a huge number of disciplines were all brought into service of colonialism”. It is this “relationship of the entire intellectual apparatus that the British produced” to “colonial rule itself” and which was inherited primarily by the savarna caste communities to then continue to colonise the rest of India, that we try to make sense of in the india & me cafe.

We also remain mindful that in contemporary times, English is playing more than one role. While it continues to have a colonial context as outlined above, learning and using English is also part of the emancipatory practices among marginalised groups for more than one reason. We recommend reading “English as a Tool of Liberation for Dalits in India” by Anjali Shreshth to appreciate, as she argues, how “the relationship that the Dalits have with English leads us to broadly question the dynamics of internal colonialism in India, and how have the internally colonised, the Dalits, reclaimed a colonial tool of oppression from the otherwise colonised, the upper castes, to use it to claim their political rights.”

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