English

The imperfective aspect marker -unnu licenses a situation argument, which is the characteristic property of an episodic predicate. The generic reading of the -unnu construction is derived when the situation argument is bound by an extensional quantifying operator. The imperfective reading is derived when the situation argument is bound by an existential operator signalled by the existential copula uNTə. The

Universities are o!en thought of as egalitarian spaces that foster free thought and expression, and our attention is being frequently drawn to the recent attacks on this freedom. The fact of the matter is that universities are hardly immune to the prejudices or free from the control of the dominant ideologies of society. This is evident if one tries to decipher the underlying pattern in the voices of protests and clamours for change that have recently emanated from university spaces. This piece tries to interrogate the recent unrest in the universities in the wake of the change in the composition of student communities. If the adoption of the Mandal Commission Report by the VP Singh Government (o!en referred to as Mandal I) brought the spectre of caste into upper-caste discourses, as upper-caste locations suddenly became locations of disentitlement in terms of public employment, the 93rd Constitutional Amendment that allowed the government to make special provisions for the " advancement of any socially and educationally backward classes of citizens " in admission in aided or unaided private educational institutions threatened to erode the upper-caste hold on higher education. In both the instances, the upper-caste student groups took to the streets in protest, and mainstream media gave extensive coverage of the protests. The years that followed brought into focus several stories of discrimination and suicides by Dalit students in higher educational institutions (see studies by Insight Foundation, Delhi). Discrimination in terms of violation of reservation policy seldom evoked any protest from the upper-caste dominated mainstream student groups. For instance, when the University of Delhi violated norms of OBC reservation and converted thousands of OBC seats to General Category seats in the initial years of OBC reservation in higher education, none of the student groups raised its voice. It was only small splinter groups that came together to "ght for social justice that took up the issue and fought the battle in the streets and in the courts. Dalit suicides evoked the same kind of scant attention that instances of caste atrocities (like

The Indian language policy is informed by a pull towards unilingual identity, inspired by the European model of nation state that is predicated on the homogeneity of its people. Language hegemony works at two tiers in India—at the state and the centre. The Constitution fails to pay more than lip service to the linguistic plurality and multilingual ethos of the peoples of India and has created a chaturvarna (four-tier order) of languages, with Sanskrit, Hindi, the scheduled, and the non-scheduled languages occupying various rungs of the ladder. English—the language of the conquerors—being outside the chaturvarna system has emancipatory potential.

The various struggles that the university space in India has been witnessing in the recent past have been unable to reconcile the issue of social inequality and exclusion. The struggle against a politics of exclusion within academic spaces is to take control of spaces that will lead to changes in the character of the institutions dominated by upper castes. On the other hand, the struggle for the freedom of expression seems to be a struggle that is led by those who are already occupying the hallowed university spaces. Recently, a few incidents have unfolded within universities in the recent past that saw the convergence of these struggles, as the groups that have been leading those struggles on both fronts came together. On the basis of the constitutional status of these rights, I try to show the fissures between these movements.

The imperfective aspect marker –unnu licenses a situation argument, which is the characteristic property of an episodic predicate. The generic reading of the –unnu construction is derived when the situation argument is bound by an extensional quantifying operator. The imperfective reading is derived when the situation argument is bound by an existential operator signalled by the existential copula uNTə. The –unnu generic sentences contrast with the generic sentences with the future tense marking modal particle –um. The modal marker –um is argued to signal the presence of a modalized generic operator that quantifies over the set of accessible possible worlds. This gives the sentence an intensional (characterizing) property. The modal –um is thus claimed to be closely related to the universal quantifying particle –um.

By PK Vijayan Asst Professor, Hindu College, Delhi A few days ago, former Delhi University ViceChancellor Deepak Pental remarked to a newspaper that "in the semester system, there is no room for strikes as there is a definite schedule. Teachers' associations are not supposed to strike and the Delhi University Teachers' Association (DUTA) strike is certainly not for the welfare of the students". This remarkable little nugget from Pental (he was still holding office at the time) is profoundly revealing of some of the political issues that underlie the implementation of a semester system in Delhi University. Not only did he deny the profession the right to use its labour as collective bargaining for a legitimate cause -a right, we may add, that has been fought for and won over decades of trade union struggles; he also sought to use this very strike to 'sell' the idea of the semester system even harder to the public at large, by noting -diabolically -that the semester system will put paid to any possibility of strikes, because there simply won't be any time for strikes.