O ne day sometime in mid 2020, Aditi Priya, a Masters’ graduate in economics employed with a research organisation, messaged Disha Wadekar,...
One day sometime in mid 2020, Aditi Priya, a Masters’ graduate in economics employed with a research organisation, messaged Disha Wadekar, a lawyer, on Facebook. Priya needed help with research she was conducting on the link between police presence and gender-based violence on women, particularly in marginalised communities. She felt Wadekar, as a Supreme Court lawyer, would be able to help her, since she often worked on caste-related cases.
But the interaction soon went beyond the particular project Priya was working on. The two women, both in their twenties, drifted into a conversation more directly connected to their lives and their work. They spoke in particular about the poor representation in their fields of people from India’s marginalised communities – Dalits and Adivasis, officially called Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, as well as a range of middle castes, many of which are categorised as Other Backward Classes.
Wadekar, along with Anurag Bhaskar, an assistant professor at the Jindal Global Law School, Sonipat, and advocate Avinash Mathews, who also works at the Supreme Court, had been working on launching an initiative called Community for the Eradication of Discrimination in Education and Employment, or CEDE, which would aim to increase the numbers of professionals from historically...
