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Writer, publisher booked for derogatory idiom

Ahmedabad: Kalupur police on Monday filed a case under the Atrocities Act against the writer and publisher for an idiom derogatory to Dalits being published in a BEd course book, based on a plea filed by a Botad-based activist.

In his FIR with Kalupur police, Kiran Solanki, 50, a resident of Botad, said that he usually distributes books to poor students free of cost.

As some students demanded books for BEd courses, he had on November 4 gone to Gandhi Road to buy books for first semester of the Gujarati-medium BEd course.

After buying the books, he returned home and began reading one of the books. In it, he found a idiom derogatory to Dalits. The book written by Natu Raval, professor at a BEd college that was published by Nirav Shah, contained the idiom in Gujarati translating to “every village has one Dalit ghetto too”.

It was interpreted as: “Every person cannot be good, there are bad people also”.

Solanki claimed that the idiom and its interpretation hurt the sentiments of Dalits, portrayed the community in bad light and insulted them. Solanki moved an application before Kalupur police and police registered an FIR under the Atrocities Act and relevant charges of the IPC.

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