DATE
Thursday October 11, 2018
TIME
5:00 PM
LOCATION
UBC | C.K. Choi Building
Room 120 | 1855 West Mall
The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhism and Contemporary Society is proud to co-sponsor the Second Annual Dr. B.R. Ambedkar Memorial Lecture with
Ms. Santosh Dass MBE
This year’s Memorial Lecture is dedicated to Mr. Raju Kamble, Mr. Shital Anmol, and others who dedicated their lives for creating inclusive world.
About this event
Her talk will address the ongoing campaign to outlaw caste discrimination in the United Kingdom, interwoven with references to Dr. Ambedkar and the Ambedkarite movement in the UK. She will cover the reasons for a law on caste discrimination, share evidence of caste-based discrimination, and describe the scope of the campaign both at a domestic and international, United Nationas, level. Reflecting on this campaign, she will discuss what has worked, what has hindered it, and the status of the law now.
About the speaker
Ms. Santosh Dass MBE is a human rights and equality campaigner living in London. She is an ex Civil servant and held a number of senior roles at the Department of Health (DH) including leading on Better Regulation and Risk Management. Santosh is one of the leading figures in the campaign to outlaw Caste-based discrimination in the UK. She has taken up this issue and that of the rising atrocities against Dalits in India at the United Nations. Santosh is the Chair of the Anti Caste Discrimination Alliance (ACDA)and President of the Federation of Ambedkarite and Buddhist Organisations UK. She is the co-founder of CasteWatch UK and the ACDA. In September 2014, Santosh put forward and pursued a proposal to the then Congress-led and then the BJP Government of Maharashtra (GOM) in India that they fund the purchase of the £3.1million London house where Dr B R Ambedkar lived in between 1921-22 – and turn it into a memorial. This house was purchased by GOM in September 2015 and has been refurbished and opened to the public. Santosh is a member of the Ambedkar House London Memorial Advisory Committee. In 2007 Santosh was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for her services to Better Regulation at DH.
This event is sponsored by CISAR, Chetna Association of Canada, Dr. Hari Sharma Foundation, UBC’s Department of Asian Studies, the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhism and Contemporary Society (何鴻毅家族基金佛學與當代社會課程), and SFU Institute for the Humanities.