[ARTICLE] Gregory Pappas discusses how new media inhibits deeper learning and threatens the health of democracy....

January 24, 2017: Following the 2013 release of Navayana's annotated critical edition of B. R. Ambedkar's Annihilation of Caste with an introductory essay by Arundhati Roy, Dalit (ex-Untouchable) activists angrily charged that Roy and the publisher were unqualified to write on Ambedkar by virtue of their high-caste backgrounds. We examine this war of words in the context of Ambedkar's career as the leading voice for Untouchable human rights and as principal draftsman of India's Constitution. We compare the attack on Navayana's Annihilation of Caste to the original attack on Ambedkar's 1936 speech....