Dalits fight caste prejudice
India’s abused lot rise against age-old discrimination
NEW DELHI: The video footage posted on social media by India’s self-proclaimed cow saviours was brutal. It showed four bare-chested men tied with ropes to a car, flinching as an angry group of men took turns beating them with wooden sticks, belts and iron rods. Their crime: skinning a dead cow.
The savage beating of the men – all “Dalits” from the lowest rung of India’s caste hierarchy – in the small town of Una in the western state of Gujarat last month stirred outrage across the country. The men were beaten by a group of upper-caste men, highlighting how the rigid social hierarchy persists more than 65 years after India instituted laws banning caste discrimination.
Every day, newspapers are awash with stories of injustices against Dalits and their oppression by uppercaste Hindus.
Among the attacks on Dalits in the past month – a 13-year-old girl who was beaten up for drinking from a temple water pump; a Dalit team in the traditional Indian sport of kabaddi attacked by a rival upper-caste squad for winning a match; an impoverished Dalit couple hacked to death following a disagreement with an upper-caste shopkeeper over a debt of Rs15 (90sen).
But while Dalits – formerly known as “untouchables” – are still victims of thousands of attacks each year despite laws put in place soon after India’s independence, there has been a slow change in the way they react to the atrocities, say social scientists and Dalit activists.
The protests that spread across India following the incident in Una are viewed as signs that the Dalit community will no longer tolerate the injustices they face, said Beena Pallickal of the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights.
“Una was a turning point in our fight,” she said recently in her office in New Delhi. “The Dalit community will no longer stay silent. We will rise in protest against all forms of prejudice.”
The 2011 census counted about 204 million Dalits in the country of more than 1.2 billion – a population the size of Brazil, the world’s fifth most populous nation.
Dalits are finding the rigid caste divisions slowly being eroded due to fundamental changes in Indian society, at least in the urban centres.
As India’s booming economy fuels urbanisation, people from different regions and all walks of life are being packed into the cities’ crowded apartments and slums. Living in such close quarters, they are becoming less concerned with centuriesold caste divisions and traditional prejudices, analysts say.
For some Dalits, the change isn’t happening fast enough. An emerging class of educated Dalits has begun demanding an end to caste discrimination – demands that sometimes touch off deadly clashes between communities.
India’s National Crime Records Bureau reports more than 700 Dalits were killed in attacks in 2014, the last year for which data is available.
Chandra Bhan Prasad, a Dalit writer, says there is a conflict between the past and the future that younger Dalits envision for themselves.
“This new generation of Dalits cannot tolerate humiliation. Nor will they accept it,” said Prasad, who has written and lectured widely on Dalit rights.
“They may have done so before, because they saw no way out of their subjugation at the hands of upper-caste Hindus, but not anymore.” — AP