Indian campaigner against caste prejudice wins ‘Asia’s Nobel’

An activist who campaigned to restore the dignity of India’s low-caste Dalits was among six winners of Asia’s Magsaysay awards on Wednesday.

The Manila-based Ramon Magsaysay Award, named after a Filipino president killed in a plane crash, was established in 1957 to honour people and groups tackling development problems. It is often described as Asia’s Nobel Prize.

Bezwada Wilson, 50, founded a grassroots movement to stop “manual scavenging” — in which Dalits, mostly women and girls, remove by hand human waste from latrines and carry away baskets of excrement on their heads.

Wilson, born in a Dalit family, was honoured for his “moral outrage” and organising skills in his efforts to ban the demeaning work, judges said. His group has successfully lobbied for laws supporting scavengers and conducted training to move them to better jobs. Indian musician Thodur Madabusi Krishna, 40, won the Award for Emergent Leadership for spreading appreciation of classical music to lower castes through his foundation that trains talented rural young people.

“Music and the arts are... capable of liberating us from artificial divisions of caste and race,” said Krishna, who hails from an upperclass Brahmin family.

Also honoured was Filipino chief graft-buster and former Supreme Court justice Conchita Carpio-Morales, 75, for her diligence in prosecuting high-ranking corrupt officials. A charity group, Vientiane Rescue, also received the award. Indonesia’s biggest philanthropic group Dompet Dhuafa was cited for its transparent use of the obligatory tax known as zakat, which led to projects such as support for small and medium enterprises and scholarships. The Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers also received an award.

In the center of the capital, extra security and the closing of avenues near the Senate caused massive traffic jams. Police said they were preparing for large protests later in the day. On the Senate floor, emotions crackled in the run-up to the vote, then overflowed as senators made final speeches on what both sides of the debate agreed was history in the making. Senator Aecio Neves, Rousseff’s narrowly defeated center-right opponent in her 2014 reelection, pronounced triumphantly: “The constitution won. Brazil won!”

But Senator Vanessa Grazziotin was scathing in her summing up of an “illegal process that is called impeachment but is a coup.” “Temer does not have legitimacy to govern this country,” she warned.

“This is a farce, a farce, a farce,” shouted another pro-Rousseff senator, Lindbergh Farias. Shaking his fists at the majority backing impeachment, he cried: “They’re going in the garbage can of history.”