October 12, 2019
Plight of 200 million Dalits in India
By Abdus Sattar Ghazali
Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, the father of Indian Constitution once said: Dalithood is a kind of life condition which characterizes exploitation, suppression and marginalization of Dalits by the social, economic, cultural and political domination of the upper castes’ ‘Brahminical ideology.”
Around 500 Dalits from various parts of Gujarat embraced Buddhism on Tuesday (October 8) in three separate programmes held in Ahmedabad, Mehsana and Idar of Sabarkantha district on the occasion of Vijayadashami.
The day of Vijayadashami holds a special significance in Buddhism in India. It was on a Vijayadashami day on October 14, 1956 that Dr B R Ambedkar famously embraced Buddhism along with lakhs of his supporters in Maharashtra.
Figures from the 2011 census confirm that there are more than 200 million Scheduled Castes (the official term for Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist Dalits) in India.
Untouchability—the idea that coming into contact with a Dalit would make an upper-caste Hindu impure was made illegal in India’s 1959 Constitution. However, discrimination and segregation continues.
India’s Caste System
To borrow Archana Chaudhry of Bloomberg, seven decades ago, the founders of post-colonial India outlawed caste discrimination and enshrined affirmative action in the constitution. That included reserving government jobs and places in higher education for Dalits. Yet caste remains a significant factor in deciding everything from family ties and cultural traditions to educational and economic opportunities, especially in small towns and villages, where more than 70% of Indians live.
Nearly a third of Dalits make less than $2 a day and many don’t have access to education or running water. Most menial jobs are carried out by Dalits; few office jobs are.
Hate crimes against Dalits have proliferated in recent years, prompting criticism of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party for stoking social divisions. The party is the natural home for Hindu hardliners, some of whom have attacked Muslims for eating beef and lower-caste Hindus over their links to the beef trade. (Hindus consider cows sacred.) Dalits have taken to the streets by the tens of thousands to protest and to demand better rights.
Plight of Dalits in India worsened under Modi
There is a rise in rape cases against Dalits since 2014 when Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s RSS backed government into power.
The current scenario is very disturbing, the Milli Gazette of New Delhi wrote and gave few instances: A 20-year old Dalit girl of Rohtak was gangraped by five men belonging to upper castes on 13 July, 2016.
The girl was gangraped by the same group two years ago in 2013 in Bhiwani. As the accused got bail, they again committed the heinous crime to take revenge from her for not withdrawing charges against them in exchange for some money.
On 25 July, 2016, a 14-year old Dalit girl succumbed to death after getting raped frequently by a man who allegedly tortured her and compelled her to drink some corrosive substance. She was tortured for two months but the accused people have not been arrested yet.
‘Hidden Apartheid’ of Discrimination Against Dalits
India has systematically failed to uphold its international legal obligations to ensure the fundamental human rights of Dalits, or so-called untouchables, despite laws and policies against caste discrimination, the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice and Human Rights Watch said in a new report released in February 2007. The 113 page report was titled: “Hidden Apartheid: Caste Discrimination against India’s ‘Untouchables’.”
A resolution passed by the European Parliament on February 1, 2007 found India’s efforts to enforce laws protecting Dalits to be “grossly inadequate,” adding that “atrocities, untouchability, illiteracy, [and] inequality of opportunity, continue to blight the lives of India’s Dalits.” The resolution called on the Indian government to engage with CERD in its efforts to end caste-based discrimination. Dalit leaders welcomed the resolution, but Indian officials dismissed it as lacking in “balance and perspective.”
In January 2007 the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women concluded that Dalit women in India suffer from “deeply rooted structural discrimination.” “Hidden Apartheid” records the plight of Dalit women and the multiple forms of discrimination they face. Abuses documented in the report include sexual abuse by the police and upper-caste men, forced prostitution, and discrimination in employment and the payment of wages.
Dalit children face consistent hurdles in access to education. They are made to sit in the back of classrooms and endure verbal and physical harassment from teachers and students. The effect of such abuses is borne out by the low literacy and high drop-out rates for Dalits.
70% of Christians in India are Dalits
India’s 29 million Christians constitute only 2.3 percent of the country’s population, making them the second largest religious minority in the country after Muslims. By conservative estimates, across denominations, nearly 70 percent of Christians are Dalits (formerly the untouchable caste).
In 2017, the Evangelical Fellowship of India documented 351 instances of violence against Christians, but activists and scholars believe that this is only a fraction of the actual violence as many cases go unreported.
This proliferation coincides with the social and political rise of Hindu nationalist organizations, including the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), from the peripheries to the center of Indian politics. The Hindu nationalist ideology, known as Hindutva, considers Christians as foreigners, intent on destroying the integrity of the nation primarily through conversions.
Following the historic political victory for the BJP in 2014, which propelled Narendra Modi to the prime ministership, 600 instances of violence against minorities were recorded in the first 100 days of the administration.
Since 1998, persecution against Christians in India has escalated. Churches have been burned, pastors are beaten, and nuns and women of the church are raped. In recent years, this specific persecution has increased even more. Church properties in one Indian state were taken over and the graves of the deceased were dug up and desecrated.
Dalit Liberation Sunday
Tellingly, Dalit Liberation Sunday will be observed across India on Nov. 9, recalling the 2008 anti-Christian violence in Kandhamal.
The National Council of Churches in India (NCCI), comprising Protestant and Orthodox Churches, and the CBCI has been jointly observing Dalit Liberation Sunday on the second Sunday of November.
Kandhamal is a district of the eastern Indian state of Odisha, formerly known as Orissa, where an orgy of violence descended upon the impoverished Christian minority in August 2008.
A series of riots led by radical Hindus left roughly 100 people dead, thousands injured, 300 churches and 6,000 homes destroyed, and 50,000 people displaced, many forced to hide in nearby forests where more died of hunger and snakebites.
The mobs had been incensed by rumors that Christians had killed a local Hindu holy man. (It later emerged that the holy man had actually been assassinated by Maoist guerillas in the area.)
Social exclusions of Dalits in the U.S. colleges
India Abroad wrote in March 2019 the Dalits face discrimination from their fellow Indians in US educational institutions:
In 2017, a team of South Asian academics, activists, community members and policy advocates said in a report, “Caste in the United States: A Survey of Caste Among South Asian Americans,” that about 40 percent of Dalit students report facing discrimination in educational institutions in the diaspora while by contrast, only as much as 3 percent of respondents who were “upper” caste reported the same.
“The stigma attached to caste is so deep that most Dalits, refuse to talk about it,” Soundararajan said. Citing the key findings of the Equality Labs report on caste in the U.S., Soundararajan said 25 percent Dalits or lower caste people say they experienced a physical assault because of their caste, while 59 percent reported caste-based derogatory jokes or remarks directed at them. More than half said they were afraid of being outed as a Dalit.
The Equality Labs report was authored by Soundararajan and Maari Zwick-Maitreyi, a Dalit community activist and Equality Labs’ research director.
Explaining about caste supremacy and oppression, Soundararajan called it a system of oppression and social organization where men are given prominence over women, trans people, queer, and gender-queer people throughout society. She said the caste hierarchy and gender hierarchy are the “organizing principles of the Brahmanical social order and are closely interconnected.”
A telling example of the Dalits’ sorry state in India was the case of Rohith Vemula, a 26-year-old Ph.D. student from the Dalit community at the University of Hyderabad, who committed suicide in 2016, allegedly because of persistent caste discrimination against him, although he was a brilliant scholar. Vemula left a suicide note in which he wrote: “The value of a man was reduced to his immediate identity and nearest possibility. To a vote. To a number. To a thing. Never was a man treated as a mind. As a glorious thing made up of star dust. In every field, in studies, in streets, in politics, and in dying and living.”
Prakash Ambedkar, grandson of Babasaheb Ambedkar, who is recognized as the Father of the Indian Constitution, wondered if the prime minister has become a Christian since washing the feet of the lowest of the low exists in Christianity.
“The prime minister has never spoken about incidents in which Dalits were targeted during his reign. This is merely a gimmick. But it is not going to help him as Dalits know him, his ideology and that of his followers,” Ambedkar claimed while speaking to Down To Earth magazine.
On the issue of awareness about Dalits both in the U.S. and India, Chinnaiah Jangam, a professor specializing in modern South Asian History at Carleton University, Canada said in an earlier interview with India Abroad that as violence against Dalits rise in India and discrimination continues against the community, it is important that awareness about them is created among the American mainstream population and within the liberal South Asian community.
Abdus Sattar Ghazali is the Chief Editor of the Journal of America (www.journalofamerica.net) email: asghazali2011 (@) gmail.com
The Journal of America Team:
Editor in chief:
Abdus Sattar Ghazali
Senior Editor:
Prof. Arthur Scott
Special Correspondent
Maryam Turab
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