No one believes these numbers are anywhere close to the reality of crimes committed against Dalits. Because the police, village councils, and government officials often support the caste system, which is based on the religious teachings of Hinduism, many crimes go unreported due to fear of reprisal, intimidation by police, inability to pay bribes demanded by police, or simply the knowledge that the police will do nothing.
That same year, 68, complaints were filed against the police for activities ranging from murder, torture, and collusion in acts of atrocity, to refusal to file a complaint.
Sixty two percent of the cases were dismissed as unsubstantiated; 26 police officers were convicted in court. Despite the fact that untouchability was officially banned when India adopted its constitution in , discrimination against Dalits remained so pervasive that in the government passed legislation known as The Prevention of Atrocities Act.
The act specifically made it illegal to parade people naked through the streets, force them to eat feces, take away their land, foul their water, interfere with their right to vote, and burn down their homes. Since then, the violence has escalated, largely as a result of the emergence of a grassroots human rights movement among Dalits to demand their rights and resist the dictates of untouchability, said Narula.
Enforcement of laws designed to protect Dalits is lax if not non-existent in many regions of India. The practice of untouchability is strongest in rural areas, where 80 percent of the country's population resides. There, the underlying religious principles of Hinduism dominate.
Hindus believe a person is born into one of four castes based on karma and "purity"—how he or she lived their past lives. Those born as Brahmans are priests and teachers; Kshatriyas are rulers and soldiers; Vaisyas are merchants and traders; and Sudras are laborers. Within the four castes, there are thousands of sub-castes, defined by profession, region, dialect, and other factors. Untouchables are literally outcastes; a fifth group that is so unworthy it doesn't fall within the caste system.
Although based on religious principles practiced for some 1, years, the system persists today for economic as much as religious reasons. Because they are considered impure from birth, Untouchables perform jobs that are traditionally considered "unclean" or exceedingly menial, and for very little pay. One million Dalits work as manual scavengers, cleaning latrines and sewers by hand and clearing away dead animals.
Millions more are agricultural workers trapped in an inescapable cycle of extreme poverty, illiteracy, and oppression. Although illegal, 40 million people in India, most of them Dalits, are bonded workers, many working to pay off debts that were incurred generations ago, according to a report by Human Rights Watch published in These people, 15 million of whom are children, work under slave-like conditions hauling rocks, or working in fields or factories for less than U.
Dalit women are particularly hard hit. They are frequently raped or beaten as a means of reprisal against male relatives who are thought to have committed some act worthy of upper-caste vengeance. They are also subject to arrest if they have male relatives hiding from the authorities. A year-old Dalit woman was gang-raped and then burnt alive after she, her husband, and two sons had been held in captivity and tortured for eight days. Her crime? Another son had eloped with the daughter of the higher-caste family doing the torturing.
The local police knew the Dalit family was being held, but did nothing because of the higher-caste family's local influence. A report released by Amnesty International in found an "extremely high" number of sexual assaults on Dalit women, frequently perpetrated by landlords, upper-caste villagers, and police officers. The study estimates that only about 5 percent of attacks are registered, and that police officers dismissed at least 30 percent of rape complaints as false.
The study also found that the police routinely demand bribes, intimidate witnesses, cover up evidence, and beat up the women's husbands. The police are not quick to "poke their noses" into these cases either [Gandhi Peace Foundation, ]. The same problems affect a formidable array of redistributive laws - minimum wages, development grants for the landless and marginal farmers, land reforms.
By the reaction to village Untouchables' efforts to assert equality had been so violent - involving mass murders and arson - that one senior Indian social scientist urged a policy of planned emergency urbanization of Untouchables. The same argument has been made by Untouchable intellectuals as well. Untouchables in urban India continue to have low social and economic status.
Opportunities for mobility are by no means equal. Untouchables are not physically distinctive, but access to India's desperately scarce jobs, housing, and services requires manipulation of social relationships - to an extent Westerners find difficult to comprehend and higher caste Indians find easy to ignore.
Reporting on a survey of employment patterns of urban college graduates, one study noted, "Graduates from the lower castes are more often unemployed This holds true even when the low-caste graduate has the better academic qualifications". Special access programs to higher education and to jobs in the massive public-sector bureaucracies and industries are designed to counter such resistance but are hampered by hostile administrators.
There has been change, but it has had a recurrent price, whether it be three months of riots against the education and job programs for Untouchables in both urban and rural Gujarat in , or a recent "minor" riot in Sholapur on the heels of an Untouchable literary conference. An earlier incident in Agra, the city of the Taj Mahal, illustrates the complexity of the urban situation. Here Untouchables have some limited economic independence because their "polluting" leather craft is the basis for small businesses.
Many have also asserted cultural independence through conversion to Buddhism. An annual parade in honor of the late Untouchable leader, Dr. Ambedkar, consciously symbolizes all that Untouchables should not be according to prevailing standards - proud, assertive, non-Hindu, and wealthy enough to carry out a parade that rivals higher caste displays. The parade is resented by the higher caste population, and in conflict triggered a police riot. The police went on a rampage in Untouchable residential areas, killing nine, seriously injuring more than , burning homes, and leaving the walls of an Untouchable Buddhist shrine riddled with bullet holes.
As yet, no police have been brought to trial. The situation is grim. A number of human and civil rights groups have developed in India in the past few years, and some of these now supplement the efforts of grassroots Untouchable organizations. Small groups of Untouchable immigrants to Britain and North America have added their own increasingly desperate calls for action. All are painfully aware of their limitations in the face of violence that has become routine and governments that repeat a maddening refrain - "There is no crisis, and we have it firmly under control.
Our website houses close to five decades of content and publishing. Or you can lie. Did his wife wear a red sari or a white sari? How does she wear her sari? Do you eat beef? Who is your family deity? You cannot tell them about your life.
It would reveal your caste. Because your life is your caste, your caste is your life. At 26, I came to America, where people know only skin color, not birth status. Some here love Indians and some hate them, but their feelings are not affected by caste. No one informed me that I was untouchable. It is not the kind of thing that your mother would need to tell you.
What I was told was that we were Christians. Christians, untouchables—it came to the same thing. All Christians in India were untouchable, as far as I knew though only a small minority of all untouchables are Christian. I knew no Hindu who did not look right through a Christian man standing in front of him as if he did not exist.
I saw the grown-ups in my family scrambling to their feet, straightening their clothes, and wringing their hands when a certain bowlegged, cross-eyed, drooly-mouthed Hindu man passed in front of us. I knew the cross-eyed, drooly-mouthed man was fucking my aunts both of them , making children with them, but not marrying them because they were Christians. I knew a Christian boy who was pushed in front of a train for falling in love with an uppercaste girl. The questions started when I was fifteen and someone took me and my sister to see a movie.
Then they came in a flood that would not stop for years. In the movie a rich girl falls in love with a poor boy. The girl, not knowing what her family has done, goes searching for the boy. No surprises here for an Indian moviegoer.
The shock came at the wedding scene. The heroine wears a white gown. Not a sari like a Hindu bride. A white, Western-style gown with a veil, like they wear at Christian weddings. The rich girl was Christian! This movie, in sheer defiance of the laws of nature, portrayed Christians as rich and powerful and—most amazing of all—scornful of brahmins, the highest caste of all. It is simply not possible to convey what this meant to a fifteen-year-old untouchable Christian girl.
My questions found no outlet. It was too shameful to bring up the subject of our inferior status, even among my own folk.
I never thought to ask anyone. There were only fifteen RECs in the whole country. Students from other states and even other countries went there to study. That was the first time in my life I saw people from outside my home state of Andhra. Being a small-town girl, I was afraid of betraying my curiosity about all the strange and modern things I saw at the college.
I saw girls with short hair. I saw girls in sleeveless blouses. I even saw some girls wearing pants. Some wore lipstick and tweezed their eyebrows. I saw girls secretly smoking. I learned the concept of boyfriend-girlfriend. And of course all of these girls could speak English. It was here that I first saw in real life what I had seen in that movie: Christians who looked down on even high-caste Hindus.
But what could I ask them? I was ashamed to bring up the subject. I finished my program without ever finding out what the difference was between them and me. After Regional Engineering College I went to yet another citadel of engineering education.
I went to Madras to attend the Indian Institute of Technology. I was a research associate in the department of applied physics working on a project funded by the Indian Space Research Organisation.
They were all so beautiful, rich, happy, charming, high-class. I felt as if I were surrounded by movie heroines, but with brains. And in the hostel I saw many more of those elusive superior Christians.
One thing I noticed quickly: they all came from the southern state of Kerala. That movie I had seen, I found out later, had been made in Malayalam, the language spoken in Kerala, and dubbed into my own native language of Telugu. She was always flanked by two brahmin girls, her loyal sidekicks. Supriya Abraham, when she descended to the ground floor to go to the mess, was like a star from the sky deigning to visit the earth.
The brahmin boys who fawned over these Christian girls would look at me in disgust. In my town, Christian girls were called crows, pigs, scavengers.
I wanted to make friends with these Keralites. But they shunned me just as any Hindu would. I was deeply hurt, more deeply than when it happened with the Hindus. But I was determined to find out why I was different. Jessie was kind, one of the only girls who would talk to me. Her room and my room were on the same floor.
They were obviously wealthy. I started probing, asking questions. Nambudiris are so high in rank that they look down on all other brahmins. She explained that among the Nambudiris, in ancient times, the eldest son inherited all the property, and only he was allowed to marry.
The rest of the sons inherited nothing and had to find lower-caste mistresses or remain celibate. But I refused to believe her. Is that all it took? Some Christians decide to claim brahmin heritage and everyone believes it? It was too far-fetched. By this time I was brazen. So what is the relation between religion and caste? Between caste and social status? Between social status and wealth?
Between wealth and caste? I thought about these things incessantly. I decided to find out how my family became Christians.
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