The Hindu : Their tomorrow never comes

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Dec 29, 2002

Opinion

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Their tomorrow never comes

Fifty-five years after India claimed for itself the status of a modern nation-state, one-fifth of its population remains subject to the tyranny of `tradition'. A tradition that rates cows higher than some human beings. Anjali Mody on the Dalits' daily struggle.

The mother and child of one of the Jhajjar victims... will they ever get justice?

FIVE DALIT men were lynched and burnt to death in front of a police station in Jhajjar in Haryana. The police sent a cow for post-mortem to decide whether they deserved to die or not.

Three Dalit students at Delhi University's top ranking Hindu College were battered with fists and beaten with rods, the local police station was reluctant to file a complaint.

The entire Dalit population of a village in Gujarat's Amreli district was subjected to an economic boycott — no water supply, no essential commodities, no employment, no freedom to leave the village. The District Collector did nothing.

In Betul district, Madhya Pradesh, a woman member of a panchayat was raped by upper caste men and paraded naked with bells tied around her neck. This was `punishment' because she was having a relationship with a man. Nothing has been done to the men who raped her.

And so it goes on, everyday, somewhere or the other in India.

Fifty-five years after India claimed for itself the status of a modern nation state, based on equality of citizenship, one fifth of its population remains subject to the tyranny of `tradition'. A tradition which rates cows higher than some human beings. A tradition that laughs in the face of modern laws that were designed to punish those who perpetuated it.

The barbarism of what continues to be dealt to Dalits in India is encapsulated in the recommendation made by the National Human Rights Commission in its first report of the 21st century: "that the Government of India undertake comprehensive steps to root out `Untouchability'." The Constitution of India, which came into effect in 1950, "abolished" Untouchability. But like all the other laws preventing atrocities, protecting civil and human rights, Article 17, is not up to much.

Its biggest impact would appear to have been to abolish the mention of Untouchability. Apart from brief references in school history textbooks, which assure you that it was all sorted out with the temple entry movement, Mohandas Gandhi's dignifying labour by cleaning his own toilet, the appointment of "Harijans" to operate water taps in Brahmin neighbourhoods in Madras, it has vanished from the national lexicon. We simply refuse to deal with the idea. It sits rather uncomfortably with our `nuclear power' image.

But the uncomfortable truth is that although we have had a Dalit president, in many parts of India while Dalits work the land owned by the upper castes, they still cannot draw water from the same well or bathe in the same pond as them. They cannot drink from the same glass as a higher caste person even at a teashop or worship in the same temple. In most places they cannot even be cremated at the same burning ghat as a caste Hindu. In life and in death they are untouchable. Untouchable, that is, except by the arrogant power of upper caste groups who attack, even kill, Dalits with impunity, whenever they perceive a threat to their "way of life".

This is reflected in the rising graph of physical crimes — assault, murder, rape — committed against Dalits across the country. Not a day goes by when a newspaper or television channel does not report an incident. Ramkumar, a Dalit rights activist in Uttar Pradesh, says that the stories that appear in the press are just a minuscule proportion of the atrocities that Dalits face every day. The numbers of atrocities reported by the press are tiny and those recorded by the police as formal complaints are "less than 5 per cent of the actual number of cases".

Physical attacks on Dalits have risen, he said, because of their increasing resistance to `tradition'. Ramkumar said it was a function of "self-respect", that there was an increasing self-assertion, and an awareness of their rights among Dalits, the outcome of the Ambedkarite movement. The atrocities had increased, he said, "with increasing Dalit resistance to the role assigned to them by Hindu tradition.''

So a Dalit man in Bihar is stripped naked and paraded on the streets because he has dared to try and take home with him the upper caste woman whom his son has married. A Dalit woman is raped in Madhya Pradesh, because she has contested and won an election to a panchayat defeating an upper caste rival. A Dalit youth is battered because he cycled through the upper caste area of his village, on a bicycle acquired with a job. Many of the cases in and around the Capital, reported in the media in the last few years, have involved marriages between Dalits and upper castes. Marriages which represent an assault on the caste system, the very system that has determined that upper castes may trample upon Dalits.

Dalits are asserting their claim to rights that are constitutionally guaranteed to them. The ferocious `backlash' from upper castes, however, appears to suggest that the constitutional guarantees for their protection against atrocities are not worth the paper they are written on. Our lawmakers cannot be faulted. Over the years they have put in place enough legislation to guide a society towards civilisation: The Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955, the S.C./S.T. (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, and the Protection of Human Rights Act, 1993, on the basis of which the NHRC was set up. But they seem to have made little difference to Dalits. The fact of the matter is that increases in levels of violence against Dalits signify that the law simply does not work for them.

And yet some States have actually shown a decline in the number of atrocities against Dalits, and the national figures of offences under the S.C./S.T. (Prevention of Atrocities) Act went down year on year through the 1990s. This, a senior police officer from Uttar Pradesh said, was an impossibility given that the majority of cases were never recorded. He said, "it is impossible for anyone to register a decline in atrocities against Dalits unless they have locked up the FIR book and they are simply not registering FIRs because there is Government pressure on them to reduce crime." Government statistics of atrocities against Dalits were, the officer said, "meaningless" since they were limited to the cases that had been recorded by the police. And the numbers of cases registered by police, he said, echoing Ramkumar and other Dalit activists, were "a fraction of the actual numbers of atrocities".

Khurshid, an activist with the Dalit organisation, Dynamic Action Group, said that it was "virtually impossible to have a compliant about an atrocity against a Dalit recorded... Police will simply not record the complaint". He said there was an even smaller chance of cases of rape and molestation of Dalit women being recorded. Not so infrequently, the police were witnesses, participants or complicit bystanders in crimes against Dalits.

Mr. Khurshid gave the example of a Dalit woman in Unnao district of Uttar Pradesh, whom the police were trying intimidate into repaying a loan. The woman's baby was snatched from her and flung against a wall by a local policeman. The baby died. No case was registered. The police, from many accounts, also had a role in the lynching in Jhajjar. According to independent investigations, it was the police who first beat up the victims and then, from all accounts, allowed a mob to collect and incited them to violence.

The police, said the officer from Uttar Pradesh who did not want to be named, were "not trained to deal with crimes against the vulnerable". Nothing in their training was sufficient to make them resist in-built caste prejudices, the `traditions' to which they owned allegiance or the pressure of the powerful.

The powerful in most cases are the landed upper and intermediary castes. And the real struggle and the source of much of the violence, according to Dalit activists, is land. It is landlessness which is at the heart of Dalit disempowerment. Dalits are the single largest group of landless agricultural labour and this ensures their dependence on upper caste land holders.

Outside towns and cities, those who seek justice against discrimination or violent crimes committed against them face instant retribution in the form of an economic boycott. This means no waged work, on which the bulk of them depend, and denial of access to water and other basic necessities.

With the state looking the other way this is the perfect way to break resistance and achieve a `compromise' that usually means that the Dalits who have filed complaints or police cases withdraw them. This is what happened in Amreli in Gujarat and in Vadgas near Ahmedabad, and in hundreds of other villages across the country.

The Ahmedabad-based Dalit leader, Valjibhai Patel, says that land "is not just an economic issue, but an issue of social status. A person who owns land is more powerful, more respected, than someone who works another man's land." And that it is only through ownership of land that the situation of Dalits will change.

And, over the years, different State Governments have had different schemes to give land to Dalits, ownership of which has been denied to them by `tradition'. But, by and large, the schemes do not work. Or, as Mr. Patel puts it, "are not allowed to work".

In Gujarat, some 96,000 acres of land, acquired by the State through the Land Ceiling Act, was allotted to Dalits. In many areas they are only the technical owners of land: the title is in their name, but the land, duly measured and surveyed, stays with the upper castes. Dalits who attempt to stake a claim face the threat of violence.

In Madhya Pradesh, the Government handed out pattas to Dalits; but upper caste landholders, deprived of near-bonded labour, unleashed brutal attacks on them, destroying their homes and their crop. Similar stories come from other States, including BSP-ruled Uttar Pradesh.

But, how can land which has been given to an individual by the state become subject to litigation? Mr. Patel's answer is simple: "the police and administration serve the interests of the upper caste landholders, they invariably belong to the same castes."

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