Dalit Suicide Brings Focus to India's Caste Apartheid

[Riaz Haq]

"Democracy in India is only a top dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic"

Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, Father of India's Constitution

What Dr. Ambedkar said decades ago about the inherent inequality of Indian society continues to be true today. The latest manifestation of it is the suicide of a Dalit Ph.D. scholar Rohith Vermula in the southern Indian state of Telangana.

In 2015, the University of Hyderabad suspended 5 Dalit PhD scholars -- all members of the Ambedkar Students Association (ASA) -- after reports that on Aug. 3, students from ASA attacked Susheel Kumar of Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), from the ruling party BJP's student wing. A team of investigators from the university found these five students innocent, but they were still suspended after BJP Union Minister Bandaru Dattatreya insisted on this action.

Smirti Irani, another ruling BJP minister in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's cabinet, has also been accused of playing a role in suspension and the subsequent protest and death of the Dalit scholar in Hyderabad.  She is also accused by the Opposition of lying about it.

India's rigid caste system assigns each individual to an occupation based on his or her birth. Such division have existed in other societies but these assignments are particularly rigid in Hindu society. It's extremely difficult for someone born to low-caste parents to pursue occupations reserved for higher castes. This has resulted in what the United Nations considers "Caste Apartheid".

The Hindu hierarchy is said to have evolved from different parts of the body of Brahma—the creator of the universe. Thus, the Brahmans, who originated from the mouth, are engaged in the most prestigious priestly and teaching occupations. The Kshatriyas, made from from the arms, are the rulers and warriors; the Vaishyas, from the thighs, are traders and merchants. The Shudras, from the feet, are manual workers and servants of other castes. Below the Shudras and outside the caste system, lowest in the order, the Dalits engage in the most demeaning and stigmatized occupations like scavenging, for instance, and dealing with bodily waste.

Women get the worst of both worlds under the system of Caste Apartheid. Women in India face discrimination and sexual intimidation, however the “human rights of Dalit women are violated in peculiar and extreme forms. Stripping, naked parading, caste abuses, pulling out nails and hair, sexual slavery and bondage are a few forms peculiar to Dalit women.” These women are living under a form of apartheid: discrimination and social exclusion is a major factor, denying access ”to common property resources like land, water and livelihood sources, [causing] exclusion from schools, places of worship, common dining, inter-caste marriages”, according to the UN Human Rights body.

In spite of the obvious devastating impact of caste discrimination, the Indian government continues to oppose the UN attempts to define it as racism. Paul Divakar, convener of the Delhi-based National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights, says, "In a country that prides itself as being the world's biggest democracy, more than 200 million people from the Dalit communities suffer from caste discrimination."

The only minority group reportedly worse off than Dalits are Indian Muslims, according to Indian government's data. The Muslims of India suffer from widespread discrimination in education, employment, housing and criminal justice system.

Given the many ethnic, regional, religious and caste fault lines running through the length and breadth of India, there have long been questions raised about India's identity as a nation. Speaking about, the US South Asia expert Stephen Cohen of Brookings Institution has said, " But there is no all-Indian Hindu identity—India is riven by caste and linguistic differences, and Aishwarya Rai and Sachin Tendulkar are more relevant rallying points for more Indians than any Hindu caste or sect, let alone the Sanskritized Hindi that is officially promulgated".

The ethnic, regional, religious and caste fault lines dividing India have only widened under the new government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India which has been engaged in a concreted campaign to accelerate total Hinduization of India. It does not augur well for the future of India as a secular, democratic and united nation envisioned by its founders.

Related Links:

Haq's Musings

Dalit Victims of Indian Apartheid

Disintegration of India

Hinduization of India Under Modi

Discrimination Against Indian Muslims

[Riaz Haq]

How Severe Is Inequality in #India? We Just Don’t Know, Says Thomas Piketty. #Modi #BJP http://on.wsj.com/23iHhQS via @WSJIndia

In New Delhi on Thursday, Mr. Piketty said India’s extremes of opulence amid destitution—“islands of California in a sea of sub-Saharan Africa,” in the words of economists Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen—are probably comparable to what prevails in Brazil and South Africa, where around 60% of national income goes to the top 10% of earners. The figure in France and Germany is around 35%, according to Mr. Piketty’s data. In the U.K., it’s 40%. In the U.S., nearly 50%.

Superstar economist Thomas Piketty filled several auditoriums with listeners when he spoke in New Delhi this week, many of them likely hoping to learn what the French scholar’s research on economic inequality around the world reveals about India, where wealth and deprivation are often on display in uncomfortable proximity.

His answer may have disappointed a few of them. “We don’t really know,” Mr. Piketty said. India’s government simply doesn’t release the requisite data.

For his book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” which became a surprise blockbuster when the English translation was released in 2014, Mr. Piketty mined decades of tax records to show that income and wealth inequality in the U.S. and Western Europe fell in the first half of the 20th century—and then rose spectacularly in the second.

He connects the latter shift to changes in various policies—income-tax rates, corporate-governance rules that affect executive compensation, minimum wages—and calls for remedial efforts, such as a global tax on capital, to dissipate the concentration of riches.

In New Delhi on Thursday, Mr. Piketty said India’s extremes of opulence amid destitution—“islands of California in a sea of sub-Saharan Africa,” in the words of economists Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen—are probably comparable to what prevails in Brazil and South Africa, where around 60% of national income goes to the top 10% of earners. The figure in France and Germany is around 35%, according to Mr. Piketty’s data. In the U.K., it’s 40%. In the U.S., nearly 50%.

But Mr. Piketty really can’t be certain about India, he said. The country’s government stopped publishing detailed statistics related to income tax in 2000. “It’s quite a unique case in history, where you have a decline in transparency and publication about income taxation.”

He continued: “I have been in touch with many people at all levels in India for the past 15 years to try to understand why this cannot change. Everybody tells me, ‘This will change in the next three months, six months.’ ”

Officials at India’s Finance Ministry said they couldn’t immediately comment.

Mr. Piketty acknowledged the sensitivities surrounding income tax in India, where administration can be patchy and evasion widespread. “Let me make very clear that nobody is asking for names,” he said. “We are talking of fully anonymous data. Today, we do not even know the number of taxpayers and amounts of income by income brackets.”

India doesn’t have an estate tax, so there aren’t any official data on inherited wealth either, Mr. Piketty noted.

The 44-year-old economist drew a huge, appreciative crowd at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, where he was speaking en route to the Jaipur Literature Festival. Even the overflow rooms overflowed with listeners. People crouched in aisles and stood on a lawn where a projector and screen had been set up.

Mr. Piketty lauded India, with its caste-based quotas at universities and government agencies, for at least attempting to help the disadvantaged gain access to education and jobs.

Overall, he said, “I hope Indian elites will behave in a more responsible way than Western elites did in the 20th century.” It took two world wars for some Western governments to use progressive taxes to fund public health and education, he said.

“In India, these reforms, to a large extent, are yet to come.” 

[Riaz Haq]

#Indian #Dalit woman survived in #India by hiding her caste identity. #DalitSuicide | PBS NewsHour http://to.pbs.org/1WBmp2B via @NewsHour

Growing up in India, Yashica Dutt feared that people would discover her true identity.

Then one day when she was 15, they did. She walked with her friend home as she did every day. Her friend’s mother invited her inside and offered her a glass of water. Sitting across from her friend’s parents in their drawing room, they asked about Dutt’s caste.

“I vividly remember thinking, ‘It’s now or never,’” said Dutt, now 29.

She looked down at the floor and told them she was a Dalit — a member of a group also referred to as Untouchables, which sits at the bottom of the caste system and makes up 16 percent of India’s 1.2 billion people.

Under such a system, Dutt would be deemed “unclean,” discouraged against sipping water from her friend’s glass or sitting next to her because her friend belonged to a higher caste.

“I knew I’d done something wrong,” she said. Moments later, she left.

The next time she saw her friend in class, her friend told Dutt that her parents forbade her from speaking to Dutt again.

Dutt said she was never hurt that way again because she “became really good at hiding” who she was.

In many ways, she defied Dalit stereotypes. Her skin color was fair. She spoke excellent English and did well in school. Generations back, her family name changed from Nidaniya, a name that revealed their traditional profession as scavengers, to Dutt, a more ambiguous surname.

And if anyone asked her caste again, Dutt followed her mother’s advice and told them she was Brahmin, a group that sits at the top of the caste system’s hierarchy.

She kept her secret for more than a decade. She worked in New Delhi as a journalist for the Hindustan Times, one of India’s largest newspapers, before moving to New York City where she earned her master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University.

But when an Indian doctoral student named Rohith Vemula recently killed himself to protest discrimination that he and other Dalits face across South Asia, Dutt couldn’t ignore who she was anymore. In what The Hindu newspaper reported to be his suicide note, Vemula wrote that, “The value of a man was reduced to his immediate identity and nearest possibility,” and added that “My birth is my fatal accident.”

Inspired by Vemula, on Tuesday Dutt declared that she was “coming out as Dalit” and asked other Dalits to share their stories on Facebook and on Tumblr.

Dutt isn’t alone. More than 130 academics from around the world signed an open letter following Vemula’s suicide on Jan. 17 decrying what they called the “most recent case of caste discrimination in Indian higher education” by administrators from Hyderabad University, who had suspended Vemula and four other Dalits from school and expelled them from campus housing.

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But more than five decades later, the advocacy group Human Rights Watch criticized India’s failure to stop Dalit discrimination, which often resulted in Dalits being “denied access to land, forced to work in degrading conditions, and routinely abused at the hands of the police and of higher-caste groups that often enjoy the state’s protection,” according to a 2007 report.

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“Caste-based discrimination goes back centuries, and it is very deeply entrenched in Indian society,” Bajoria said. “This will have to be battled at every level.”

Dutt, who still lives in New York and works as a journalist, doesn’t believe the caste system will end during her lifetime, but she said she thinks an open conversation about Dalit discrimination will help empower members of her community.

“It’s wrong to be quiet,” she said.

http://www.ndtv.com/blog/why-today-is-the-day-i-am-coming-out-dalit...

http://www.ndtv.com/blog/yes-im-trying-to-make-it-cool-to-be-dalit-...

[Riaz Haq]

Laws have no meaning when they are not enforced. That is the case in India. 

A survey by the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights on the practices of untouchability (Dalits) undertaken in 565 villages in 11 major states of India found in 73 percent of villages, Dalits were not permitted to enter non-Dalit homes.

In 70 percent of villages, non-Dalits would not eat with Dalits. In 48.4 percent of surveyed villages, Dalits were denied access to common water sources. In as many as 38 percent of government schools, Dalit children were made to sit separately while eating.

Dalits also face routine violence. A 2005 government report said there is a crime committed against a Dalit every 20 minutes.

In December 2006, Indian Prime Minister Mannohan Singh became the first Indian leader to acknowledge the parallel between untouchability and apartheid in India.

Singh described untouchability as a “blot on humanity” and acknowledged that despite constitutional and legal protections, caste discrimination still exists throughout much of India.

Today in Asia, well over 200 million men, women and children continue to endure near complete social ostracism on the grounds of their descent. Sixty-five years after Indian independence, Vinod Sonkar, a Dalit, said, “We are still Dalit, still broken, still suppressed.”

“Dalits are increasingly becoming aware of their rights and raising their voice against discrimination and atrocities,” researcher Vidyarthee said. “Future efforts needs to be in that direction.”

http://borgenproject.org/dalit-caste-apartheid-in-india/

[Riaz Haq]

Tavleen Singh: "#Davos2016 reminds me of how backward #India remains intellectually and academically" https://shar.es/1hYmO9 via @sharethis

To tell you the truth, I am not sure exactly what it is except perhaps that every year I attend at least one session that reminds me of how backward India remains intellectually and academically. And of course economically but there is inevitably a connection. As the economist Nouriel Roubini pointed out in the NDTV Davos debate, India needs to invest in human capital. It is not good enough, he said, to have a handful of brilliant engineers and computer programmers if hundreds of millions of Indians continue to lack basic education.
Images of rural government schools came into my head as I listened. It is true that decades of criminal negligence will take time to correct but if correction does not happen India will remain in its time warp.


On the first day of the conference I attended a session called ‘A Brief History of Industrial Revolutions’ moderated by Niall Ferguson that reminded me painfully of how much of an academic laggard India is. This panel included professors of history and politics from Britain and the United States and the exalted level at which they discussed the theme of this year’s conference, ‘Mastering the Fourth Industrial Revolution’, reminded me painfully that it could never happen in India. I am not going to bore you with details; you can go to the WEF website and watch the whole discussion. You can go to it as well to see what is happening on the frontiers of medicine, science, environment and technology. On account of the reputation that this Davos meeting has gained in its 46 years of existence, it attracts the best minds in the world. Not just “the 1%” as leftist critics of Davos like to believe. And by the way, these same leftist critics come running to Davos when invited to receive awards for social work or achievements in music and the arts.

[Riaz Haq]

BBC News: #India caste violence: 10 million without water in #Delhi as protesters damage water supply canal #Haryana http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-35627819 …

More than 10 million people in India's capital, Delhi, are without water after protesters sabotaged a key canal which supplies much of the city.
The army took control of the Munak canal after Jat community protesters, angry at caste job quotas, seized it.
Keshav Chandra, head of Delhi's water board, told the BBC it would take "three to four days" before normal supplies resumed to affected areas.
All Delhi's schools have been closed because of the water crisis.
Sixteen people have been killed and hundreds hurt in three days of riots.
At the scene: Defiant India protesters stand ground in Haryana
Watch: What future for India's caste system?
Sixteen million people live in Delhi, and around three-fifths of the city's water is supplied by the canal, which runs through the neighbouring state of Haryana.
Mr Chandra said that prior warnings meant that people had managed to save water, and tankers had been despatched to affected areas of the city, but that this would not be enough to make up for the shortfall.
The army took control of parts of the canal on Monday morning, but repairs are expected to take time.
The BBC's Sanjoy Majumder, who is near Delhi's border with neighbouring Haryana state, said protesters who have set up road blocks are refusing to budge.
"We don't trust them. Let's get something in writing. Let them spell it out," one demonstrator who refused to be named told the BBC.

The land-owning Jat community is relatively affluent and has traditionally been seen as upper caste.
They are mainly based in Haryana and seven other states in northern India.
Comprising 27% of the voters in Haryana and dominating a third of the 90 state assembly seats, they are a politically influential community. Seven of the 10 chief ministers in Haryana have been Jats.
The Jats are currently listed as upper caste but the demonstrators have been demanding inclusion in caste quotas for jobs and education opportunities that have been available to lower castes since 1991.
In March 2014 the Congress-led national government said it would re-categorise Jats as Other Backward Castes (OBC), opening the way to government job quotas.
But India's Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that the Jats were not a backward community.
As jobs have dried up in the private sector and farming incomes have declined, the community has demanded the reinstatement of their backward caste status to enable them to secure government jobs.

[Riaz Haq]

India has in recent weeks seen some of its most concerted protests because of caste. At least 18 people were killed and hundreds injured in violent protests by members of the Jat community who are unhappy about the caste quota system, as they say it puts them at a disadvantage in government jobs and at state-run educational institutes. The BBC explains the complexities of India's caste system.

India's caste system is among the world's oldest forms of surviving social stratification.

The system which divides Hindus into rigid hierarchical groups based on their karma (work) and dharma (the Hindi word for religion, but here it means duty) is generally accepted to be more than 3,000 years old.

How did caste come about?

Manusmriti, widely regarded to be the most important and authoritative book on Hindu law and dating back to at least 1,000 years before Christ was born, "acknowledges and justifies the caste system as the basis of order and regularity of society".

The caste system divides Hindus into four main categories - Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and the Shudras. Many believe that the groups originated from Brahma, the Hindu God of creation.

Image copyrightAFP

At the top of the hierarchy were the Brahmins who were mainly teachers and intellectuals and are believed to have come from Brahma's head. Then came the Kshatriyas, or the warriors and rulers, supposedly from his arms. The third slot went to the Vaishyas, or the traders, who were created from his thighs. At the bottom of the heap were the Shudras, who came from Brahma's feet and did all the menial jobs.

The main castes were further divided into about 3,000 castes and 25,000 sub-castes, each based on their specific occupation.

Outside of this Hindu caste system were the achhoots - the Dalits or the untouchables.

How does caste work?

For centuries, caste dictated almost every aspect of Hindu religious and social life, with each group occupying a specific place in this complex hierarchy.

Rural communities were long arranged on the basis of castes - the upper and lower castes almost always lived in segregated colonies, the water wells were not shared, Brahmins would not accept food or drink from the Shudras, and one could marry only within one's caste.

Image copyrightAFPImage captionIndia's caste system is among the world's oldest forms of social stratification surviving to this day

Traditionally, the system bestowed many privileges on the upper castes while sanctioning repression of the lower castes by privileged groups.

Often criticised for being unjust and regressive, it remained virtually unchanged for centuries, trapping people into fixed social orders from which it was impossible to escape. Despite the obstacles, however, some Dalits and other low-caste Indians, such as BR Ambedkar who authored the Indian constitution, and KR Narayanan who became the nation's president, have risen to hold prestigious positions in the country.

Is the system legal?

Independent India's constitution banned discrimination on the basis of caste, and, in an attempt to correct historical injustices and provide a level playing field to the traditionally disadvantaged, the authorities announced quotas in government jobs and educational institutions for scheduled castes and tribes, the lowest in the caste hierarchy, in 1950.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-35650616

[Riaz Haq]

#Dalit family beaten up for accidentally touching #Brahmin man in #India #BJP http://toi.in/17_ADa via @timesofindia #dalitilivesmatter

he curse of untouchability still have deep roots in the country, a truth which can be gauged from the fact, that an entire family of a dalit was beaten with sticks and kicked just because one of the family members accidentally touched the hands of a Brahmin man.
The incident was reported in the remote village of Kyuri village of Pinhat area on Friday afternoon, when a Valmiki family was engaged in a marriage ceremony.
According to Vineeta, a victim of the incident said, "My younger son Sonu had gone to a sweet shop owned by a Brahmin man named Anil Sharma. While giving the payment for the sweets, Sonu accidently touched the hand of Sharma, on which he got infuriated and thrashed my son."
"When Sonu returned home with bruises, he narrated the entire event after which I along with group of women went to sweet shop to protest against the cruelty on mere touching the hand. Later, Anil along with some few more men came to our house and attacked us with wooden sticks. They didn't spare even a pregnant women, who had come to attend marriage ceremony," she claimed. "They kicked her womb after which our family members took her to hospital," she alleged.
As per sources, in the incident, Rekha the pregnant woman, Sonu and his father Hotilal were injured.

[Riaz Haq]

#India "riddled with inequality" says NY Times' Somini Sengupta in "End of Karma" #caste http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/books/review/the-end-of-karma-by-... …


In November 1949, India had been independent for slightly more than two years, and through that duration, a drafting committee labored to devise a constitution for the new nation. The work was nearly finished, but critics grumbled about how long it had taken; one pundit thought the panel ought to have been called the “drifting committee.” B. R. Ambedkar, the Columbia-educated lawyer heading the group, defended his colleagues. Their task was difficult. The constitution incorporated 395 articles and 2,473 amendments, a density that reflected India’s complications — its iniquities of caste, its poverty, its various languages and faiths. India already had political democracy (one vote per citizen), but the constitution also needed to foster social democracy. “How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life?” Ambedkar said in a speech. “We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment, or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political ­democracy.”

The lives of India’s poor and its lowest castes have improved in many ways, but the country remains riddled with inequality; in fact, over the last 35 years the gulf between the wealthiest and the most impoverished has widened. In “The End of Karma,” Somini Sengupta delivers a portentous warning that echoes Ambedkar’s, updated for the present. A quarter of India’s 1.25 billion people are younger than 15; every month, until 2030, nearly a million Indians will turn 18, raring for more education and employment prospects. The size and energy of such a work force is a nation’s dream — the celebrated “demographic dividend.” But the state’s failure to supply these young people with schools, universities and jobs, and to help them climb into prosperity, will tug India into perilous waters, Sengupta writes. “In the coming years, India can thrive because of its young. Or it can implode. Or both. There’s little time left.”


“The End of Karma” shifts in and out of three modes of narrative. The weakest involves Sengupta’s recollections of a childhood in India and North America, as well as her decision, during the stint in New Delhi, to adopt a baby girl. Her interest in India’s youth, she suggests, was quickened by this entry into her life by her daughter, a bona fide member of these restless generations, a unit of India’s demographic dividend. But much of this feels tenuous, the sort of material an editor commonly asks for, reproaching a writer because her manuscript is Not Personal Enough. The book’s second mode is expository — summations of news, history and statistics, which Sengupta delivers in cool, swift language. Two pages about Laloo Prasad Yadav, a powerful politician in the state of Bihar, are a marvel of economy, laying bare his background, his machinery of caste politics, his wrecking of Bihar, and his folksy charisma.

In the book’s most vibrant sections, Sengupta profiles seven young Indians, shadowing some of them over years. All grew up in poor or lower-middle-class homes — the socioeconomic brackets that hold a majority of India’s populace — and their lives illustrate the ways in which the state is failing its youth.

[Riaz Haq]

Shocking video of two naked ‘#Dalit women’ in #India beaten by ‘upper caste’ women goes viral. #Modi http://ambedkar.in/ambedkar/news/?p=652 … via @drambedkar

A shocking video of two ‘Dalit women’ being subjected to merciless thrashing and public humiliation allegedly women from upper caste has gone viral on social media platforms.

The video is so graphic in nature that we at jantakareporter.com have decided not to broadcast here because of poor taste and decency issue.

In the two naked ‘Dalit women’ can be seen lying in water while two women are constantly thrashing them.

We don’t know where the incident took place and what the reason for their public humiliation was. But nothing will ever justify the humiliation meted out to the victims.

What’s worse is that they are being surrounded by a group of men with most of them busy filming the incident.

Source : http://www.jantakareporter.com/india/shocking-video-two-naked-dalit...

[Riaz Haq]

BBC News - #India #Dalit couple hacked to death over minuscule debt

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-36921346


A man from India's Dalit community has been beheaded and his wife hacked to death after a row over a 15 rupees (22 cents; 16 pence) debt in Uttar Pradesh state.
Police said the couple were murdered by an upper caste grocer on Thursday when they told him they needed time to pay for biscuits they had bought from him.
The grocer has been arrested.
Dalits, formerly known as untouchables, form the lowest rung of India's caste hierarchy.
Police told the Press Trust of India news agency the incident took place in Mainpuri district early on Thursday as the couple were on their way to work.
They were stopped by Ashok Mishra, the owner of a village grocery, who demanded that the couple pay the money for three packets of biscuits that they had bought for their three children a few days ago, reports say.
Protests
The couple reportedly told him they would pay after they received their daily wages later in the evening.
"While Mishra kept shouting for the money, the couple started walking towards the fields. Mishra then ran to his house nearby and returned with an axe. He hacked Bharat repeatedly and then attacked Mamta who was trying to rescue her husband. The couple died on the spot," Nadeem, a local villager, told The Indian Express newspaper.
The Dalit community in the village have blocked roads and protested over the incident.
Earlier this month four low-caste Dalit men were assaulted by cow protection vigilantes while trying to skin a dead cow in western Gujarat state.
Many Hindus consider cows sacred and the slaughter of the animal is banned in many Indian states.
In March, a Dalit man was murdered for marrying a woman from a higher caste in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.
The woman's father handed himself in and admitted to carrying out the attack on a busy road in daylight, police said.