The Violent World of Dalits
Violence and Crimes Against India's Untouchables
A further look at the lives of India's millions of outcasts, specifically at the ways in which it is impacted bt violence.
Last week, we outlined India's ancient system of social stratification. Its basic premise is that, based on karma and purity of one's livelihood, a person is born into one of four castes. Those born as Brahmans are priests and teachers; Kshatriyas are rulers; Vaisyas are merchants and traders and Sudras are laborers. Untouchables are a fifth group considered so unworthy that it is placed outside of the caste system. They are, in quite a literal sense, out-castes, known as Dalits.
This system of social stratification is based on religious principles and has been practiced for some 1,500 years. Today, the system is still around for economic as much as religious reasons. Untouchables do the least attractive, dirtiest jobs for very little pay.
In last week's blog for example, we met Amrutbhai Sarasiya, one of the one million Untouchables who work as manual scavengers. Men like him manually clean latrines and sewers and clean dead animals off the streets. After the Tsunami, Dalits were also the ones cleaning up contaminated and disintegrating dead bodies.
Millions of Dalits like Amrutbhai Sarasiya are trapped in an inexorable cycle of extreme poverty, illiteracy, and oppression. And on top of that, there is violence.
Violence against Untouchables
Violence against Dalits is commonplace. Hillary Mayell, (2003) sampled some mainstream Indian newspapers and found headlines such as: "Dalit boy beaten to death for plucking flowers"; "Dalit tortured by cops for three days"; "Dalit 'witch' paraded naked in Bihar"; "Dalit killed in lock-up at Kurnool"; "7 Dalits burnt alive in caste clash"; "5 Dalits lynched in Haryana"; "Dalit woman gang-raped, paraded naked"; "Police egged on mob to lynch Dalits" (as cited in Hillary Mayen, 2003).
Fear of public humiliation, beatings, and rape keep India's Untouchables in their place. For Dalits, simple acts like drinking from a public well or walking through an upper-caste neighborhood can evoke such violent reactions that these simple acts can in fact be a life-threatening offenses (Amnesty International, 2001, 2005, Hillary Mayell, 2003).
Statistics from India's National Crime Records Bureau indicate that in 2000 25,455 crimes were committed against Dalits (Hillary Mayell, 2003). Every hour two Dalits were assaulted; every day three Dalit women raped, two Dalits murdered, and two Dalit homes torched. Yet the actual reality of crimes against Dalits is much worse than these numbers suggest. Amnesty estimated that only about 5 percent of attacks are registered (Hillary Mayel, 2003, Amnesty International, 2005). Dalits are afraid of retaliation and intimidation. They are also often discouraged by the bribes demanded by police, who more often than not, do nothing about it (Hillary Mayell, 2003, Amnesty International, 2005).
Violence against Untouchable Women
The plight of Dalit women is especially depressing. They suffer double discrimination, one based on caste, the other on gender. Many young Dalit girls for example, end up as prostitutes under the guise of the religious practice devadasis, meaning "female servant of god." They end up serving upper-caste members sexually. Many of them are eventually sold to an urban brothel. Other Dalit women are frequently raped, gang-raped, beaten, tortured or forced to walk through the streets naked as punishment for something she or her family has done (Amnesty International 2005).
Hillary Mayell (2003) mentions a 1999 case that illustrates the implacable mix of gender and caste.
To punish her for the fact that one of her sons had run off with the daughter of a higher-caste family, a 42-year-old Dalit woman was gang-raped and then burnt alive after she, her husband, and two of her sons had been confined and tortured for eight days by upper-caste relatives of the girl. While the local police knew that this was going on, they did not intervene because of the influence and status of the upper-caste family (Hillary Mayen, 2003).
Amnesty International (2005) reported on the following case.
Ram Chandra, a Dalit living in Munni Khera was married to Ramvathi. They owned a piece of land on which they had a house. Dalits are generally not allowed to own land, and upper caste villagers were trying to take the land from them. In September 1998, Ramvathi was gang-raped by five men. These men are believed to be higher caste villagers who raped her as a punishment for the couple's refusal to give up their land. For a while, the couple moved to Ramvathi's parent's village some distance away. They returned to the village on January 30, 1999 to repossess their property. They were met with violence. First Ram Chandra was severely beaten. He described what happened next as follows:
"They attacked my wife with stick, she fell down then and there. After that my wife came to me and laid over my body to save me, then they had beaten my wife with sticks and axes. She got deep injuries on the head and shoulder and her right hand and leg broken. [one of the attackers] put off all the clothes of my wife, raped her and inserted and pushed the stick in her private part".
Ramvathi died the next morning (taken from Amnesty International, 2005)
Amnesty International reported in 2001 on an "extremely high" number of sexual assaults on Dalit women. Landlords, upper-caste villagers, and police officers are primarily responsible for the assaults.
In Closing
There are laws and regulations against caste-based discrimination, but they are not enforced or enacted. Many groups, including the police, continue to discriminate against Dalits. There is a culture of impunity when it comes to violating Dalits, and perpetrators are rarely brought to justice. Until India's "hidden apartheid" is abolished, as A K. R. Narayana said it so well in quoting Ambedkar, India's true Untouchable hero, the world's largest democracy is nothing but a palace built on a dung heap (as cited by Tom O'Neil, 2003, p. 30.).
References
Amnesty International (2005). India's Unfinished Agenda: Equality and Justice for 200 Million Victims of the Caste System. Available online at: http://www.amnestyusa.org/regions/americas/document.do?id=ENGUSA2005100705001
Amnesty International, (2001). India: Violence against women - a double discriminationhttp://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGASA200292001?open&of=ENG-IND
Dalit Freedom Network. Online at: http://www.dalitnetwork.org/go?/dfn/index
Hillary Mayell, (2003) India's "Untouchables" Face Violence, Discrimination. National Geographic News, June 2, 2003. Available online at: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/06/0602_030602_untouchables_2.html
Human Rights Watch. Violence Against "Untouchables" Growing, Says Report. Indian Government Fails to Prevent Massacres, Rapes, and Exploitation. Available online at: http://hrw.org/english/docs/1999/04/14/india879.htm
Tom O'Neil (2003). Untouchable. In: National Geographic, June 2003, pp. 2-31.
