Editor,
Three persons allegedly molested an 18-year-old Dalit girl in Baghpat, Uttar Pradesh, when she was working at a cauldron of a jaggery-making unit in December last year. When she protested, the accused allegedly threw her into the hot cauldron and hurled casteist words at her. She suffered appalling burns to half of her body.
The above incident is just the tip of the iceberg. The latest National Crime Records Bureau’s data show the crimes against Dalits increased from 50,744 in 2021 to 57,428 in 2022. The graph has been going up since 2013. There were 15,368 crimes against scheduled caste persons in Uttar Pradesh in 2022, while Madhya Pradesh ranked first in crimes against scheduled tribes from 2020 to 2022.
The administrations in these two states need to be more efficient in dealing with crimes against Dalits. However, caste hatred towards Dalits by the upper caste members of the same religion is not confined to those two states only but all over India. Many parents teach their children the mantra regarding educating their children about caste differences. In some schools in Tamil Nadu, students wear colour-coded wristbands to show their caste identity. Those children may or may not wear their hearts on their sleeves, but they definitely wear their castes on their wrists.
The following incident would reveal what ‘caste educated’ little children could do. A teacher from a lower caste was appointed in a school in Tamil Nadu where the majority of the students belonged to upper castes. A student threw a firecracker at her when she had been taking a class. It ruptured her eardrum and she was forced to leave.
On the other hand, a young student was killed in Rajasthan in August 2022 for not getting enough education on untouchability. The student touched a drinking pot and, as a result, he was beaten to death by his teacher in Surana village of Rajasthan’s Jalore district. As per the India Human Development Survey (IHDS-2) in 2011-12, 27 percent respondents across India said that they had been maintaining the practice of untouchability in their daily lives.
According to studies conducted by the National Council of Applied Economic Research in 2016, about 5 percent of the marriages in India are inter-caste marriages. Caste identity cannot be changed with the change of class, or, in other words, with the help of money power. One in four Indians who practices untouchability will not touch even a well-off Dalit. On the other hand 95 among 100 Indians continue to avoid marrying even rich Dalits.
There is a long list of atrocities against Dalits, like thrashing them for sporting a moustache, or riding a horse, or drinking water from a public tap, or getting a haircut at a barber’s shop, or entering a temple, or taking water from a well, or sitting in a row in a feast, etc. The story is the same as that of ‘sadgati’, which is not just a Munshi Prem Chand’s short story or a Satyajit Ray’s film. As a matter of fact, this is a never-ending story of caste hatred in our country.
This made Ambedkar embrace Buddhism and Vemula write in his suicide note, “My birth is my fatal accident.” And this makes the school dropout rate in Dalit children generally high in our country. The UN report says that there is a widespread discrimination against Dalits throughout the entire educational system in India.
This is a threat to equality, to our national unity and more importantly to humanity. More often than not, history witnessed what Tagore wrote in his famous poem, Apamanita (Insulted), “Whom you push down will pull you down” or in other words Newton’s third law “for every action in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
Students should be taught in schools why caste inequality is an ugly blot like sati that needs to be erased from our society. Moreover, a display of any kind of symbol of one’s caste identity must totally be banned.
Sujit De,
Kolkata