Memoirs of fifties Akividu or Akiveedu (ఆకివీడు), and neighbouring villages. Educational, geographical, historical, literary, philosophical,
religious and social postings included. Copyright Raju (PD). (bondadaa@gmail.com)
Tuesday, May 22, 2018
The Daily Fix: Dalit lynched for refusing to clear trash is a reminder of Gujarat’s caste apartheid
Everything
you need to know for the day (and a little more).
21 hours ago
Shoaib
Daniyal
The Big
Story: Gujarat model?
In the run up to the 2014 Lok Sabha
elections, of Gujarat was touted as an ideal state by its then chief minister
Narendra Modi. Yet, as a number of commenters pointed out, Gujarat’s economic
prosperity did little to help its people – the state’s social indicators ranged
from middling to poor. This is hardly surprising given the vicious anti-Dalit
prejudice present in the state.
On Sunday, this casteism was on
naked display as a 40-year-old Dalit man, Mukesh Vaniya, was allegedly murdered
in Rajkot district. Vaniya’s wife said that employees from a local factory asked them their caste and then when it was confirmed they
were Dalits, wanted the couple to pick up garbage. When Vaniya and his wife
refused, they were beaten. Vaniya was picked up, tied to a pole and assaulted
brutally with metal rods for more than an hour. A video of the incident was
also recorded. Vaniya died as a result of the assault.
The incident is a clear throwback
to Una
in 2016, where cow vigilantes had assaulted four Dalit men for skinning a cow.
There too, Dalits complained that caste conventions dictated that they were
often forced to pick up dead cows just like Rajkot saw the Dalit couple being
forced to pick up garbage.
These are not isolated incidents.
In 2010, Navsarjan, a nongovernmental organisation that has done extensive work
amongst Gujarat’s Dalits, published a study noting that untouchability was widely practiced in
Gujarat. Amongst 98.4% of the village surveyed, inter-caste marriages were
barred. In 97.6% of villages, a Dalit touching a caste Hindu’s utensils or
water pot was seen as a form of pollution. In 98% of villages, tea was either
not served to Dalits or served in cups reserved specially for Dalits. Religious
segregation was near-complete too: in 97% of the villages, Dalits were barred
from touching articles used in religious rituals. Segregation is near total,
from schools, wells to temples, as is violence against Dalits. It is clear that Article 17 of the
Indian Constitution, outlawing untouchability, is a dead letter in the state of
Gujarat.
This dire situation has been, for
the large part, encouraged by the state’s political leadership. The government,
for example, has been dragging its feet in implementing land reforms – carried
out decades earlier by most other states in India. In February earlier this
year, a Dalit activist, Bhanubhai Vankar set
himself on fire to protest the state government’s apathy on the matter. In
fact, far from implementing land reforms, the state’s BJP government has made it easier for rich farmers and industry to dispossess
small holding farmers by relaxing earlier safeguards under the land revenue
code.
Simultaneously, the Gujarat
government has made efforts to shoot the messenger, stifling voices that speak
on behalf of Dalits. Navsarjan, the state’s most credible body on Dalit issues
was accused of trying to “malign Gujarat’s image” by a state
minister. Even more seriously, in 2017, the Modi government cancelled the NGO’s
foreign funding, forcing it to let go nearly its entire staff and putting
in peril its activities in more than 3,000 villages across Gujarat.
Unlike states like Uttar Pradesh,
Dalit have little political clout in Gujarat. Combine this with an actively
hostile stance from the state government results in Gujarat’s Dalits leading a
precarious existence, subject to apartheid and brutal violence on a regular basis.
The Big
Scroll
In Gujarat, it took a
tragedy for two Dalits to get their land titles. Many more are still
waiting, reports Aarefa
Johari.
“He will bring us
justice”: Dalits in Gujarat pin
their hopes on Jignesh Mevani’s big win.
With its foreign
funding cancelled, can Gujarat’s oldest Dalit NGO, Navsarjan,survive?
“Your mother, you take
care of it”: Shoaib Daniyal on the Dalits behind Gujarat’s
stirring cow carcass protests
Punditry
Activism in its true
sense: In Bloomberg-Quint,
Alok Prasanna Kumar writes about Justice Chelameswar’s Legacy.
What’s beyond
Bengaluru: In the Economic
Times, Narendra Pani outlines the reason behind Siddaramaih’s failure
in Karnataka
In Mint, Kunal Singh writes on the strategic stalemate in South Asia:
while Pakistan hasn’t been able to fulfil its grand strategy objectives
with the help of its nuclear weapons, India hasn’t found an adequate
answer to Pakistan’s skilful use of sub-conventional assets
Ipsita Chakravarty reports
on how Kashmiri women see themselves in a separatist movement dominated by men:
Women’s protests are not new in
Kashmir. “People have forgotten the 1990s,” said Hameeda Nayeem, who teaches
English at Kashmir University and is married to separatist leader Nayeem Khan.
She recalled how men and women marched in large numbers to the United Nations
building to demand a plebiscite, for instance.
But many agree that women have now
become more confrontational with the state. Recent images of college girls
pelting stones on security forces and being detained for taking part in
protests raise some old questions again. Where do women see themselves in a
separatist movement whose protagonists have always been men, which has largely
been defined by men? Where do women’s individual freedoms figure in the idea of
azadi?
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