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The Wicked Civilisation

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Iftekhar Sayeed
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Now, let us turn to the subject of democracy in India. Democracy, claims The Economist, ‎accepts the individual as the unit of society. Does Indian democracy? No. ‎

Consider caste struggle - the name of an article in Newsweek (July 3rd, 2000, pages 18- ‎‎22). According to the article, "every hour, two Dalits [as untouchables are nowadays ‎called] are assaulted, three Dalit women are raped, two Dalits are murdered and two Dalit ‎houses are burned". The article notes: "Unlike racial apartheid in Africa or gender ‎discrimination in the Muslim world, casteism hasn't captured the West's attention - yet".‎

That "yet" was printed a long time ago. Casteism still hasn't caught the West's attention, ‎and since apartheid has been dismantled, the West is obsessed with a supposedly ‎misogynistic Islam. ‎

On 21 May 2002, a high-caste family in Thinniam branded two dalits with hot iron rods ‎and forced them to feed dried human excreta to each other. The mainstream media in ‎India, which has almost no dalit members, ignored it, according to Siriyavan Anand in ‎Himal, November 2000 (http://www.himalmag.com/2002/november/perspective_2.htm).

The author continues: "In Tamil Nadu, the Thinniam incident did not make any ‎impression on the government, media, civil society or the mainstream intelligentsia. Most ‎newspapers and television channels did not report it and those that did, like The Hindu, ‎ran shy of seeming scatological and referred to it as simply "a heinous incident". This ‎neglect led to another Thinniam." This time Sankan, a dalit, while drinking tea with a ‎friend at a shop was attacked by six caste Hindus. He was verbally abused and beaten up, ‎after which an off-duty constable urinated in his mouth. Why? Because he had dared to ‎pursue his right to a piece of land of which he had been cheated. ‎

The author recounts other episodes. "In 2001, at Prichatur, 75 km from Tirupati in ‎Andhra Pradesh, caste-Hindu men paraded a dalit youth, Murugesh, in a procession and ‎forced him to drink his own urine for 'the crime of relieving himself in the presence of the ‎upper castes' (Deccan Chronicle 30 August 2001). Also in 2001, caste Hindu landlords ‎from Chanaiyan-bandh village in West Champaran, Bihar, tied Dasai Manjhi, a dalit, to a ‎pole, shaved his head and urinated in his mouth. But it was the dalit who landed in jail ‎‎'for felling the timber of his landlord' (The Times of India 11 July 2001). Lalit Yadav, a ‎minister in the Bihar state government, held a truck driver Deenanath Baitha and cleaner ‎Karoo Ram, dalits both, captive for over a month in June-July 2000. The minister and his ‎cousin removed the fingernails of the driver and made him drink urine. Lalit Yadav was ‎dropped from the ministry but remains a free man today. Again in Bihar, in September ‎‎2000, Saraswati Devi, a dalit woman was paraded naked on charges of witchcraft in ‎Pakri-Pakohi, Karja block, Muzaffarpur district. A dozen persons tortured her and forced ‎her to swallow human excreta. After Devi lodged a complaint, police visited the village ‎but failed to 'nab' the accused."‎

The killing of women suspected of being witches is a frequent phenomenon in parts of ‎eastern and central India. In 2002, five women were killed by tribesmen, apparently on ‎the instructions of their priest, believing they were witches. The priest told them the ‎‎"witches" had caused a spate of recent deaths in the area from malaria and diarrhoea. ‎However, women's' rights groups say that local priests, tribal chiefs or greedy relatives ‎declare widows or divorcees witches so they can take control of their property ‎‎(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2166856.stm).

And yet the man who wrote the Indian constitution was a Dalit - BR Ambedkar. In his ‎article "Why do India's Dalits hate Gandhi?", Thomas C. Mountain makes this acrid ‎observation: "In India, supposedly the world's largest democracy, the leadership of the ‎rapidly growing Dalit movement have nothing good to say about Mohandas K. Gandhi. ‎To be honest, Gandhi is actually one of the most hated Indian leaders in the hierarchy of ‎those considered enemies of India's Dalits or "untouchables" by the leadership of India's ‎Dalits." ‎

Why? First of all, Gandhi was a high-caste Hindu. "High castes represent a small ‎minority in India, some 10-15 percent of the population, yet dominate Indian society in ‎much the same way whites ruled South Africa during the official period of Apartheid. ‎Dalits often use the phrase Apartheid in India when speaking about their problems."‎

Secondly, and this is much more significant, because Gandhi opposed the idea that Dalits ‎should have the right to elect their own leaders, as was stated in the draft constitution. He ‎used his usual tactic to have the clause removed - the famous (in this case, infamous) ‎Gandhian fast-unto-death: tens of thousands of Dalits were slaughtered, and it was ‎obvious that if Gandhi died, the violence started by the apostle of nonviolence would ‎soar. Ambedkar backed down. On his death bed, he bitterly regretted this backsliding, ‎and said that that had been the biggest mistake of his life. "To this day, most Indians still ‎believe, and this includes a majority of Dalits, that Dalits are being punished by God for ‎sins in a previous life. Under the religious codes of Hinduism, a Dalit's only hope is to be ‎a good servant of the high castes and upon death and rebirth they will be reincarnated in a ‎high caste."‎

In India, therefore, the vote is not an individual, but a collective act. According to Stanley ‎J. Tambiah: "Ethnic equalisation, rather than freedom and equality of the individual, is ‎the principal charter of participatory democracy in many of the plural and multi-ethnic ‎societies of our time. It has been the experience in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and ‎Malaysia...."‎

A biographical approach best illustrates the complex tangles of Indian politics and Indian ‎crime. In 1981, Phoolan Devi, a Dalit woman, and her cohorts were accused of ‎slaughtering 22 upper-caste men, who, she claimed, had gang-raped her, in the hamlet of ‎Behmai in Uttar Pradesh. She denied the accusations, but agreed to surrender to the ‎police in 1983 by agreeing to the 70 different counts of extortion, kidnapping and murder ‎outstanding on condition that she spend only 8 years in jail. In the event, she spent 11 - ‎then the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh dropped the charges, and took her into his party! ‎She went on to become MP. According to the police, of the 85 MPs from Uttar Pradesh, ‎at least 28 had criminal records or serious charges against them in 1997. Indira Gandhi ‎introduced goons to politics to get votes; since then, they have gone into politics for ‎themselves. Phoolan Devi, despite becoming MP, was brutally murdered. ‎

Though the film that Shekhar Kapoor made on the life of Phoolan Devi - Bandit Queen - ‎found a receptive audience in Western cultural capitals, such as Cannes, "casteism hasn't ‎captured the West's attention - yet", to quote the earlier Newsweek article. ‎

In the same article, we read about how "untouchables" become "touchable" when they are ‎dedicated to temple prostitution. Around 15,000 girls in rural areas are dedicated to ‎divinity every year. "Somebody has to be dedicated or the goddess will be angry," ‎explains Sister Bridget Pailey. The girls are married to god before puberty, and, after ‎their first menstrual period, become sexual servants to the villages' upper-caste men. It's a ‎form of sex-slavery that "hasn't captured the West's attention - yet". ‎

Phineas Fogg and The Widow - Again‎
‎"India is set to adopt tough new laws to prevent the practice of sati, or the self-‎immolation by a widow on her husband's funeral pyre...." This was an Associated Press ‎announcement that appeared in the Bangladesh Observer on 28th January, 2006. One ‎would have thought that such laws would be redundant today. Not so. ‎

‎"While rare," continues the report, "the practice still persists in some areas of the country, ‎especially in deeply traditional rural regions where widows are often shunned because of ‎a belief they will bring had luck and tragedy to the community." The report omitted the ‎fact that those who commit sati - or are forced to do so by relatives and priests - become ‎objects of veneration. ‎

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Iftekhar Sayeed teaches English and economics. He was born and lives in Dhaka, � ��ŽBangladesh. He has contributed to AXIS OF LOGIC, ENTER TEXT, POSTCOLONIAL � ��ŽTEXT, LEFT CURVE, MOBIUS, ERBACCE, THE JOURNAL, and other publications. � ��ŽHe (more...)
 
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