We Indians delude ourselves and our progeny that caste discrimination is a thing of past ,yet it pervade the nation ,top to bottom.
For decades after independence in 1947 , caste remained a conversational taboo in India. Popular understanding of caste in India is deeply influenced by the way caste has been written about in its fundamental scriptures , perhaps because Brahmins tightly control the production of knowledge through most of India’s history. Caste based quotas in government jobs date back to the colonial time: they were first introduced in Tamil Nadu in 1831, with the spread of modern education , as the British sought to create a bureaucratic class outside the Brahmins . The Indian state expanded this policy post – independence ,guaranteeing the members of ‘The Schedule Castes and The Schedule tribes’ (previously ,the untouchables) a proportion of government positions. Yet reservation schemes are attacked by privileged groups everywhere : as the denial of ‘merit’ of deserving candidates.
Thus there is no denial of the fact that despite the law , Dalits are still treated unfairly . An incident which took just a few years before and many more unspotted , are quite of evidences. In October , 2016, a young man ,an untouchable walked into a flour mill in Uttrakhand. Present in the mill was a Brahmin schoolteacher – Brahmins who accused the Dalit man of having defiled all the flour produced there that day . After the Dalit man objected to the insult , the schoolteacher took out a blade and slit the Dalit’s throat ,killing him instantly . The Brahmin schoolteacher was arrested , along with his brother and father , who had threatened the murdered man’s family if they went to the police .
Silence followed ,then forgetting . There was no discussion of the deep –seated convictions and code that enabled this gruesome act , or how each Indian life was linked to it.
The first step is to relieve ourselves of the old, colonial idea of caste. Instead, we must understood how both hierarchy and segmentation seep continually into everyday Indianlife.
- Urvi Bansal
Did Dalits get their Justice? : A question of significance
Above is a question every single individual should ponder upon before they question the significance of the Reservation policy because the acute discrimination based on caste persists even after 73 years of independence. Where a guy from Schedule Caste and Schedule Tribe cannot stay or breathe in the same vicinity of a Brahmin we don’t have a right to question the reservation policy.
The news and knowledge of such discrimination to the people are scarce as there are only selected news which are mainstream such as the death of Dr Payal Devi in 2019 due to repeated casteist slurs, ragging and harassment from upper-class doctors in Mumbai, Hathras Rape case in Uttar Pradesh in 2020 where a Dalit woman was raped by 4 Thakur caste men, suicide by Rohith Vemula in 2016 after being harassed by upper-caste professors. There are many such cases prevalent in many regions of India such as professors treat students admitted with reservation quota as disappointments as per the many DU students, people from lower caste are still not allowed entry in the temple of places like in Hamirpur district, and Bulandshahr district of UP, in Tejur village of Karnataka (where protests continue against it), Badagaon in Bhubneshwar (Odisha) and many other instances.
Further, we see, as per the Annual Crime Report 2019 by the National Crime Records bureau we see an increase of about 27% and 7% in crime against Schedule Caste and Schedule Tribe respectively. And Uttar Pradesh reports the highest number of such cases followed by Rajasthan and Bihar. The types of crimes include rape and cognizable crimes violating the IPC.
The scenario shown above clearly states that vision of equality dreamt by Dr B. R. Ambedkar for India in the constitution is still a distant dream as we see caste discrimination and violence still prevailing in our country. And further even the educated are also professing such practice, so it clearly shows there's a long way to go. But we can just hope that one day we get free from all such orthodox beliefs and develop ourselves and our society to accept everyone equally. Until then we can just condemn and prevent such practices while waiting for the right thing to happen.
- Priyankush
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