http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/enough-is-enough/article6070582.ece
Enough is enough
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ANAND TELTUMBDE
* PTIVillagers near the site of crime at Katra Shahadatganj village
where two sisters were gangraped and hanged from a tree, in Badaun district on
Saturday.
*
TOPICS
India
Uttar Pradesh
crime
sexual assault & rape
crime, law and justice
inquiry
crime, law and justice
The images of two innocent Dalit girls hanging from a tree in Katra village in
Badaun district of Uttar Pradesh and a crowd of spectators looking bewildered
at them best describes our national character. We can endure any amount of
ignominy, can stand any level of injustice, and tolerate any kind of nonsense
around us with equanimity. It is no use saying if those girls were our own
daughters or our own sisters, we would still stare at them, bewildered and
resigned like anyone in that crowd did. In just the past two months, while we
as a country were busy playing fiddle to Narendra Modi and his promise of acche
din, there have been a series of gory rapes and murders of Dalit teens across
the country.
But beyond the residual anger, there is hardly any real concern for these
atrocities. The rulers are not concerned, the media is hardly interested, and
then there is indifference of the progressive lot and Dalits’ own frigidity
towards them. It is shameful that we take the rape and murder of innocent
Dalits as an adjunct of our social environment and forget about them.
Rapes aren’t Manu-ordained
Whenever we speak about castes, we bury our neck ostrich like into sands of
mythic past and blind ourselves to our own times where contemporary castes have
been constructed. All the stereotypical theories that are in vogue either
promote inaction or intoxication with one’s caste identity – a veritable
suicidal instinct. They absolve our rulers of their dirty intrigues that
enlivened castes into modern times, with the alibi of social justice. The
Constitution outlawed untouchability but not castes. It was not social justice
but the ability of castes to splinter people that made the post-independence
rulers wanted castes to survive. The reservations in an equality-aspiring
country could be an exceptional policy, which it was as instituted by the
colonial rulers. The scheduled castes, as identified on a solid criterion of
untouchability in 1936 were such exceptional people wanting an exceptional
policy. But during the constitution making, it was made
open-ended, first by extending it to the tribes by creating a separate
schedule with fluid criteria and then to all others that could be identified by
the State as ‘educationally and socially backward’. The latter was
appropriately used by our rulers in 1990 in the form of Mandal reservations
taking the lid off the can of caste worms.
This and their other intrigues have created the modern monsters who unleash
caste atrocities on Dalits. With the rhetoric of socialism, they systematically
drove the country in capitalist direction. Right from clandestinely adopting
the Bombay Plan drawn up by the big capitalists in January 1944 as our first
three five year plans, giving an impression that India was truly embarking on a
socialist path, to implementing the calibrated land reforms and rolling out a
capitalist strategy of Green Revolution, which together created a class of rich
farmers out of the most populous shudra caste-band, as a rural ally of the
central bourgeoisie. The erstwhile upper caste landlords were replaced by the
rich farmers assuming the baton of Brahmanism. Dalits on the other hand, were
reduced to be the rural proletariat, with the collapse of the traditional
jajmani ethos of interdependence, utterly dependent on the rich farmers for
farm wages. It soon gave rise to wage
struggles, which were responded to by culturally unsophisticated new
custodians of casteism by unleashing terror, using a weird amalgam of caste and
class that precipitated into gory atrocities starting from Kilvenmani in
Tamilnadu in 1968 to their intensification today in the age neoliberalism. The
shudras which were potential ally of Dalits (ati-shudra) in the schema of
Jotiba Phule were made the oppressors of Dalits by the intrigues of the new
rulers.
Atrocities are not statistics
“Every hour two Dalits are assaulted; every day three Dalit women are raped,
two Dalits are murdered, and two Dalit homes are torched”, has become a
catchphrase since Hillary Mayell had coined it while writing in National
Geographic full 11 years ago. Well, today these figures have to be revised
upward as for instance, the rape rate of Dalit women has shot up from Hillary’s
3 to well over 4.3, a whopping 43 percent rise. Even the sensex has its ups and
downs but the atrocities on Dalits have only shown rising trend. Still it fails
to shame us. With characteristic cool we carry on with our business,
occasionally demanding stringent legislation knowing well how the Atrocity Act
also has been rendered toothless by the justice delivery system. Right since
this Act was promulgated; there have been open demands for its repeal by the
casteist outfits. Shiv Sena in Maharashtra for instance, made it as a
centerpiece of its electoral campaign in 1995 and the
Maharashtra Government literally withdrew 1100 cases registered under the Act.
The reluctance to register crime against Dalits under this Act is proverbial.
Even in Khairlanji, which even a layman identified as a caste atrocity, the
fast track court did not find any caste angle to apply the Atrocity Act.
Despite the glaring fact that the entire village attacked the Dalit family in
concert torturing, raping and murdering a woman, her daughter and two sons, and
that the women’s dead bodies were found naked with assault marks all over them,
the trial court did not find a case of conspiracy or outraging women’s modesty.
Even the high court did not feel it worthwhile correcting this abominable
observation. Such travesty of justice is a legion in atrocity cases. The entire
justice delivery system, right from police to judges is fraught with such
glaring anomalies. In the very first case of Kilvenmani, wherein 42 Dalit
labourers were burnt alive, the Madras High Court had observed that the rich
landlords, who owned even a car could
not be committing such a crime and acquitted them. The least said about the
police in India, better it is; most of them being the criminals in uniform.
They come clearly against Dalits in every case of atrocity. Whether it is
faulty investigation and/or incompetent prosecution, even the courts have been
suspect in creating an insidious pattern of judgements. Recently, the Patna
High Court stunned the world acquitting all the criminals of Ranvir Sena in
case after case of Dalit massacres that came before it. The Andhra Pradesh High
Court also did the same in the infamous Tsundur case, where all the convicts by
the lower courts were acquitted after years of running.
Emboldening criminals
It is this trend set by the justice delivery system that emboldens the
criminals to commit any atrocity against Dalits. They do know that they would
never be punished. Firstly, they see Dalits, who are dependent for their
survival on them, would not ordinarily dare to go against them. Many cases of
atrocities thus have still birth, mostly in remote parts of the country. But if
they do not, the real culprits escape the police net and their minions are made
to undergo the judicial process. The police manage it by deliberately leaving
investigation faulty; the case is presented by incompetent prosecutor and
ultimately ends in indifferent to biased judgement. This process thus becomes
quite reassuring to the criminals.
Can one imagine the temerity of the rapists in Bhagana where four teenage Dalit
girls of 13 to 18 years age could be brutally gang-raped entire night and
thrown up into bushes in the adjacent state, still hoping that everything would
be hushed up? Can one imagine their pain in braving their dishonor, sitting in
the capital along with their parents demanding justice for months and no one
taking note of them? Can we imagine the subtle casteism of the so called
progressives in the country who raised a nationwide fury over a rape and murder
of a non-Dalit girl, naming her nirbhaya, but keeping silent over the plight of
these Bhagana girls? Can we imagine the suffering of a 17 year Dalit school
boy, Nitish of Kharda village in Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra, the plight
of his poor parents whose lone son he was, when he was beaten to death in broad
day light just because he dared to speak with a girl who belonged to the
dominant community? And can we
imagine what might have befallen those two innocent girls who were devoured by
the criminals entire night and then hanged to death? And these are not the only
cases. There have been scores of such cases of atrocities in both these states
that happened during the last two months but did not find much space in media.
Can one imagine the perpetrators committing such heinous crimes without the
support of the politicians? In all these cases the criminals are nakedly
protected by the political biggies of the Congress in Haryana, the Samajwadi
Party in UP and the NCP in Maharashtra.
The lynching of black men in the US led to the black youth taking up guns and
teaching the whites to behave. Do the casteist criminals want this specter to
come alive in India?
Keywords: Badaun gangrape case, Dalit sisters rape, CBI probe, Akhilesh Yadav,
BJP, BSP, Mayawati
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