|
The horrifying
killings of Dalits in Uttar Pradesh during the last six months, would raise
doubts in anyone’s mind whether India is living in the medieval period or in a
high-tech age. Brutal massacres of entire families, including women and little
children have become the order of the day. But UP is not alone, similar reports
are coming in from a number of states of the country, particularly AP, Gujarat
and Rajasthan. The story everywhere is the same: entire families liquidated by
upper caste killers, BJP’s (and often other parties as well) the
administration’s and the police’s collaboration with the killers, and the
‘opposition’s’ token protests. Here we consider the incidents in UP.
In Jeharana the
victims were Jatavs from the dalit caste. The teenager Mukesh was hit by some
Thakur youth. When Mukesh retaliated, a crowd of Thakurs threatened to lynch
him. When he sought to make a police complaint, the Thakur SHO refused to record
it. On June 12 the Thakurs attacked Mukesh’s family in their house. Mukesh’s
father and a child were shot dead while asleep outside their house. The killers
then scaled the wall of their house and shot dead his mother and an aunt. Then
while the injured were being taken to the local PHC (primary health centre) in a
bullock cart, another aunt and her son were killed. Mukesh managed to escape.
His was a family that had been rising economically. The police hesitantly
arrested six people, though it is well known that 18 took part in the massacre.
Within days banners and posters appeared all over the area calling on the upper
caste community of 84 villages to attend a meeting. Involved in organising the
meeting was the Kashatriya Mahasabha, which appealed to the people to raise
funds for the killers. The chief guest at this meeting was the UP minister
Dalveer Singh who guaranteed all protection to the upper castes, vowing that he
will not allow the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act be used against them. In
the entire event, the BSP, with its huge dalit backing in UP, was conspicuous by
its absence.
The story was the
same in all the other killings. In the Hasnapur killings three women and two
children were killed over a dispute of drawing water from a common well. All
were brutally clubbed to death. Again the BJP collaborated with the killers;
while the BSP, more interested in enticing upper caste votes in the Fatehpur
region, played low key.
Then earlier, on
Apr.7 a family of dalit bonded labourers from Bihar were burnt alive. In Bara
Banki district upper-caste men poured acid in the eyes of four dalits and
blinded them. In Mirzapur district 16 dalits were gunned down on the pretext
that they were naxalites. Similar atrocities have been reported from Banda,
Kanpur (rural), Unnao, Etaah and Sonbhadra districts.
But this is not
confined to the backward rural areas of UP. In the modern city of Kanpur, a 25
year old dalit woman was arrested, stripped naked and beaten by the local police
sub-inspector on July 31st. Her ‘crime’ was that she refused to bow to the
threats of hoodlums who sought to remove her from her hut. The SI striped her
and brutally hit her genitals. In further humiliation, she was forced to lie
naked for another hour.
With the Hindutva
brigade on the offensive, their brahminical biases inevitably results in
contempt and hatred for the dalits and lower castes. This results in greater
atrocities. Particularly, they are intolerant of any dalit who seeks to assert
his/her self-respect, whether through organisation or through
economic/educational development. Their blind hatred comes out in the form of
the brutal killings. So we find that whether it is the present killings in UP
and elsewhere, or the feudal upper-caste armies of Bihar, or any other caste
violence, the killers today act with the confidence that they have the
protection of the saffron brigade, not to mention the tacit (or blatant) support
of the police and the judiciary.
The BSP-type
vote-bank politics is only to capture power, even if it means sharing it with
the upper-caste killers. As far as the other opposition parties go, the less
said the better: all are busy nursing their upper-caste vote-banks, and will
make only so much noise as will attract dalit votes while not antagonising
upper-caste votes. As far as the revisionist and ‘Left’ go, they prefer to turn
a blind eye to casteism, on the pretext that it divides the oppressed masses.
Rather than remove the biases of many of their upper-caste leaders (particularly
at the local level) they pander to their reactionary sentiments. The liberals
merely appeal for unity, seeing caste conflagrations not as struggles of the
oppressed, but as internecine clashes, putting blame equally. There is also a
new brand of NGOism , which idealises bourgeois dalit politics and dalitism,
without seeing the necessity of organising them into a fighting force, and the
need to link abolition of caste oppression with the overall socio-economic
change in the country.
And as for legal
remedies, the entire bureaucracy, police and judiciary have a strong casteist
bias. Most cases of untouchability go unrecorded. Throughout the last year there
were only 28,441 cases recorded. Besides, under the SC/SC Act, there was a
conviction rate of a mere 1.1%.
It is only the
revolutionaries who have organised the oppressed to fight castism and hit back
at all forms of discrimination against dalits. In Bihar it is the CPI(ML)(PW)
who are at the forefront organising the masses (not only dalits) against the
feudal upper-caste armies. The dalits of UP, instead of being passively
massacred, or relying on fake dalit parties like the BSP, can learn much from
their neighbours in Bihar. |
