In Gujarat's Villages, Discrimination Of Dalits Is Sanctioned By Law

Una, Gujarat: "69 years ago, India woke up to freedom. Today, 69 years later we are freeing ourselves. It's not the Angrez (British) we are fighting; our civil disobedience is against our own society's caste oppression," said an emotional Laljibhai Chavada after he took a dramatic pledge along with thousands of other Dalits in Una yesterday to renounce their caste-specific profession of clearing and skinning dead animals.

Since four Dalit boys were wrongly accused of killing a cow and flogged and paraded through town by self-appointed cow vigilantes, Una has grabbed national headlines.

Laljibhai Chavda is no activist. The 20-something wants to improve his English and travel outside Gujarat. But after he finished school, he found himself disposing dead cattle in his village in Sundernagar district. No option was available, he said, "We are chamars (untouchables) and so we are expected to do this. Besides we don't have any other available jobs." The incident at Una provoked a determination to fight back. "We've suffered humiliation and violence of this nature for very long but looking at the clips of the violence against our brothers in Una, our blood boiled over. No more."
 Like so many other young Dalits in Gujarat, Laljibhai Chavda says it is only after Una that he realized the extent of a systemic and entrenched discrimination, as well as an urgency to contest it.   

Kiritbhai Bhailalbhai Rathod, an activist with Navsarjan, a prominent Dalit rights' organization based in Ahmedabad, points out that the discrimination runs so deep that even government laws and programs designed to help Dalits end up institutionalising it. One of the most blatant examples of this, he says, is evident in Gujarat's Panchayati Raj Act passed in 1993.

The Act itself creates a Samajik Nyaya Samiti or Social Justice Committee with three to five nominated Dalit members (or tribal members in villages with a high Scheduled Tribe population) in villages. These committees are meant to monitor caste discrimination in development schemes and act as ground-level safeguards against caste-based atrocities. But ironically and illustratively, the Act assigns the job of clearing dead animals to this committee.

After three decades of the implementation of the Act, what emerges on the ground in most villages is that these committees have never held a single meeting. The only function they perform is the removal of carcasses. "You see how even a law as important as the Panchayati Raj one works to yoke Dalits to their caste profession," says Kirit Bhai, contending that the responsibility of getting rid of dead cattle should have been assigned to the entire panchayat or village council and not just the committee of Dalit representatives.

Dalit activist Joseph Patelia says that an organization formed in 2007 to try and empower these committees wrote to the government "asking them to end this unconstitutional practice which reinforces caste institutionally." But nothing came of the note.

In Rakia village in Ahmadabad district, a frail looking Ganeshbhai Dayalal points to his name scrawled in chalk on a board at the Panchayat Bhawan as the chairman of the Samajik Nyay Samiti. When we ask him if the committee has been put to use at all, Ganeshbhai tells us that it has fulfilled its main task. "We make sure the burial ground, the shamshan is clean and we clear all the dead cattle."

When the upper-caste sarpanch or panchayat head arrives, Ganeshbhai moves to the side to allow him to speak. He tells us the Samajik Nyay Committee of Dalit representatives has never met because there is no discrimination in the village. When asked who handles the removal of dead cattle, his reply is instant: "As the committee is made up of chamars, naturally this is easy for them."