by Rama Lakshmi
The Globe and Mail
3 July 2001

NAVAPURA, INDIA -- The villagers found Rati Lal's body in a dark alley around midnight. The young man had dared to sneak into a position where he could watch the upper-caste men of Navapura take part in a festival. When the men spotted him, they pounced on him, calling him a "dirty untouchable." Mr. Lal reacted angrily, a fight broke out and his stomach was sliced with a knife.

When his family took his body to the police station, they were shooed away. Only when a crowd of angry villagers gathered did police relent and investigate the case. An upper-caste youth has been charged with murdering Mr. Lal.

His death has shaken Navapura's small community of Dalits, the modern Indian term for "untouchables."

Despite being one of the first Dalits in his village to graduate from school and go on to a job in a nearby plastics factory, Mr. Lal could not escape India's 3,000-year-old class system.

Manohar Vasrambhai, a 43-year-old Dalit tailor in Navapura, said the upper caste can't handle a changing world.

"We are not dependent on the upper-caste landlords any longer, and we don't feel the need to bow each time we pass them. They cannot tolerate this and feel angry at our progress."

While the Dalits in this village, in the western state of Gujarat, ponder their future, a coalition of activists around the world is battling for Dalit rights in general, trying to push the issue onto the world stage.

For a start, they want caste-based discrimination to be on the agenda of the United Nations conference on racism to be held next month in Durban, South Africa.

"Caste is India's hidden apartheid," said Martin Macwan, head of India's National Campaign of Dalit Human Rights, a large network of groups at the forefront of the conference campaign. For 160 million people in India, "caste is a system of discrimination that is worse than the one against Jews in the Nazi era or the black slavery [in the United States]," Mr. Macwan said.

According to tradition, every Hindu is ranked at birth as a member of a caste group and the "untouchable" outcasts were considered irredeemably "polluted." Most of the world's Hindus live in India, where they make up about 80 per cent of the nation's one billion people.

"I want to bring international visibility to the problem of caste," Mr. Macwan said.

The Indian government is fighting the move, arguing that caste does not fall within the ambit of the UN gathering.

"This is a conference about racism. We believe that by bringing caste in, we would end up diluting the real thrust of the conference," said Soli Sorabjee, India's Attorney-General and a member of the UN subcommission on the prevention of discrimination.

"Of course, despite laws and constitutional provisions, caste discrimination still exists in India. Social habits die hard. But caste and race are not synonymous," Mr. Sorabjee said.

In a recent essay, one of India's prominent sociologists, Andre Beteille, criticized the UN's effort to revive and expand the idea of race, creating an uproar among Dalit activists with his words.

"Every social group cannot be regarded as a race simply because we want to protect it against prejudice and discrimination," he wrote. "Treating caste as a form of race is politically mischievous and scientifically nonsensical."

Dalit lobbyists insist that caste discrimination in India urgently needs international attention. They say they will fight for inclusion on the racism agenda under a different name: "descent-based and occupation-based discrimination." The Indian government believes caste is an internal matter. At a preparatory meeting for the Durban gathering, an Indian diplomat asked the Dalit delegation not to wash India's "dirty linen in public."

India has made many moves to fix the caste issue, such as outlawing untouchability and discrimination. Its Constitution mandates affirmative-action programs for Dalits in education, and quotas in government jobs and political representation. Tougher laws have helped many Dalits take on upper-caste abusers. But for the vast majority of Dalits, abuse and bias are facts of life. Attempts by Dalit activists to change the social system in rural areas are met with violence, the destruction of property and sexual violence against women.

About two-thirds of India's 160 million Dalits are illiterate and about half are landless agricultural labourers. Only 7 per cent have access to safe drinking water, electricity and toilets. Dalit activists acknowledge that getting the issue on the agenda in Durban would likely be a symbolic victory at best, and wouldn't change things at home. But they want to bring India under international scrutiny as a vital first step to ending caste-based discrimination.

"Untouchability may be outlawed on paper but the practice of social exclusion carries on in many forms," said Chandrabhan Prasad, one of the country's leading Dalit columnists.

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