The young 19-year-old dalit woman was raped because of her caste. The brutal violence was also initiated because of her caste. Even the recourse which she opted for in the form of a police complaint took 10 days. This was, again, mainly because it was against those five accused, who belong to the upper-class community of Thakurs.
The way caste permeates our society and unravels the social structure is laid bare by cases like this Security personnel outside Safdarjung Hospital as people protest to demand justice for the Hathras gangrape victim, September 29, 2020.
Upper castes carry forward an old age tradition of having excessive power over dalits, where they are considered to be held in servitude.
This is often more explicit in rural India, since it is latent and direct. In cities, it is clothed and polished – thus, much easier to neglect and unsee dalit men and women are not allowed to physically interact with any other class members, are not allowed to use common facilities, are employed to do the dirtiest jobs involving manual labour and can only live in secluded quarters away from others.
The perversity of this discrimination is to an extent that in some villages, dalits are not allowed to keep male dogs/animals because there is always a chance that the Dalit person’s male dog mates with a non-dalit’s female dog.
In 1992, Bhanwari Devi was raped in Rajasthan because she had the ‘audacity’ to stand up against child marriage.
In 2006, in Khairlanji in Maharashtra, members of a dalit family were tortured and beaten to death by men of the dominant Kunbi and Kalar caste. This was because the dalit (Bhotmange) family was prosperous and had previously helped a dalit man escape violence which was being perpetrated by upper caste men.
To teach them a lesson, the mother, her daughter, and her two sons were dragged out of their house. The four were stripped and paraded naked. One of the sons was asked to have sex with his sister and was beaten to death when he refused. The perpetrators mutilated their private parts, gangraped the women. It was also reported that the men continued to rape their dead bodies long after they had died.
Every year on September 29, dalit-Buddhist organisations light candles on the spot where Bhaiyyalal Bhotmange once lived with his wife Surekha, 45, sons Sudhir and Roshan, 21 and 19, and daughter Priyanka, 17.
Referrals:
- Bhanwari Devi: The rape that led to India’s sexual harassment law
- Lone survivor of 2006 Khairlanji Dalit family massacre dies of heart attack
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AUTHOR: Ānanda Bashu, You can reach him at: anandabashu@gmail.com
