The Times Of India
IG's 'caste' remark snowballs into controversy
TNN | Aug 7, 2011, 12.38AM IST
KAKINADA: A senior IPS officer has landed himself in trouble over his alleged remarks on the increasing number of SC/ST atrocities cases. The reported comment by Visakhapatnam range IG Vinay Kumar Singh that a lot of SC/ST cases were fake drew strong reactions from severaldalit sanghams who demanded action against the officer. Earlier on Friday night,17 dalits were arrested and remanded to judicial custody for obstructing his vehicle and shouting slogans against him when he was on his way to Anaparthi.
Trouble had started when the IG, during his visit to Anaparthi police station on Thursday, told the cops to be wary while dealing with caste-related cases. Singh said that caste colour was being given even to minor incidents and demonstrations were being staged without much provocation. He urged the cops to be on guard against such fake atrocity cases. These remarks kicked up a controversy in Anaparthi the next day during the IG's visit. He was gheraoed, his vehicle was obstructed and slogans were raised against him by SC activists.
Condemning the arrests, Amalapuram MP G V Harsha Kumar said that the IG's action was uncalled for and demanded immediate release of the dalit activists. MLC George Victor said use of force on peaceful protesters was unacceptable.
ZEE News
SC, ST, OBC caste certificate Bill gets GOM's nod
http://zeenews.india.com/news/orissa/sc-st-obc-caste-certificate-bill-gets-gom-s-nod_724726.html
Bhubaneswar: The Orissa SC, ST & OBC (Regulation of Issuance and Verification) of Caste
Certificates Bill-2011, on Saturday got nod of the Group of Ministers in Orissa. "There was unanimity at the GOM meeting. The Bill will be placed before the Cabinet soon before being introduced in the assembly," Finance minister Prafulla Ghadai told reporters.
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The Bill, placed before the Cabinet last week, however, was deferred as most of the ministers opposed to the provision of punishment in the Bill. According to the Bill, the authority whoever (including MLAs) was found issuing fake certificate will be liable to rigorous imprisonment for a term of six months, which may extend up to two years or fine of Rs 2,000 which may go upto Rs 20,000 or with the both.The ministers strongly opposed to the punishment for issuance of fake certificate. Besides Revenue department officials in the rank of tehsildar, MLAs also issue caste certificates to the people at the time of their need. As the MLAs have no mechanism for verification of caste of a person, they should be spared from punishment, many ministers had argued.However, the GOM reached at a conclusion that there could not be separate punishment for similar offence. If the officials were being held liable for the offence of issuing fake certificates as per provision of the Bill, the same should be applied to MLAs also, the GOM observed.
The state government mooted the Bill in the wake of the rising resentment among tribal population who alleged that people belonging to other castes take benefits meant for them by producing fake caste certificates. Fake caste certificate was one of the factors that flared up the ethno-communal violence in Kandhamal in 2008, the officials at the SC-ST, OBC and Minorities development department said.
The Times Of India
AARAK SHUN
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-toi/special-report/AARAK-SHUN/articleshow/9512625.cms
Shobhan Saxena, TNN | Aug 7, 2011, 05.09AM IST
A knock on the door always makes Amit nervous. If it is daytime, he quickly moves the book rack so that it hides the framed photo of B R Ambedkar, dressed in a dark suit and looking at some distant horizon. If it's night, Amit lies still in bed, staring at the fan. As the banging goes on, he slips in and out of sleep. In his dreams he often sees a boy putting a noose around his neck. Sometimes he sees the boy hanging from a rope that's furiously twisting by itself. Then there is dead silence. He can't go back to sleep.
Amit, a student of IIT-Kanpur, is not suicidal. He has been to a shrink, though, and says he lives in some kind of dread. For two years, life on the campus was beautiful - at least until the day his classmates found out his caste, a fact he had masked with a caste-neutral surname.
The Ambedkar photo had already made some "friends" suspicious, and when a clerk in the scholarship section "exposed" his caste, Amit's world changed. He lost his place on the dining table. The batchmates became hostile: jibes in the classroom or an accidental jab in the ribcage every now and then became a common occurrence. And the midnight knocks started. "They don't want me to study. People may think it's a seat of high learning but for me it's living hell," says Amit, who has a brilliant academic record. "People here don't believe in merit. They will push you if you perform better than them," adds the final-year student who is too scared to give his real name.
Amit is not paranoid. His fear is real. In 2008, the year he joined the institute, a fellow student called Prashant Kureel was found hanging in his room. In 2009, an MTech student, G Suman, killed himself. And in 2010, Madhuri Salve, a final-year student, used her dupatta to hang herself from the ceiling fan. All three were dalits and IIT authorities were quick to blame academic pressure for these deaths. "It's because of constant ragging and brazen casteism on the campus that my son killed himself," says Sunder Lal Kureel, the father of Prashant, as he continues his fight for justice.
But in this battle, Sunder Lal is alone. There are no middle class-led candlelight vigils at IndiaGate for Prashant. There are no campaigns by TV channels, just the lonely battle of a broken man. There are many like Sunder Lal in their peculiar tragedy. Since 2007, 18 dalit students pursuing engineering and medical courses in the country's top institutes, including the IITs and All India Institute of Medical Sciences, have committed suicide. And here's the real shocker: only one of them, Jaspreet Singh of Government Medical College, Chandigarh, left behind a suicide note. None of the others who hanged themselves or jumped from a building blamed anyone for pushing them to take the extreme step. "All of them had complained to their families about harassment at the hands of faculty and fellow students, yet they didn't leave a suicide note. Only Jaspreet's was there because his father found his body. We wonder what happened to all the other suicide notes," says Ratnesh Kumar of Insight Foundation, which is trying to get justice for the families. "We're sure the notes vanished because the victims had accused the authorities of harassment."
Hidden in these missing notes are the dirty secrets of India's top institutes, where dalits have been treated as outcastes ever since reservations were introduced for SC and ST students in the 1950s. Nobody likes to talk about this dark side. Now, as filmmaker Prakash Jha takes a "fresh look at the issue" with his Aarakshan, the dalits fear that the film may reinforce old biases. "We get only 15% seats, while the OBCs get 27%. But, it's the dalits who have to face the brunt of hate campaigns," says Surya Dev, a 25-year-old engineer from Guna, MP, who now works with the Insight Foundation helpline.
Ironically, anti-dalit sentiment erupted in 1991, when the V P Singh government decided to implement 27% reservation for OBCs. In the Capital's "Left-leaning" university, JNU, caste clashes took place between students; in the dining-halls of IIT-Delhi, dalits were forced to sit on separate tables, and the walls of urinals in Delhi University were covered with puerile graffiti. And the authorities just watched. "The atmosphere in our institutions is very brahminical as the upper castes dominate the faculty. In such an environment, the lower caste students automatically become outcastes," says Dilip Mandal, who teaches at Delhi's Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC).
Many dalits have paid a price for being what they are. In 2008, Narendra Divekar and Nitin Kamble, who worked as cameramen at the Centre for Distance Engineering Education Programme at IIT Bombay, took part in a meeting of the institute's union for backward classes. A torrent of casteist abuses from the centre's web coordinator, Rahul Deshmukh, followed almost immediately. Deshmukh told them that they were "not fit to work here". A complaint was made to IIT authorities and the police. But the abuse went on. Unable to handle it, the duo tried to commit suicide outside Deshmukh's office.
Many, however, have fought back. Dr Ajay Singh, who joined AIIMS in 2002 with the same marks as the cut-off for "general" students, was the only dalit in his hostel wing. He was barred from entering the carrom-board room and one day someone scrawled "Nobody likes you here. F**k off" on his door. But Dr Singh fought back and that led to Prime Minister Manmohan Singhappointing a three-member committee, headed by University Grants Commission chairman Sukhdeo Thorat, to look into caste harassment in the country's top medical institutes. The report was shocking: dalit students were bullied into vacating their hostel rooms, leading to a ghetto being formed on two floors of a hostel; they were specifically targeted during ragging; they were not allowed to play cricket and basketball; they were not allowed to eat in the "upper-caste mess"; and the teachers ignored them in class, sometimes deliberately failing them in exams. Shamed by the damning report, AIIMS took some remedial steps. "Now the hostels are allotted through a lottery system and general harassment has come down a bit, but all the recommendations of the panel are yet to be implemented," says Dr Singh, who now works with a government hospital in Delhi.
But resistance is growing on some campuses. "Now the number of upper-caste and reserved category students is almost the same. It's not easy to bully them," says Mandal of IIMC. And dalits are now not prepared to be shunned by the system. "We started celebrating Ambedkar Jayanti on our campus to unite us," says Manju Kumari Rao, 28, a former student of Benaras Hindu University who was once denied permission to go abroad on an exchange programme because she was dalit. "We don't want to join the system, we want to change it."
The Times Of India
Damned twice over
Siddique Humayun | Aug 7, 2011, 12.09AM IST
Whenever there is talk of minority rights in Pakistan, one usually thinks of Christians, Ahmadis and Hindus. But there is a minority that lives within this minority. They are the low-caste Hindus of Sindh and southern Punjab. Estimates vary, but their numbers are pegged anywhere between two to four million. The country's caste Hindus do not much care about their dalit brethren while the state and society do not differentiate between the two.
The story of dalits in Pakistan is as old as the country itself. Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah appointed Jogendra Nath Mondal as the newborn state's first federal minister for law, justice and parliamentary affairs. Sadly, this was the only instance a dalit occupied such high office in Pakistan. After Jinnah's death, minorities lost much of their protection and a frustrated Mondal resigned and migrated to India in 1953. While migration was an easy choice for most influential caste Hindus during Partition, the poor, low-caste among them, who form the bulk of the Hindu population in Pakistan, could only afford to stay back.
In 1998, the 6% 'scheduled caste quota' in Pakistan's federal services was changed to a 'minority quota'. Krishan Bheel and Dr Meghwar, the two dalit Members of the National Assembly (MNAs) at the time, watched this in helpless silence. They couldn't take on the more strident and united MNAs from the relatively stronger minorities. With this change, the dalits of Pakistan found themselves legally part of a minority that refused to accept them as their own. They languish at the bottom of the social structure, deprived of identity and recognition.
Despite the emergence of some prominent leaders from the community, the larger picture looks bleak. They are discriminated against on both fronts - as a minority by society in general and as dalits by the caste Hindu minority, facing bias in educational institutions as well as in community life. From keeping different utensils to forbidding them from drawing water from common wells, the evil of untouchability continues to this day not only in India but also in Pakistan.
The divisions run deep, but there are signs of hope. While the state of Pakistan constitutionally sees all its citizens as equal, change is slowly happening on the ground as well. Examples include the Thardeep Rural Development Programme that works for the betterment of the rural people of Thardeep, including Tharparker district, which has a 35% Dalit population. The Sindh Rural Support Organization strives to empower this minority and many low-caste Hindus have made progress through education. But true empowerment can only happen through self-help, self-awareness and community recognition. Talking of dalits, one is reminded about a boy and his father who accidentally crossed the border into India. As the family got separated, the boy found himself facing the same discrimination in an Indian jail that his mother suffered during her solitary struggle in Pakistan. While this is a true story for that dalit family, for the rest of us it is a piece of art - a movie called Ramchand Pakistani.
--
.Arun Khote
On behalf of
Dalits Media Watch Team
(An initiative of "Peoples Media Advocacy & Resource Centre-PMARC")
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Peoples Media Advocacy & Resource Centre- PMARC has been initiated with the support from group of senior journalists, social activists, academics and intellectuals from Dalit and civil society to advocate and facilitate Dalits issues in the mainstream media. To create proper & adequate space with the Dalit perspective in the mainstream media national/ International on Dalit issues is primary objective of the PMARC.
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