In urban India some imagine that caste demarcations have become history. We need to only check the caste identity of those employed to clean the toilets in our offices and homes to recognise how wrong they are.
It is eight years since communal violence swept the second poorest, deeply-forested district of Odisha, Kandhamal. We must not allow the erasure of this hate violence from public memory, because the suffering and displacement of the tribal and Dalit Christians targeted by the communal violence are unabated even today, and justice is systematically denied.
Early on a winter morning at the Chuna Mandi labour adda near Paharganj in Delhi, the capital’s “dispensables” were gathering to scour for their day’s work, as they do every day. The fog was yet to set in, and the air had a sharp nip. The mood among the casual workers was visibly downbeat.
The public lashing of Dalit men in Una, Gujarat, for skinning a dead cow was what caused the Dalit fury in the state. But the community’s anguish is much older. The cruel traditions of the past 2,000 years have trapped them into stigmatised occupations, regarded ritually “unclean”.
In Uttar Pradesh, the BJP-RSS combine is using its usual communal card. The Samajwadi Party is complicit. Rahul Gandhi has tried to raise some relevant issues, but it’s not backed by credible evidence of sustained ground-level engagement. That leaves the BSP-led Mayawati. If indeed the Dalit and Muslim voters across UP heed Mayawati’s call, it…
The public lashing of Dalit men in Una, Gujarat, for skinning a dead cow was what caused the Dalit fury in the state. But the community’s anguish is much older.
“We have to dig wells every day in order to quench our thirst”. This popular Hindi saying recurred in conversations when I walked Delhi’s streets to understand how the abrupt withdrawal of old currency notes had impacted Delhi’s poorest, homeless and casual workers, and people dependent on charity.
These are times of global disquiet. Gales of hatred and bigotry are sweeping country after country around the world. After Donald Trump’s emphatic and stunning electoral success to the office of the president of the US, I wrote this mail to many American friends:
It would be hard to find a building more burdened with suffering and memory in all of Delhi. And yet, if you walked past it, you would hardly turn your head to look at it again. There was nothing that distinguished it from the tens of thousands of other urban cages anywhere in the country.
SECULARISM India at a Crossroads Madhav Godbole Rupa 441 pages; Rs 995 Madhav Godbole was a civil servant of standing who held several responsible official positions, including that of the Union home secretary.