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GURGAON,
India (IPS) - This city's resemblance to American suburbia is intentional.
The rolling lawns, lush golfing fairways and well-appointed housing
estates called 'Malibu Towne' and 'Beverly Park' ensure high returns
for property developers.
But this booming modern city on the edge of New Delhi's busy international
airport falls in Haryana, a state steeped in the worst traditions
of India's notorious caste system but which the government is at
pains these days to say has nothing to do with race.
India's foreign ministry, hopeful of wangling a seat in the United
Nations Security Council, has resisted the inclusion of caste on
the agenda of the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South
Africa that starts Aug. 31.
Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh has termed it ''an attempt to ascribe
racial connotations to caste''.
But the U.N. Committee on Civil and Political Rights has observed
that low-caste and tribal people in India ''continue to endure severe
social discrimination and suffer disproportionately from ''inter-caste
violence, bonded labour and discrimination of all kinds''.
Top sociologists say that caste -- an ancient, four-tier hierarchy
based on descent and occupation -- is far worse than racial apartheid
ever was in South Africa.
The 'dalits', who fall outside the four castes, were once considered
untouchable because they were seen as ritually polluting and were
often relegated to doing tasks considered taboo for caste Hindus,
including scavenging.
In Haryana and the adjoining north Indian states today, young people
who fall in love and marry outside the caste they were born into
can expect to be lynched. 'Dalits' or socially oppressed low- caste
people live lives akin to slavery.
In early July, social workers rescued Bacchan Singh, his wife Rani
and their three children from bonded labour on a farm in Fatehpur
district, a few hours drive away from gleaming signs that proclaim
the presence of information technology giants like IBM, Lucent Technologies
and Motorola.
Activists of the All-India Agricultural Workers Union (AIAWU) and
the Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI) stepped in after
they spotted Bachhan Singh, a 'dalit', working on his landlord's
150-acre fields hobbled with a chain that bound his left hand to
his left foot.
''Initially, the sub-divisional magistrate (SDM), S K Setia, did
not believe us when we informed him, but he ordered an investigation
and Bacchan's chains were finally removed in his presence,'' said
Dass, an activist of the DYFI who like many of those with 'dalit'
second names prefer to drop them.
Police have since registered a case against the landlord, Sukhdev
Singh, under the Bonded Labour System (abolition) Act and the Scheduled
Castes and Scheduled Tribes (prevention of atrocities) Act.
According to Ramkumar Behbalpuria, president of the AIAWU in Haryana,
his organisation has identified no less than 200 cases of bonded
labour in the farm-rich state which, along with adjoining Punjab,
benefited from the Green Revolution of the 60s and 70s.
Behbalpuria said while the Green Revolution, characterised by the
use of modern inputs such as irrigation, hybrid seeds, fertilisers
and pesticides provided by the state, greatly enriched upper-caste
landlords, it did little for the 'dalit' farm labourers.
Whenever media attention focused attention on the plight of 'dalits'
working in chains, they would be promptly sold off or hired out
to other landowners in remoter areas, said Behbalpuria
''Sometimes they would even be bought back when the heat was off,''
he pointed out.
According to Behbalpuria, no politician dares to take on the landlords
because of their political clout. Sushil Indora, a 'dalit' politician
who represents the parliamentary constituency of Sirsa in which
Fatehabad falls, refused to comment on Bacchan's release from bonded
labour.
Politicians tend to uphold the status quo when it comes to questions
relating to caste oppression -- even if there is open criminality
including the lynching and murder of those who violate caste taboos.
Recently, in the Muzaffarpur district of northern Uttar Pradesh
state barely 150 kms north of Gurgaon, 20-year-old Vishal and his
18-year-old girlfriend Sonu were hanged by a crowd with the active
support of their own families.
Vishal belonged to the high and priestly Brahmin caste, while his
girlfriend was from the largely-peasant Jat caste. Vijay Kumar Maurya,
superintendent of police in Muzaffarpur, said their arrested but
unrepentant parents had warned them against meeting each other.
According to Manoj Singh, the district magistrate in Muzaffarpur,
inter-caste relationships were strictly taboo in the area and an
unwritten code required parents to either kill their own 'erring'
offspring or else kill each other's offspring.
Muzaffarpur's elected legislator, Sanjay Chauhan, called the gruesome
lynchings ''unfortunate'' but insisted that ''maintaining social
order and public morality must take priority over love affairs''.
Such incidents feature regularly on the front pages of Indian newspapers,
which also carry matrimonial columns that specify the caste and
even sub-caste of prospective brides and grooms.
''Caste continues to limit social advancement and job and marriage
choices, although India's Constitution made it illegal and abolished
it more than half-a-century ago,'' says Ambrose Pinto, director
of the Indian Social Institute in New Delhi.
Like other leading social scientists, Pinto believes that the oppression
of 'dalits' is far worse than racial discrimination. ''Over 240
million people in this country (of one billion) are shunned as outcastes,''
he says.
No matter what the Indian government says, caste is a variety of
race and goes squarely against the principle of equality, which
is a fundamental component of the U.N. mechanism for promoting and
protecting human rights, explains Pinto.
Still, one does not have to look very far to see caste discrimination
and its impact. Pinto points to the widely debated accounts, earlier
this year, of state-run institutions directing international relief
for earthquake-devastated western Gujarat state to the camps of
upper castes -- bypassing 'dalit' victims. (Inter Press Service)
(The
following is part of a series of IPS features in advance of the
World Conference Against Racism and Discrimination, Aug. 31-Sep.7,
in Durban, South Africa.)
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