The curse of casteism trickles down to man's best friend!
Saturday, 2 October 2010
Ameer Hamza
'Incredible India' is an apt description, often proudly applied to the multi-faceted peninsula, subcontinental India. Unfortunately, this vast land is also home to some of the most inhuman socio-cultural conditions that does no decent man, or woman, proud. For here, thanks to the apartheid of casteism, swathes of people, categorised over the centuries as the lower castes, can still be treated simply as 'odious vermin who were ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth,' (to use the words of the Irish political satirist, Jonathan Swift) and subjected to all kinds of abominations even in this 21st century, despite the fact that caste-based discrimination has been declared a veritable offence in India a long time ago.
It's incredible indeed! Consider: where else can one find man's best friend thrown out by the owner himself - put in the doghouse, so to say - only because the animal was found enjoying the offering of a roti or two from the hands of a hapless Dalit (literally the Downtrodden)? As the story goes, Sunita Jatav, the Dalit woman, was caught red-handed, as it were, daring to feed the leftovers of a meal she had prepared for her husband, to Sheru, the holier-than-Dalit dog, that belonged to a high caste Hindu.
The incident, that established the woman's status vis-à-vis man's best friend, took place in Malikpur village, in the district of Morena, which is in the centre of the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, where Sunita's husband worked as a farm hand. The woman was quoted as telling the BBC that when the owner of the dog, Amrutul Kirari, saw her feeding his black mongrel, he went livid with anger, telling her that his beloved dog, as a consequence of being fed by her had become an untouchable like herself!
So, he not only abandoned Sheru, tying him to a pole outside Sunita's humble abode, but also got like-minded men together, in the form of the village council, to decree that Mrs Jatav be made to pay the sum of 15,000 Rupees as compensation for 'defiling' his pet, although he had already ditched it. The police in India are said to be investigating these claims. The village council however remains convinced that the Sheru is no longer upper caste like his master!
The apartheid of casteism is an ugly part of everyday life among the billion plus population of India, regardless of the fact that high-minded men and women in that very land have been persistently fighting this pathological mindset through various means, including enacting laws to ban caste-based discrimination, and seeking to lift the downtrodden up through education quotas. Nonetheless, all degrees of caste-based apartheid are palpable in almost all spheres of life and all strata of society. Even otherwise educated Hindu upper classes, when caught off guard, have been found to betray their prejudices about their lower/scheduled/other backward brethren. One finds many who are quite comfortable with the theory of egalitarianism among Hindus and non-Hindus alike. But when it comes to their own lives and down-to-earth situations, it's a different story altogether.
This scribe has come across at least one Indian Muslim, currently working in Bangladesh, who claims that, as a member of a humble middle class family, he had often been treated even worse than a Dalit, by his more privileged Hindu countrymen! Another young couple, currently doing roaring business in the readymade garments sector, said they were actually hounded out of their motherland because his wife happens to be a Brahmin while he comes from a much lower rung. This, his fundamentalist in-laws could not digest and threatened dire consequences, to escape which, the lovers took up temporary abode in Bangladesh. Yet, this is the land that has thrown up all-time great people like Ambedkar!
'Incredible India' is an apt description, often proudly applied to the multi-faceted peninsula, subcontinental India. Unfortunately, this vast land is also home to some of the most inhuman socio-cultural conditions that does no decent man, or woman, proud. For here, thanks to the apartheid of casteism, swathes of people, categorised over the centuries as the lower castes, can still be treated simply as 'odious vermin who were ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth,' (to use the words of the Irish political satirist, Jonathan Swift) and subjected to all kinds of abominations even in this 21st century, despite the fact that caste-based discrimination has been declared a veritable offence in India a long time ago.
It's incredible indeed! Consider: where else can one find man's best friend thrown out by the owner himself - put in the doghouse, so to say - only because the animal was found enjoying the offering of a roti or two from the hands of a hapless Dalit (literally the Downtrodden)? As the story goes, Sunita Jatav, the Dalit woman, was caught red-handed, as it were, daring to feed the leftovers of a meal she had prepared for her husband, to Sheru, the holier-than-Dalit dog, that belonged to a high caste Hindu.
The incident, that established the woman's status vis-à-vis man's best friend, took place in Malikpur village, in the district of Morena, which is in the centre of the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, where Sunita's husband worked as a farm hand. The woman was quoted as telling the BBC that when the owner of the dog, Amrutul Kirari, saw her feeding his black mongrel, he went livid with anger, telling her that his beloved dog, as a consequence of being fed by her had become an untouchable like herself!
So, he not only abandoned Sheru, tying him to a pole outside Sunita's humble abode, but also got like-minded men together, in the form of the village council, to decree that Mrs Jatav be made to pay the sum of 15,000 Rupees as compensation for 'defiling' his pet, although he had already ditched it. The police in India are said to be investigating these claims. The village council however remains convinced that the Sheru is no longer upper caste like his master!
The apartheid of casteism is an ugly part of everyday life among the billion plus population of India, regardless of the fact that high-minded men and women in that very land have been persistently fighting this pathological mindset through various means, including enacting laws to ban caste-based discrimination, and seeking to lift the downtrodden up through education quotas. Nonetheless, all degrees of caste-based apartheid are palpable in almost all spheres of life and all strata of society. Even otherwise educated Hindu upper classes, when caught off guard, have been found to betray their prejudices about their lower/scheduled/other backward brethren. One finds many who are quite comfortable with the theory of egalitarianism among Hindus and non-Hindus alike. But when it comes to their own lives and down-to-earth situations, it's a different story altogether.
This scribe has come across at least one Indian Muslim, currently working in Bangladesh, who claims that, as a member of a humble middle class family, he had often been treated even worse than a Dalit, by his more privileged Hindu countrymen! Another young couple, currently doing roaring business in the readymade garments sector, said they were actually hounded out of their motherland because his wife happens to be a Brahmin while he comes from a much lower rung. This, his fundamentalist in-laws could not digest and threatened dire consequences, to escape which, the lovers took up temporary abode in Bangladesh. Yet, this is the land that has thrown up all-time great people like Ambedkar!