India's "hidden apartheid" - caste system

India's ancient caste system persists, subjecting millions to degrading poverty and human rights abuses. Attitudes die hard, despite government legislation to usher in change

For centuries, the untouchables of Paliyad, a nondescript village in western India's Ahmedabad district, have known their place. Many of them are manual scavengers, cleaning the toilets of upper-caste villagers or toiling the land, sometimes for less than a handful of rice a day.

"We've known that we must stay away from them [upper-caste people] since the day we were born," says Rajesh, who is going on 19. "At the tea stalls, we have separate cups to drink from, chipped and caked with dirt, and we're expected to clean them ourselves. We have to walk for 15 minutes to carry water to our homes, because we're not allowed to use the taps in the village that the upper castes use. We're not allowed into temples, and when I attended school, my friends and I were forced to sit just outside the classroom.., the upper caste children would not allow us even to touch the football they played with... we played with stones instead."

More than 160 million people, a sixth of India's population, continue to bear the burden of a 2,000-year old caste system sanctioned by Hindu theology, which locks people into a rigid role by virtue of their birth.

Codes to suit the upper class

Though the term "untouchables" was abolished in 1950 under India's constitution, the "oppressed people" or Dalits as they are now referred to, continue to be discriminated against. They are denied access to land, forced to work in humiliating and degrading conditions and are routinely abused by the police and upper-caste groups, which enjoy the state's protection

Though India has sought to overcome the inequities of caste and discrimination through affirmative action--reserving quotas in education, government jobs and political bodies--these policies have benefited only a few. The highest office in the land, that of the largely ceremonial President, is today held by a Dalit, K. R. Narayanan. But all the horrors of India's caste system persist at the grassroots; attempts to defy this rigid social order invariably result in violence or economic retaliation.

Perhaps the world's longest surviving social hierarchy, India's caste system entails a complex ordering of social groups on the basis of ritual purity. Attributed to the law-giver Manu, the system was spelt out over 2,000 years ago in the Dharma Shastra, the cornerstone of the Hindu religion.

According to Manu, every individual is born into one of four principal varnas, or large categories, and must remain within that caste until death, although the particular ranking of that caste may vary among different regions in the country and over time. In order of precedence, the Brahmins are the priests and teachers, presiding over knowledge and education; the Kshatriyas are the rulers and soldiers; the Vaishyas, merchants and traders; and the Shudras, the peasants, labourers and artisans. The untouchables fall into a fifth category outside the varna system, and were often assigned tasks too "ritually polluting" to merit inclusion within the traditional varna system.

Clearly, caste discrimination was an ideological construct that was deployed by the upper castes to create and maintain their monopoly over cultural capital (knowledge and education), social capital (status and patriarchal domination), political capital (power), and material capital (wealth).

The codes were often pernicious, and rules were bent to suit the upper castes. In northern India, for example, untouchables were forced to use drums to announce their arrival, and even their shadows were thought to be polluting. In the south, some Brahmins stipulated that the lower castes would have to maintain a distance of 65 feet (22 metres) from them in order not to contaminate their betters.

Yet this caste-based discrimination also had a pragmatic dimension. The untouchables, excluded from the education and books of the Brahmins, were nevertheless allowed to develop their own stores of knowledge, in agriculture or midwifery for example. But there was a catch--this knowledge was only allowed because it benefited the upper castes.

A case of racism?

Caste is still frequently used as a cover for exploitative economic arrangements. Even today, most Dalits are not permitted to cross the invisible "pollution" line that divides their part of the village from that occupied by the higher castes. And yet a Dalit woman, whose very shadow is polluting, is allowed to massage the body of the upper-caste woman she serves. Upper caste men, meanwhile, think nothing of raping Dalit women or consorting with lower-caste prostitutes, even though touching them by accident in the street is a sacrilege.

One of the main reasons why the caste system has survived is because the hierarchical notion of social good it perpetuates is legitimized by the lower castes themselves. They replicate this hierarchy by imitating the cultural values of the upper castes, imposing discrimination on castes even lower than their own. Sociologists claim there are more than 2,000 castes and sub-castes within the five categories. These are called jatis, endogamous (inter-marrying) groups that are divided along occupational, sectarian, regional and linguistic lines. Even as outcasts, the Dalits divide themselves into further castes. This proliferation allows for discrimination both horizontally and vertically, thus making social relations all the more rigid and impermeable.

The plight of India's untouchables and the regular human rights abuses against them elicits short-lived public outrage, leaving the state under little pressure to engineer large-scale social change. This is why a coalition of Dalit groups and activists have lobbied hard for their plight to be on the agenda of the UN World Conference against Racism.

"Caste is India's hidden apartheid," says Martin Macwan, 41, convenor of the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights. He argues that like racism, caste discrimination is "based on descent."

Their demand has sparked off a national debate about the nature of caste discrimination and whether other countries should be allowed to interfere in what the Indian government considers "an internal matter."

The government has opposed the inclusion of caste on the UN conference's agenda on the grounds that caste and race are not synonymous. "Race and caste are distinct," insists Soli Sorabjee, India's attorney general and a member of the UN Sub-commission on Prevention of Discrimination. India, a vigorous campaigner against apartheid, claims that it has done everything possible to grant equality to India's lowest castes. A fifth of the seats in parliament are reserved for members of the scheduled castes (the official term for Dalits), and some states are governed by powerful political parties based on alliances with the lower castes.

Campaigns to end the stigma

Quotas and job allocations, however, have not brought equality, dignity, or even safety for India's "broken people." In villages, the social stigma remains too strong to obliterate by laws alone.

Official figures speak for themselves: recorded crimes and atrocities against the lowest castes averaged 26,000 a year between 1997 and 1999 (the latest figures available). Considering the police are often reluctant even to record claims against the upper castes, these figures expose just the tip of the iceberg.

About two-thirds of the Dalit population are illiterate, and about half are landless agricultural labourers. Only seven percent have access to safe drinking water, electricity and toilets. And a majority of the estimated 40 million bonded labourers (who work as slaves to pay off debts), including 15 million children, are Dalits.

A national campaign to highlight abuses against Dalits was spearheaded by human rights groups in eight Indian states in 1998, and caste has been taken up as an issue internationally for the first time by organizations including Human Rights Watch. While some Dalits have resisted subjugation and discrimination by armed struggle, these are invariably quelled by more powerful upper-caste private militia like the Ranbir Sena in Bihar, which has been held responsible for a series of massacres of poor Dalit peasants and landless labourers.

Macwan agrees that including caste discrimination at the conference's final resolutions would be only a symbolic victory, changing nothing in reality. "The only solution is to change people's minds," he declares.

PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL STUDIES AT PUNE UNIVERSITY AND FELLOW, CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF DEVELOPING SOCIETIES (DELHI). SHIRAZ SIDHVA IS A UNESCO COURIER JOURNALIST

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