Action Card - August 2007
Dalits of India
August 2007 is the month in which we
celebrate India’s sixtieth year of independence. There is much to
celebrate and to learn from India and not just in the area of the
educational and technical progress which has been made, mostly in the
urban areas. What we have also to learn is of strong and on-going faith
which has been there for thousands of years. But there is also another
side to the life of the sub-continent which is mainly to be found in the
India where 70% of the people live, rural India. Here living is often
little more than struggle and uncertainty. In rural India it is
estimated that 800 million people at least are uneducated and very poor.
In many rural areas life has become such a nightmare that farmers are
killing themselves, usually leaving their wives and destitute young
children behind.
The category of ‘untouchable’
was abolished in India in 1950, but despite much affirmative action and
some gains for this huge group of more than 250 million people, now
called ‘Dalits,’ discrimination and persecution are rife. Hundreds of
thousands of caste based crimes occur in India every year; few are
reported and even fewer are prosecuted.
We learn from India’s Human
Rights Commission that it is still not unusual for Dalits to live in
segregated areas and to work in very bad conditions. They are denied
access to wells and temples used by people of caste. Following the
earthquake in Gujarat in 2001 the relief agencies were forced to mark
their supplies of blood with the caste of the person it came from,
because otherwise people would not use them.
A debate in the House of Commons
in May this year told of horrific persecution of Dalits in India,
including the murder of a 15 year old girl who had reported that she was
raped by a higher caste man. It is estimated that there are at least
26,000 atrocities against Dalits every year and that a high proportion
of them occur in police stations and prisons.
Send a card of support to Shanti
Ranjan Behera at the Martin Luther King Centre for Democracy and Human
Rights. The centre includes in its work human rights for all prisoners,
many of whom are Dalits, for the release of children from prison, for
the segregation of prisoners who are mentally disturbed, for skills
training for those about to be released from prison, and for an open air
prison in Orissa. The centre also works for penal reform.
Shanti Ranjan Behera
Martin Luther King Centre for
Democracy and Human Rights
PO Box 185 GPO
Bhubaneswar 751001, Orissa,
India
There will be a Christians Aware
visit to the Martin Luther King Centre in Orissa in February 2009
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