All India Dalit Mahila Adhikar Manch

As the United Nations Human Rights Council began its 38th session in Geneva from June 18, a coalition of Dalit women activists released a report at a side event there on Thursday on caste-based violence faced by women.

The report titled Voices Against Caste Impunity: Narratives of Dalit Women in India compiles accounts of witness, statistics and testimonies about the effects of caste-based violence in India, while recommending policy actions to end this. It is the first such presentation at the United Nations Human Rights Council by a Dalit women’s collective.

“We are challenging the [international non-governmental organisation] style reports, which often include not-so authentic data and remain as glossy reports and nothing more,” said Asha Kowtal, general secretary of the All India Dalit Mahila Adhikar Manch, who will be making a presentation at Geneva on Thursday. “This is a report that delves deeply into the lives of Dalit women activists, who are constantly engaging with the community and in particular, with survivors of violence.”

The testimony will be followed by responses from a panel of experts, including senior advocate Vrinda Grover and Rita Izsák-Ndiaye, member of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

As the United Nations special rapporteur for minorities, Iszák-Ndiaye had in 2016 submitted a report on caste discrimination in India. The Indian government had condemned the report on its release. In this, it followed its long-held precedent of not acknowledging caste discrimination at international forums.

The All India Dalit Mahila Adhikar Manch tackles this head on. At the World Conference against Racism in Durban in 2001, activists had attempted to highlight caste issues, to vigorous protests from the Indian government, which said caste was an internal matter not to be equated with race. It has maintained this line ever since.

“Post the World Conference against Racism, Dalit women have always seized every opportunity to engage in dialogue and raise awareness about our specific issues,” said Ruth Manorama, national convenor for the National Federation of Dalit Women. “However, the blockading by India is severe.’’

The side event, said Kowtal, is an attempt by Dalit women to step up their efforts to demand state accountability by the United Nations.

“Dalit women are now seeking space for dialogue with Indian diplomats, which has been denied thus far,” Kowtal said. “Our objective is not to shame the country, but to enable us to collectively find a way to break through this terrible silencing of caste crimes, perhaps the most silenced human rights crisis of our times.”

Dr Sylvia Karpagam, author of the report and public health doctor and researcher from Karnataka, said that caste-based violence meets most criteria of human rights violations. “But the government either says it does not exist or that we will deal with it ourselves,” she said. “There is a lot of denial in terms of this violence existing which is made worse because things like harassment and discrimination are hard to prove.”

Structural violence

The report notes that discrimination begins early, and is evident in factors such as a mother’s access to healthcare and an infant’s access to adequate nutrition. This continues into the education system.

The report quotes Abhirami, an activist with the National Dalit Movement for Justice, talking of her work on a study on discrimination and violence in schools. One of their findings was that Dalit girls were “specifically given the duty of sweeping and cleaning”.
“If all caste girls are made to do these jobs, then we could call it gender discrimination,” the report quotes Abhirami as saying.

Girls face violence at a younger age and at a higher rate than women of other castes. According to the National Family Health Survey, as quoted in the report, by the age of 15, 33.2% scheduled caste women experience physical violence. The figure is 19.7% for “other” category women.

The violence continues, largely due to a sense of impunity among dominant castes.
 

“Suman says that there is a mind-set among the dominant castes that make them feel that they can do anything they want with dalit girls and that they will get away with it. When girls walk through or work in isolated places, the men touch the girls wherever they want – ‘They feel that can even go to their houses, their rooms, their beds and that they need not have any fear and no action will be taken against them.’ Gayatri says that even those few girls or their families who consider complaining are targeted viciously. ‘They humiliate one girl and her family so much that it is like a lesson to other girls from the community to never complain.’”
— Voices Against Caste Impunity: Narratives of Dalit Women in India

Even when Dalit women acquire political power, as when they are elected as sarpanches, this is often no protection against the social power that sanctions violence and discrimination against them.

The report quotes Gayatri, a respondent from Madhya Pradesh, elaborating on the difficulties women sarpanches face, even if they understand the powers they have. “If she takes a stand against a murder or arson or attack on dalit people, she is targeted and harassed,” Gayatri said in the report. In a village with a Dalit woman sarpanch, a Dalit woman was burned, but no action was taken. The nephew of another sarpanch was beaten when she objected to an atrocity.

“She wants to do her job properly, but the dominant caste people have all the power and keep her in control,” the report quotes Gayatri as saying.

There are Dalit women working actively within and with the system to help Dalit women. One such person is Savita, a lawyer from Panipat in Haryana who is quoted extensively through the report. She points out that dominant caste men are not the only ones who practice caste discrimination.

“I don’t agree that non-Dalit and Dalit women are the same,” the report quotes Savita as saying. “Caste makes a difference. We have seen during trainings, if there is even one non-Dalit woman, she will not let the Dalit women speak. She will speak non-stop in English to prove that she is superior. We Dalit women tend to push our sisters to speak up, but non-Dalit women reinforce the weaknesses of Dalit women.”

Later in the report, she is quoted as urging more Dalit women to take up law.

“Outside the court, many people are fighting,” Savita said. “Of 100 cases, only 5 go to court. If there are good lawyers they will not allow compromise. We have to fight within the court as much as we have to fight outside.”

While the report includes statistics drawn from official sources, it is also wary of drawing too many conclusions from them, pointing that very often cases are withdrawn and witnesses turn hostile because of pressure outside the system without adequate protection given to them.

“This is the movement led by Dalit women in India,” the report says. “There is nothing for us to lose but everything for us to win, as we march on with the spirit of resistance in our hearts, to sound the death knells of the caste system.”
 

In January, Manoj Nimbhal quit his job as a painter for a stationery manufacturing company in the Gujarat Industrial Development Corporation enclave in the state’s Umbergaon town. Nimbhal is a resident of Khadkipada, a village in Maharashtra’s Palghar district, 22 km away from Umbergaon and just south of the border between the two states. The enclave employs thousands of people from Palghar.

But since the government’s demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes on November 8, cash payments to these daily-wage workers have dried up and they are being paid by cheque or by direct transfer to their bank accounts.

“I don’t have an account, so where will they send me money?” Nimbhal said. “So they did not pay me at all.”

Nimbhal was with the company for the past three years, and rode his motorcycle to work every day. Khadkipada is not near the main road and getting to Umbergaon involves taking a series of shared rickshaws, spending up to Rs 100 per day. Despite his cash flow drying up, Nimbhal managed to get by for two months. However, he eventually ran out of money for fuel and had to leave his job. He has not found other employment since.
 

Blocked at banks

On Sunday, days before the third month after demonetisation drew to a close, a group of men and women gathered under a mahua tree in Khadkipada to discuss what had changed for them since the demonetisation announcement.

The village, home to the indigenous Warli community, is located at the foot of a hilly outcrop around 20 km from Dahanu town on Maharashtra’s western coast. The land here is dry, allowing for cultivation only once during the monsoon. The men tend to their fields during the rains and travel for work for the rest of the year, be it to the Gujarat Industrial Development Corporation as Nimbhal used to, to the brick kilns spread out across Palghar, to fisheries along the coast, or cutting and selling dried grass for press machines.

Nimbhal is not the only one who has had to make do with a limited flow of cash since demonetisation. Cash supply at banks in the area continues to be stilted a month after the deadline to deposit old notes ended. Even when employers pay workers by cheque, there are delays in withdrawing that money, which results in loss of working days. Add to these problems the fact that many in the village, like Nimbhal, do not have bank accounts.

Sunita Narle, a resident, had a few of the old notes she had saved over the years. The news of demonetisation took a little more than a week to reach the village through the men who work outside. When she realised a part of her savings were no longer legal tender, she was at a loss for how to exchange it.

“Since I don’t have a bank account, I gave it to others to deposit,” Narle said. “I have not got the money back yet because there is no money in the banks and my friends have not been able to withdraw it.”

Sakharam Umbersada, another resident of the village who had gathered at the meeting, spoke of problems villagers still faced at the nearby bank branch. “It takes people two or three weeks just to get their money out of the bank,” Umbersada said. “We go to the banks and stand in line, but our number is not called. When big people come, they get money immediately, but not us.”

 

Scaling down

Narle’s husband cuts and sells hay to a seth who lives in Dahanu. He has not been paid for two months. In fact, the hay business across Dahanu taluka seems to have been affected, going by anecdotal reports.

Umbersada elaborated: “Seths are giving us chittis, not money, for our work cutting and pressing grass.” These chittis, or notes, are receipts with a promise to pay later. “They have not yet paid us even for work done in November,” he added.

Even those who do have money have been forced to cut back on spending. Sunita Takle runs the government shop in the village. After demonetisation, she had to shut her shop for a month because she had no money to buy supplies from the wholesaler in Dahanu. “I had no money to buy from Dahanu, and anyway, nobody had cash to buy from me,” she said, laughing.

Takle buys goods worth Rs 5,000 from her wholesaler as per her requirement. This includes dal, potatoes, onions, sugar, snacks and cold drinks. From sales of Rs 500 to Rs 600 daily before demonetisation, she now sells goods worth Rs 200 to Rs 300 only.

Even before demonetisation, the government shop refused rations to those without Aadhaar cards. Takle said that many people in the village did not have Aadhaar cards, as their applications were either stuck in processing or had not been accepted for months on end. And their situation was dire.

She maintained that many had been hit harder than herself. “My neighbour used to work in Mangalore at a fishing company for Rs 8,000,” she said. “Since they stopped paying him, he had to leave that job. Just last week, he took his entire family to work at a brick kiln for half the salary he used to get.”
 

Fifty-seven billionaires in India possess as much wealth as the poorest 70% of the country, according to a report on global inequality released on Monday by Oxfam, an international confederation of 18 non-governmental organisations.

By comparison, eight men across the world are as wealthy as the poorest 50% of the global population, the report said. A mere 500 people will bequeath wealth worth $2.1 trillion – more than the current gross domestic product of India – to their heirs over the next 20 years.

Drawing from news reports and its own studies, the Oxfam paper points to growing gaps in income inequality across the world. In India, for instance, the chief executive officer of a leading information technology company earns 416 times more than the firm’s average employee. This is reflected in India’s wealth distribution. The richest 10% in India own 80% of its wealth, while the richest 1% possess 58% of all wealth.

Note: Percentages in the first decile are negative because they represent negative wealth, that is debt. This amounts to -$21 billion, or -0.68% of India's wealth.

Even income growth has been uneven over the years. Between 1988 and 2011, incomes of the poorest 10% of Indians rose by $29, or around Rs 2,000, at an increase of 1% each year. For the richest 10% in the same period, incomes increased by almost Rs 40,000, with an annual increase of 25%.

Oxfam lists several reasons for this inequality, including crony capitalism and corporations that squeeze employees at lower rungs to maximise salaries and dividends for high-level executives and shareholders. This gets exacerbated in the current economic framework, Oxfam argues, since the surest way to grow wealth is to possess it. Those who are most rich can afford the best investment advice. Despite this growth of wealth, governments across the world lose taxes and valuable income with the super-rich depositing their wealth in tax havens abroad and manipulating political systems to do so without repercussion.

Oxfam’s report comes a week after HSBC released a study on social sector spending in India on January 10. The report, timed between demonetisation and the budget, notes that India’s expenditure on social sectors such as health and education is far lower than global and emerging market standards. However, this expenditure has far greater impact on growth than capital expenditure on infrastructure.

In this chart, EM stands for 'emerging markets'. Source: World Development Indicators, HSBC.

In this chart, EM stands for 'emerging markets'. Source: World Development Indicators, HSBC

Governments tend to ignore such expenditure, the report argues, because their political terms last five years, whereas it takes around six years for the clear benefits of social expenditure to show.

In this chart, EM stands for 'emerging markets'. Source: HSBC estimates

Courtesy: Scroll.in