The year 2024 will long be infamous for the gruesome rape and murder of a young doctor at the RG Kar Medical College in Kolkata. It rightfully sparked nationwide outrage and sustained public mobilisation. Yet around the same time a 14-year-old Dalit girl was gang raped, mutilated and murdered in Bihar’s Muzaffarpur district for refusing a marriage proposal from the prime accused. The alleged perpetrator was a 45-year old man from the dominant Yadav caste. Her story barely entered the national consciousness. The paradox is an uncomfortable reality: in India, violence against women does not evoke equal public concern. The visibility of a victim’s suffering is often mediated by caste. When there were nationwide candlelight marches and protests across the country against rape of Nirbhaya in 2014, Dalit scholars mourned the lack of similar uproar by the nation against the Khairlanji atrocity. In 2006, Surekha Bhotmange and her three children were brutally attacked and killed by dominant-caste villagers in Maharashtra’s Khairlanji village, after she resisted encroachment on her land. The dominant castes dragged Surekha, her daughter and two sons out of their home, paraded naked, raped and lynched them. Burnt charcoals were inserted into the private organs of the women. Most horrifyingly, the perpetrators included participation of Caste-Hindu women. However, it was more than a week before the Khairlanji massacre received coverage in the print media.
When India’s speaks of women’s rights, it often collapses all women into a single box. In the meanwhile, it ignores the distinct and compounded forms of suppression endured by lower-caste women. The tragedy is – Dalit women are invisible not because they are women but because they sit at the intersection of caste, gender and poverty.
The Nation’s selective outrage and Yashika Dutt
Lower-caste women are raped in what appears to be more of an organised and systemic way. Dalit women are raped whenever they or the men of their community are seen as transgressing the caste hierarchy as evidenced by the Khairlanji rapes and murders in 2006 and the prevalent devadasi/jogini practices (temple prostitution).
Dalit women experience caste violence aimed at controlling and monitoring their sexuality as their bodies are symbols of honour and caste authority and their exploitation has been justified by their lower social status. Dutt has noted – “every time a Dalit woman is assaulted, abused, raped or murdered, her caste matters. Even if she was not raped simply because she is Dalit, the conditions that lead to her assault are almost always affected by her status as lower-caste woman in an upper-caste male-dominated society”.
Unfortunately, this is palpable in the context of public outrage – rapes, and murders of Dalit women rarely make headlines. This closely resonates with the mainstream media’s conspicuous apathy in covering the struggle for the most basic human rights in Manipur. The refusal of institutions to recognise the dehumanizing ordeal of Dalit women compounds psychological harm. Coverage of caste-based sexual violence is often episodic, with sustained public attention reserved for only a handful of extreme cases – the Hathras case of 2020 being one of them – where a 19-year old Dalit girl was gang raped and murdered in Uttar Pradesh’s Hathras district.
The erasure of caste trauma from public discourse compels survivors to internally bear harms that are rooted in structural discrimination and require collective reckoning. The accounts and experiences of the Dalit women get obscured within the folds of the dominant narratives.
The Protectors Are Perpetrators
The Constitution guarantees equality, dignity and protection against caste discrimination. Yet Dalit women continue to experience sexual violence not merely because of social prejudices (to which the Indian female population is generally subjected to) but because the very foundational institution of the criminal justice system systematically fails them. As very little information or government data concerning the particular situation of Dalit women in India is available, I will rely on the commendable ground work done by the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI) and the Swabhiman Society.
Many incidents of sexual violence and rape against Dalit women that should be registered under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act are not recorded as such by the Police. This has been attributed to political pressure seeking to project a decline in caste-based atrocities in order to exhibit their purported commitment to the appeasement rhetoric of cracking down on caste-based atrocities. Survivors of sexual violence, Dalit women and girls are silenced through threats by dominant castes. The constitutionally invalid Khap Panchayats often have an upper hand in refraining the victim families to report such instances.
The most precarious fact about violence against lower caste women is the complicity of the administration. The police, a part of the state machinery, has been reported to decline the registration of complaints. Charges are not filed because the case is designated as false by the police. The authorities often belonging to the dominant upper caste shout caste-based slurs and sexist remarks. They take money from the financially influential accused persons and direct the evidence in their favour. In the Hathras Rape case in 2020, the girl’s brother testified that no arrest was made by the police even after 10 days of the incident was reported. A 15-year-old Dalit girl who was gang raped by security personnel in Odisha was incessantly threatened, harassed and lured by the police to say that she had not been raped by security personnel but by other local persons. When she refused to put up with the falsehood, her medical examination was re-done to obliterate any evidence of rape. Three months later, she committed suicide and, that she was raped, was written in the suicide note. The sanction and continuation of these forms of sexual violence come from the powerful kinship networks, beginning with the families of dominant caste groups. These networks extend to the local governance, as well as the police and legal systems.
The regressive and ignominious two-finger test that has been ruled out by the Supreme Court of India is still used for the medico-legal examination of the Dalit victims. Survivors are often not provided with a copy of the medical examination report, or the families of the dead (in cases of murder) are not provided with the post-mortem reports. These are tampered with by the state authorities to show lack of evidence.
The incitement to declare oneself the subject of violation is the first step in seeking recognition and redress. This requires strategic enactment of a perception about law- one must act as if legal structures are capable of delivering justice once the harm is presented in familiar legal vocabulary. Thus, the police being the first rung of the criminal justice system, it remains to be seen how can laws instil faith in the Dalit women that the justice system is alive and will come to their rescue.
Women, Dalit women, Rege[1] and Bama[2]
The author’s assertion that addressing women does not mechanically translate into engaging with Dalit women is aptly substantiated by Sharmila Rege. She pointed out that the category ‘woman’ was conceived as collectively, based on their being oppressed by the fact of their womanhood. The three categories were deployed in combination and this often led to exclusions around race, class and ethnicity. Since most of the vocal feminists of the 1970s were white, middle class and university educated – it was their experience which came to be universalised a ‘women’s experience’.
Bama remarked “All women in the world are second class citizens. For Dalit women, the problem is grave. Their Dalit identity gives them a different set of problems. They experience a total lack of social status; they are not even considered dignified human being.” They must endure triple oppression – class, caste and gender.
Today, the plight is such that Dalit women constitute one of the most vulnerable and marginalised groups within India’s female population. They suffer from, what is called the triple burden of gender bias, caste discrimination, and economic deprivation. They are more susceptible to sexual violence due to their caste than other women. Experts write that the bodies of Dalit women are weaponised maintain and perpetuate the status quo – the oppression and subjugation of Dalit. Uma Chakravarti wrote that violence is inflicted on Dalit women’s bodies as a means of controlling caste dominance and maintaining caste purity. Lower-caste women have been denied the right to seek justice for sexual violence as it is often considered that they have no honour to be stolen.
Politics and Casteism in India
B.R. Ambedkar observed that the caste system can be maintained only through the constraints on women’s sexuality and in this way, women are the gateways to the caste. Sexual violence against Dalit women perpetuates and entrenches casteism in the Indian society. It is indeed ironical how such violence continues seventy-five years after the Constitution promised equality? This crisis is almost out of the mainstream political discourse. Caste-based sexual violence has occupied a relatively limited place in the election manifestos of major national parties compared to other issues.
The highest rates of crimes committed against Dalits (NCRB, 2019) were in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Gujarat. The others with rates above the national average were Telangana, UP, Kerala, Odisha and Andhra Pradesh. Remarkably, despite the pervasiveness of the menace across States in India, violence against Dalit women finds no mention in the manifesto of the ruling party in power in most of the above-mentioned States or the Indian National Congress (INC) (in power in Telangana and leading the UDF in Kerala) and cursory treatment in the manifesto of the CPI(M) (leading the LDF as the opposition in Kerala). The reason why I found it relevant to refer to the election manifestos of the political parties is because they are instructive in revealing the manner in which political institutions conceptualise and more importantly, fail to conceptualise violence against Dalit women.
The belief that reforms aimed at women as a homogenous category will inevitably serve the needs of lower-caste women is merely a façade. Neither women nor Dalits are a monolithic category. Violence perpetrated on Dalit women is a structural and intersectional menace. The rhetorical commitments to do away with “caste-based violence” or “gender-related crimes” or “women empowerment” or “Dalit atrocities” does not per se address the plight of Dalit or lower-caste women. Today, Dalit women are a more vulnerable constituency within Indian women, whose experiences cannot be comprehended through a universalised lens of womanhood. In India’s caste-ridden society, upper-caste women are bestowed with greater honour, whereas the bodies of Dalit, Adivasi, and lower-caste women are considered impure and sexually accessible to dominant caste-groups. None of the existing frameworks in India are equipped to undo centuries of inherited stigma.
Promises of political representation or reservation or economic empowerment of women through financial inclusion do not even superficially cater to the misery of the lower caste women. The perception that empowerment of women is assured through economic means abandons the idea of emancipation of the lower caste women as the latter is not possible without meticulously studying the specificities of their subordination. South India is a testament to this assertion. Higher literacy rates, positive indicators of economic development and other manifestations of modernisation have miserably failed to eradicate the blot of casteism. To borrow from Mema Chongtham, “a mirage of equality only shields prejudice, giving a lifeline to discrimination behind a façade of civility.”
Conclusion – Listen to them
Given the now proven ineptitude of governments across successive administrations and States in meaningfully assuaging the plight of Dalit women, it must now directly turn towards the lower caste women and ask – What do you need? What do you want? What do you think will help you in rising? How can the State actually support you? It is imperative for the Government to pay heed to the voices and recommendations of the Dalit women organisations, who have much more nuanced understanding of the community.
There is a need to lift them from menial jobs like manual scavenging and transform them into producers in the workforce. Dalit women are almost invisible in public life and positions of power. Though no data is publicly available on the representation of Dalit judges in High Courts and the lower judiciary, Parliamentary Committees, Commissions and high-level government officials have acknowledged the issue of acute lack of caste diversity in the justice system needs to be immediately addressed. Years of oppression and subjugation has obliterated the very confidence of lower caste women in their being. They need tangible beacons of hope to enable and equip themselves.
In my very personal opinion, though I have been generally hesitant in the deliberation over Indian issues in the international arena, it is precisely these factors that propel me to concur with what Dr. Shiv Visvanathan, a prominent social scientist, known for the concept of cognitive justice who wrote, – “One is forced to manoeuvre for international attention because only external politics might be able to leverage current paradigms”.
(The author, as student of law at the Symbiosis Law School, Pune and is grateful to Dr Ankita Chatterjee for her invaluable insights and guidance, that significantly informed and enriched this article)
References:
Dear upper caste Indians, Hathras is not another Nirbhaya. It is a Khairlanji
Hathras victim was gang-raped, murdered: CBI – The Hindu
Caste Based Sexual Violence and State Impunity (English and Hindi)
EN-Haryana_Report-ENG-PDF-1.pdf
Caste and Race: Discrimination Based on Descent | Economic and Political Weekly
Dalit_Women_Talk_DifferentlyA_Critique_of_Difference_and_Towards_a_Dalit_Feminist.pdf
Nine states have 54% of Dalits, see 84% of crime against SCs | India News – Times of India
‘I’m a Dalit woman, and my mental health matters’: Christina Thomas Dhanaraj
Dalit Women’s Rights Manifesto 2026 demands internal reservation in governance – The Hindu
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharmila_Rege: Sharmila Rege was an Indian sociologist, feminist scholar and author of Writing Caste, Writing Gender.[2] She led the Krantijyoti Savitribai Phule Women’s Studies Centre at the University of Pune since 1991
[2] Bama (born Faustina Mary Fatima Rani in 1958), also known as Bama Faustina Soosairaj, is a prominent Tamil Dalit feminist writer and former teacher from Virudhunagar district, Tamil Nadu; She rose to fame with her 1992 autobiographical novel Karukku and subsequently published Sangati in 1994, which translates to “Events” in English.
Related:
January 2024: Alarming surge in attacks targeting Dalit women