India’s National Crime Records Bureau has found that more than four Dalit women are raped every day across the country. Dalit Media Watch, a group that reports on crimes against India’s lowest caste, has reported that two Dalits are assaulted, murdered and have their homes torched every hour.
But the reality may be far worse than the statistics show: “The national figures are grossly under reported since many cases of rape of Dalit women are not even registered,” says Pratap Kumar, a Dalit rights activist in Lucknow, the capital of the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. “Conviction is a distant dream for many,”
Here is another resource: http://www.overcomingviolence.org/en/resources/campaigns/women-against-violence/now-we-are-fearless/dalit-fact-sheet.html
Although Indian law prohibits discrimination and violence against Dalit people, in reality atrocities are a daily occurrence.
- 13 Dalits are murdered each week.
- 5 Dalit homes are burnt each week.
- 6 Dalit people are kidnapped or abducted each week.
- 21 Dalit women raped each week.
It is estimated that a crime is committed against a Dalit person every 18 minutes. The problem not the law but the lack of political will, at local and national levels, to apply these laws. In 2006, the official conviction rate for Dalit atrocity cases was just 5.3%.
Social discrimination is also a major problem. Dalit people are considered ‘untouchable’; most higher caste people would not marry a Dalit, invite them into their home or share food with them.
- Dalit children sit separately from other children in schools. Almost 1 out of every 3 government school in rural areas prohibit children from sitting together.
- Dalits are prevented from entering police stations in 27.6% of rural villages,
- Public health workers refuse to enter Dalit homes in 1 out of 3 rural villages,
- Almost half of Dalit villages are denied access to water sources,
- Dalit and non-Dalit people cannot eat together in 70% of rural villages
Dalit women experience triple discrimination based on their caste, their economic situation and their gender.
- 70% of Dalit women are illiterate in rural India
- Thousands of girls are forced into prostitution before they reach puberty. .
The International Dalit Solidarity Network states “ Violence, including sexual assault, is used by dominant castes as a social mechanism for humiliating entire Dalit communities.”
13 a week works out to 672 a year. Let’s compare this to the lynchings in the South:
This works out to 55 a year, 40 for blacks. (It’s worth noting that there were periods of white lynchings, for example a number of Germans were lynched when we declared war in WW1).
Let’s compare this number to South Africa. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartheid
I can’t find good numbers in the time I am allocating to this exercise, but it looks like 70-odd were killed in Sharpsville, and there were occasional massacres in following decades, with perhaps a 1,000 dead. Steven Biko, if memory serves, was tortured to death, and of course there were atrocities like the South Africans taking pages from the Communist playbook and relocating millions of Africans to places where they were poor, and unable to effectively sustain themselves.
Net: NOTHING in modern history, in a developed democracy, comes close to the scale of these atrocities.
Why, then, is no one talking about them? Why, as an educated, reasonably aware and switched on person did I only recently become aware of this?
Simple: brown on brown violence does not fit the narrative that Soviet propaganda disseminated, that white imperialists were somehow uniquely evil, rather than uniquely good as colonizers. Empires, violence, conquests: these are older than history.
What is rare is conquerors reforming themselves morally. What are rare are attempts at empathy and connection. What is rare is GUILT. Historically, only white Europeans suffer from this, by and large (although one could of course cite people like Ashoka).
This is why I spoke of Leftist hypocrisy in the last post. They want to relive the American 1960’s because it was a period of relative moral clarity. What they do not want to do is ask themselves to live by consistent moral standards and to apply those standards around the world. They don’t CARE about the women raped by upper caste vegetarians, because they don’t know about them, and they don’t know about them because their thought leaders don’t want them to know.