s
debate in India about the nature of caste
Children of God
Should India’s caste system be equated
with racism?
Jun 14th 2001 | DELHI
From The Economist print edition
“CASTE is worthless and so is its name,”
proclaimed Guru Nanak, the founder of the
Sikh religion. Yet in the village of Sidhwan
Khurd in Punjab, one of India’s richest states,
there are two gurdwaras (Sikh houses of
worship), a scruffy one for the village’s
“scheduled castes”, the official name for
people who used to be called untouchables,
and a spiffier one for other Sikhs. India’s
160m Dalits—as members of its scheduled
castes call themselves these days—suffer
worse privations than segregation at prayer.
But nothing shows better than Sidhwan
Khurd’s two gurdwaras how stubborn is the
stigma of untouchability, 500 years after the
Sikhs abolished it and 50 years after the
Indian state did so.
That is why Dalit activists want their plight to
be on the agenda of a forthcoming UN
conference on racism, to be held in South
Africa in August. Their demand has triggered a
discrimination and whether it is a subject fit
for discussion by other countries. The
government is reluctant. “Race and caste are
distinct,” says Soli Sorabjee, India’s attorney-
general. Although India has been a vigorous
campaigner against apartheid, it does not
much like the idea of having outsiders poking
around its own systems of stratification.
India does not practise anything like official
apartheid. On the contrary, a fifth of the seats
in Parliament are reserved for members of
scheduled castes and tribes. They and other
lower castes have places at educational
institutions and jobs in government ear-
marked for them. Some states have powerful
political parties based on alliances among
lower castes. India’s president, K.R.
Narayanan, is a Dalit.
Yet quotas and job-preferment have not
brought equality, dignity or even safety to
India’s lowest castes. Dalits are barely
represented among the grandees of business,
one reason why some demand reservations for
jobs in the private sector. They are over-
represented, however, in the ranks of landless
agricultural labourers and illiterates. Such
humiliations as the “two-tumbler system”
(separate glasses for Dalits and non-Dalits)
persist in some places. In villages, the stigma
can lead not just to segregation but to
violence. Recorded crimes and atrocities
against scheduled castes averaged 26,000 a
year between 1997 and 1999; in 1998 that
included 570 murders and 931 rapes.
Dalit activists see no reason why these
injustices should not be discussed at the UN
conference, which is to discuss not only racism
but “racial discrimination, xenophobia and
related intolerance”. Just like racism,
discrimination against Dalits is “based on
descent”, argues Martin Macwan, convenor of
the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights.
Nor is it restricted to India: Mr Macwan says
that people of Dalit stock are discriminated
against in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal as
well.
Mr Sorabjee does not deny that “caste
discrimination is prevalent in India.” But the
government has a hard time admitting that it
is an Indian variation of a worldwide
phenomenon, worthy of international scrutiny.
Even Dalits themselves are not free of
prejudice. In the matrimonial section of a
website for Dalits, advertisers boast of
prospective spouses’ “fair complexions”.