Not-So-Hidden Apartheid

With a Dalit NGO winning the 2007 Rafto Prize, a prestigious human rights award, international pressure on caste discrimination is mounting, reports BEN SPENCER

VINCENT MANOHARAN leans over the table and speaks with passion and anger: “There are 167 million Dalits in India. We are outcastes, untouchables, we are impure and polluted. In mythology at least the shudras are a part of the image of the god, even if it is only the feet. But we are outside the system.” If Dalits were to form a nation it would be the sixth largest country on earth with 2.5 percent of the world’s population. In fact, Mangoo Ram, the leader of the Ad Dharm movement in Punjab flirted with the idea of Achutistan in the 1930s. On November 4, unnoticed by the media, Vincent Manoharan, Paul Divakar and Vimal Thorat, leaders of the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR), were awarded the Rafto Prize, a prestigious human rights award, in Bergen, Norway.

They are in auspicious company: previous Rafto laureates include Aung San Suu Kyi, the Myanmarese democracy campaigner, and José Ramos-Horta, President of East Timor. Many consider Rafto — established in honour of Thorolf Rafto (1922-1986), professor at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration in Bergen — the little brother of the Nobel Peace Prize. Such is the significance of the Rafto Prize that the Norwegian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jonas Gahr Støre, immediately responded to this year’s award by congratulating the NCDHR: “Dalits are among India’s poorest, and India faces major challenges as regards ensuring that its breakneck economic development benefits all groups.”

Dag Erik Berg, an academic at the University of Bergen, points out the consequence of the award: “Norwegians have now learnt the word ‘Dalit’ properly. It hasn’t to date existed in dictionaries, and the press have used old-fashioned names in its place.” Divakar, NCDHR’s national convenor, is jubilant: “At last, the issue of Dalit rights has a firm place on the international agenda. We are on track to visibilising an issue which has been effectively hidden by our country and society.”

Despite the Constitution — which prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion, race, gender or caste — caste discrimination is persistent. Vimal Thorat, Co-Convenor of NCDHR, says: “according to official statistics, which themselves grossly underestimate the extent of the violence, 13 Dalits are murdered and five Dalit homes are destroyed every week, and three Dalit women are raped and 11 Dalits are assaulted every day. A crime is committed against a Dalit every 18 minutes.”

Yet the government persists in hiding behind the Constitution and a scattering of legislation. The official line is that since caste discrimination is unconstitutional, it could not possibly exist. “We face apathy in government, impunity of the police and judiciary, and a high-caste-dominated political elite,” says Manoharan. “We have all these safeguards against discrimination, but they are not implemented.” After years of attempting to convince the government to enforce the Constitution, Dalit activists realised they had to take their cause outside India.

The journey towards the internationalisation of the Dalit rights movement began in 1998 when NCDHR was formed with an eye on the 2001 World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance (known as WCAR), held in Durban. In 1996, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), which India ratified in 1968, concluded that the plight of Dalits falls squarely under the prohibition of descent-based discrimination. The Indian government sent a report, just nine pages long, that did not mention a single instance of caste discrimination. The discrimination, ironically, has been documented and verified by India’s own governmental agencies. On the very day in September when Manoharan heard that he was to be awarded the Rafto Prize, he was on the way to Vaishali in Bihar, to investigate the lynching of 10 Dalits of the Kureri community. None of the perpetrators was arrested.

The Indian government managed to block the NGO caucus at Durban, arguing that caste was not the same as race. Dag Erik Berg argues that by refusing to acknowledge caste as similar to race, the Indian government “effectively dissolved possibilities for judgement against the state’s incapacities to implement equality in a caste context.” The document that emerged from WCAR did not include the caste issue, but the NCDHR succeeded in broadcasting the symbolic power of the equating of race and caste on an international stage. “The Indian government has a strong record of supporting human rights movements across the world. But it doesn’t view caste discrimination on the same level as apartheid in South Africa because the Indian state has internalised the caste system,” explains Divakar.

Since 2001 the Dalit rights movement has discovered the same lesson the anti-apartheid movement learnt in the 1960s: the power of the international human rights movement to implement domestic political change. “We were still a very new movement,” explains Manoharan, “but we could see that international campaigning could be effective. We established the International Dalit Solidarity Network throughout Europe and the US.”

The international campaign is beginning to work. In 2002, the CERD strongly condemned “descent-based discrimination, such as discrimination on the basis of caste.” In February 2007 the New York-based organisation Human Rights Watch issued a document tellingly entitled India: Hidden Apartheid, which criticised the Indian government’s latest report on caste discrimination. Earlier, in December 2006, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had dec - lared, “The only parallel to the practice of untouchability was apartheid in South Africa. It is not just social discrimination. It is a blot on humanity.” This rare official acknowledgment prompted complaints from the BJP. Yet, just two months later Indian officials were busy defending themselves against Human Rights Watch and the CERD, insisting that caste-based discrimination is not such a big problem.

ARNE LILJEDAHL Lynngård, chairman of the Rafto Foundation, presenting the NCDHR with the Rafto Prize said: “How much longer? This is the question the Indian Government, the UN, the European Union, and other authorities have to ask themselves. We expect that India do more to protect its 167 million Dalits against discrimination, injustice, violence and murder.”

Despite the international campaign, powerful nations such as the US and UK have not formally exerted pressure on India on the Dalit issue. But some progress has been made. The US House of Representatives in July 2007 passed a resolution calling caste discrimination illegal. The Dalit caucus believes this is likely to have an outcome on organisations in India that do business with the US government.

Divakar argues that it is with the corporate world that the real struggle lies. “The Dalit movement which began 70 years ago focussed on reservations, but we are now operating in a different world. The government now only controls a small part of the economy.” For real change to happen, Divakar calls for anti-discriminatory monitoring of the corporate world.

“Dalits are being excluded from the fruits of India’s 9.5 percent economic growth. We need access to the corporate world, access to productive resources, access to the supply chain, access to recruitment. To hell with reservations. What we want is to have our merit recognised.”