The horrifying trend of caste violence in Gujarat's rural areas

The October night was cold. Kanu Gesapara said he was peacefully asleep in his home at Nanikati village in Limdi taluka of Surendranagar district, when the peon from the village panchayat came to call him. His wife had lodged a complaint against him with the police, he was told.
He walked out with the peon, only to be accosted midway by two constables. They grabbed him by collar, dragged him to the panchayat office and stripped him, before beating him up in full public view and violating his private parts grievously.

The constables then took him to the village temple, made him lie down and hit him on the buttocks with sticks. They made him wear a ghagra thereafter and walk through the village carrying his pants and shoes on the head to the panchayat office and made him dance there, he said.

This happened about eight years earlier. Constables Janaksinh Rana and Indu Rana were suspended, but with no election on the horizon in 2008, the incident died a natural death in Gujarat and in public memory.

At a time when the alleged assault on dalits in Una town of Gir Somnath district has stirred nationwide outrage, activists said victims such as Gespara, who belongs to a Scheduled Tribe, are not all that rare.

“There is little social support available for the dalits or tribals in the state,” said Manjula Pradeep, executive director of Navsarjan Trust, which works for dalit rights across the state. “Once an incident garners media attention, we see some legal action is taken, but nothing is done at the ground level to change the social psyche that perpetuates such atrocity,” she said.

Across villages in the state, the dalit community finds it difficult to enter temples or participate in the traditional Garba dance during Navratri. In most villages dalits have their separate Garba sessions in the areas marked for them.

“The feudal history of the state, barring that of the Gaekwadi areas, has largely perpetuated an oppressive casteist mindset and accompanying prejudices,” said Achyut Yagnik, Ahmedabad-based writer and activist.

The impact of urbanisation is hardly felt in most areas, Yagnik said. “On the one hand you have high prevalence of casteist prejudicial behaviour and on the other high level of oppressive superstitions as well,” he said.

In 2013, for instance, Girish Parmar, sarpanch of Deral village in Bayad block of Banaskantha allegedly rounded up people of his village and asked them to prove their loyalty to him by dipping their hands in boiling oil.

“Since we had voted for Girish, we had no problem in proving it and we dipped our hands in boiling oil, but our hands got burnt,” said Gopal Parmar, one of the victims.

The state took legal action against the sarpanch and his cronies, but the beliefs do not appear to have changed.

A study carried out by Navsarjan and the Robert F Kennedy Centre for Justice and Human Rights in 2010 covering 1,589 villages in Gujarat listed as many as 98 forms of untouchability practised against dalits in the state.

The forms of discrimination listed in the report included denial of houses to dalits in non-dalit areas, prohibition of inter-caste marriage and practice of ‘Rampatar’ (a separate vessel kept for dalit guests in non-dalit households).

The caste hierarchy within dalit community also results in severe discrimination against those at the bottom of the pyramid. The report listed 99 forms of such discrimination being practised by dalits against the members of lower sub castes within dalit fold.

“Notably higher than the prevalence of prohibition against inter-caste marriage, inter sub=caste marriage is prohibited in 99.1 per cent of villages,” the report said, adding that in “95.8 per cent of villages, higher sub-caste dalits will enforce the practice where lower sub-caste dalits must remove carcasses”.

The report said that in 92.4 per cent of villages, all dalits do not have access to alldalit burial grounds and in 91.4 per cent of villages, lower sub-caste dalits must collect the clothes discarded at burial, and then are expected to wear them as their clothing.

Narendra Modi as chief minister had initiated an outreach to dalit community in a big way, be it starting to write his blog on April 14, 2009, the birth anniversary of dalit icon BR Ambedkar, or taking out constitution yatra in dalit-dominated Surendranagar town on the eve of Republic Day in 2010.

“Symbolisms aside, the revivalist Hindutva agenda of the BJP has failed to address the issues of conservative federal Hinduism down the rungs,” said sociologist Professor Gaurang Jani, advisor to Gujarat OBC Commission.

“The cosmetic development claims have hardly percolated beyond the urban periphery and macro revivalism has done precious nothing to mend the ailing micro level fissures,” he said.

Between 2001 and 2014, as per data received through Right to Information Act, about 1,000 cases of atrocities against dalits were recorded on average in the state, Pradeep said.

The data shows that 45 dalit women are raped every year on average while 20 dalit men are murdered, she said.

“Dalit population has been showing a declining trend over the years. While this was 7.41 per cent of the total population in Gujarat in 1991, it went down to 7.04 per cent in 2001 and further to 6.47 in 2011,” she said.

In 2015 alone, Gujarat saw 6,655 cases of atrocities against dalits, drawing attention of the National Commission of the Scheduled Castes.

Gujarat BJP president Vijay Rupani, however, said there is no social prejudice against dalits in the state. “These incidents are isolated ones, which are promptly dealt with by the state government. It is not that a community is fighting against another here,” Rupani said. “The Una incident is now being exploited by the political parties like Congress, BSP and AAP only to gain mileage in the forthcoming elections in Uttar Pradesh, where BJP is in a strong footing and poised to form government,” he said.