Cry Freedom!

Of the many forms of untouchability that persist in modern India, unarguably the most unconscionable is the wide prevalence of discrimination against dalit children within schools

Harsh Mander Delhi

In a dilapidated slum shanty near the banks of the Ganga in Patna is settled a group of families whose profession is to clean dry toilets with their bare hands, and to carry human waste on their heads to throw into the forgiving waters of the mighty river. I found that not a single child studied in the government school, which, as it happened, was located literally just across the road from the scavenger colony. It took a while to coax from the guardians the reason for their steady resolve to keep their children away from school. It transpired that they had indeed sent their children to the school initially. It is a custom in many government schools for the teacher to send children on errands. The upper-caste children were assigned tasks such as to fetch tea. The children from the scavenger colony were asked to wash the toilets, or to clean up after a dog had soiled the school premises. The children could not bear the shame, and refused to return to the school.

Of the many forms of untouchability that persist in modern India, unarguably the most unconscionable is the wide prevalence of discrimination against dalit children within schools. Children in rural India, and even parts of the cities, learn early the rules of caste, which survive unremittingly through their lifetimes, even as their country races into the 21st century. A survey of practices of untouchability undertaken in 565 villages in 11 major states of India reveals shockingly that in as many as 38 per cent government schools, dalit children are made to sit separately while eating.  In 20 per cent schools, dalit children are not even permitted to drink water from the same source.

As the outcome of a major direction of the Supreme Court of India, millions of children in most government primary schools in the country are being provided hot, cooked, mid-day meals everyday. The mid-day meal programme not only strengthens the nutrition of children in government schools, many of whom are poor and do not have access to sufficient and nutritious food in their homes, it also encourages enrolment into schools, retention and regular attendance. But an equally important outcome is that since children of all castes and classes sit together and eat, it teaches them caste equality. Traditionally, caste and communal barriers are expressed most in the refusal to eat together; therefore, people of diversity sitting together gently can shatter a range of iniquitous social practices, and what better place for this to happen than the school?

However, there are disturbing field studies of caste discrimination within schools. Caste discrimination in mid-day meals is seen in various ways. The first is defiance of the Supreme Court orders to appoint cooks from dalit backgrounds. In states like Tamil Nadu only 14 per cent of the cooks are dalit.  In many places where, although, dalit cooks have been appointed, upper-caste parents retaliated by not allowing their children to eat the meal, threatening to withdraw, putting pressure to replace the cook with an upper-caste cook and so on.

The other forms of discrimination are where children are not allowed to sit together and eat. Dalit children are required to sit apart from the dominant caste children; sometimes apart within the same space, other times outside of the school building while the dominant caste children sit inside, or on a lower level than their dominant caste peers. Some studies have also shown that dalit children are required to bring their own plates and/or are given less quantity of food, refused a second serving, not allowed to drink water from the public taps and hand pump at the school and so on.

The recently released report of perhaps the first nationwide survey of the continued prevalence of untouchability, jointly authored by social scientists Ghanshyam Shah, Sukhadeo Thorat, Satish Desh-pande, Amita Baviskar and myself (Untouchability in Rural India, Sage), finds such untouchability in all local state institutions. Almost 27.6 per cent dalits are prevented from entering police stations and 25.7 from ration shops; 33 per cent public health workers refuse to visit dalit homes, and 23.5 per cent dalits still do not get letters delivered to their homes. Segregated seating for dalits was found in 30.8 per cent self-help groups and cooperatives, and 29.6 per cent panchayat offices. In 14.4 per cent villages, dalits were not permitted to enter the panchayat building. They were denied access to polling booths, or for-ced to form separate lines in 12 per cent of the villages surveyed.  Despite being charged with a constitutional mandate to promote social justice, local ins-titutions of the Indian State facilitate untouchability.

Dalit settlements are often segregated from the main village, and these traditions are reproduced even by the government, when building Indira Awaas housing colonies for dalits or by NGOs, post-2001 earthquake reconstruction in Gujarat. In nearly half the surveyed villages (48.4 per cent), dalits were denied access to water sources. In over a third (35.8 per cent), dalits were denied entry into village shops. They had to wait some distance from the shop, the shopkeepers kept the goods they bought on the ground, and accepted their money similarly without direct contact. In teashops, in about one-third of the villages, dalits were denied seating and had to use separate cups.

In more than 47 per cent villages, bans operated on wedding processions on public (arrogated as upper-caste) roads. In 10 to 20 per cent villages, dalits were not allowed to wear clean or bright clothes or sunglasses. They could not ride their bicycles, unfurl their umbrellas, wear chappals on public roads, smoke or even stand without head bowed.

We found that restrictions on entry by dalits into Hindu temples were as high as an average of 64 per cent in 11 states, ranging from 47 per cent in UP to 94 per cent in Karnataka. Such restrictions endured even after conversion of dalits to egalitarian faiths. As many as 41 of the 51 villages surveyed in Punjab reported separate gurudwaras for dalit Sikhs, and even where dalits worshipped in gurudwaras frequented by upper caste jats, they were served in separate lines at the langar, and were not permitted to prepare or serve the sacred food. In Maharashtra, despite mass conversions of Mahars to Buddhism, dalits were denied temple entry in 51 per cent villages. Reports from Kerala and Andhra Pradesh chronicled divisions in the church between dalit converts and others, even discrimination against ordained dalit priests.

Untouchability persists even into death; in half the villages (48.9 per cent) dalits were debarred from access to cremation grounds. In Maharashtra, even where dalits have their segregated cremation grounds, these are permitted only on the eastern side of the village, so that upper castes are not polluted by the winds that pass from west to east.

The study reports discrimination against dalits even in the labour market. Although normally dalits are coerced into agricultural labour in unfavourable conditions, sometimes even of bondage, they are excluded in the lean agricultural season when work is scarce, and therefore upper-caste workers are preferred. In 25 per cent of the villages, dalits were paid lower wages than other workers. They were subjected to longer working hours, delayed wages, verbal and physical abuse, not just in 'feudal' states like Bihar but notably in Punjab.  In 37 per cent of the villages, dalits were paid wages from a distance, to avoid physical contact. The study found evidence of discrimination between non-dalit and dalit workers, evidence of caste surmounting proletarian solidarity.

Although the large majority of dalits are landless, even in the fewer cases where dalits were landowners, they were denied access to water for irrigation in more than one-third of the villages.  In 21 per cent villages, they were denied access to grazing lands and fishing ponds, and violent upper caste opposition was reported when dalits were allotted government lands for cultivation or even housing.

Untouchability extended even to consumer markets with dalit producers in 35 per cent villages barred from selling their produce in local markets. They were forced to sell in the anonymity of distant urban markets where caste identities blur, but this additional burden of costs and time reduced their competitiveness. Caste taboos apply particularly to products like milk, so that in 47 per cent of the villages with cooperatives, dalits were not allowed to sell milk to the co-operatives or even private buyers. In a quarter of the villages, they were prevented from buying milk from cooperatives. Dalits are not only disproportionately burdened with poverty to start with, caste discrimination in labour and consumer markets condemn them to lower wages with harder work in uncertain employment, and restrictions on their access to natural resources as well as markets for their products.

With untouchability persisting unashamedly in State institutions like schools and police stations, in public spaces like temples and shops, in farms and markets, and in homes and hearts, the dalit still lives in India waiting hopelessly, and sometimes in anger, for the long betrayed dawn of equality.

The writer is a former civil servant and Convener, Aman Biradari