http://timesofindia
UK bill links caste to race, India red-faced
Manoj Mitta, TNN, Mar 31, 2010, 04.17am IST
NEW DELHI: In the first such legislative move anywhere in the world,
and much to the embarrassment of India's official position, the
British House of Lords has passed a law that treats caste as "an
aspect of race".
On March 24, the House of Lords passed the Equality Bill empowering
the British government to include "caste" within the definition of
"race". This threatens India's much-touted success in keeping caste
out of the resolution adopted at the 2001 Durban conference on racism.
The provision to outlaw caste discrimination in Britain came in the
form of an amendment made by the Lords as a result of intensive
lobbying by dalit groups, including followers of Ravidass sect who had
suffered a violent attack last year in Austria.
The bill will become a law after the House of Commons passes it. The
legislation draws its legitimacy from a recommendation made in 2002 by
the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD)
that all member states of the International Convention on the
Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), including
India and the UK, should enact domestic legislation declaring that
descent-based discrimination encompassed caste and "analogous systems
of inherited status".
This development comes at a time when the Manmohan Singh government is
already under pressure before the UN Human Rights Council as the draft
principles and guidelines issued by it last year on discrimination
based on work and descent recognized caste as a factor. The British
legislation may provide impetus for the adoption of those draft
principles and guidelines.
Though the bill originally contained no reference to caste, the Gordon
Brown government agreed to its inclusion even as it commissioned a
research on the nature of the problem that is believed to have come
into Britain through the Indian diaspora. A parliamentary committee,
while recommending last year that caste be considered as a subset of
race, cited specific instances of caste discrimination in Britain.
In one such case, a qualified dalit working in the National Health
Service suddenly suffered discrimination at the hands of his
supervisor soon after the latter discovered his "low caste" status.
The dalit employee was reportedly harassed and suspended from work for
a whole year. While a trade union managed to obtain compensation for
him, the case highlighted a lacuna in the law to deal with caste
discrimination. The Gordon Brown government accepted the amendment
tabled by Liberal Democrats subject to the outcome of the research
ordered by it on caste discrimination. Baroness Thornton, speaking for
the government, told the peers, "We have looked for evidence of caste
discrimination and we now think that evidence may exist, which is why
we have now commissioned the research."
Lord Avebury, who had tabled the amendment, said he believed that the
research would "conclusively prove that caste discrimination does
occur in the fields covered by the bill". India's opposition to the
linking of caste with race began in 1996, when it tried to free itself
of "reporting obligation" under CERD, saying that caste, though
perpetuated through descent, was "not based on race".
This is a drastic departure from the position originally taken by
India in 1965 while proposing the historic amendment to introduce
descent in CERD. It had actually cited its experience with caste as an
argument for recognizing all forms of descent-based discrimination.
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