PUNE, July 15, 2010
Khap panchayats conceal caste issue by bringing up gotra, says Brinda
Amruta Byatnal
The Congress leader who eats in Dalit houses should also take care
that the Dalit people are allowed to live, CPI(M) MP Brinda Karat said
at the Kalindi Deshpande Memorial Lecture here.
She was speaking on the 'Women's movements and confronting
contemporary challenges.'
Referring to the recent incident of a Dalit boy eloping with a Brahmin
girl in a village near Delhi and his family getting threats from the
police and the Brahmins of the village, Ms. Karat said caste and
citizenship were the biggest challenges in front of the women's
movement.
"We are living in an India today where democracy is being subverted in
many ways," she said.
Launching an attack on the khap panchayats, she said they were
bringing up the gotra issue only to conceal the bigger question of
caste.
Narrating her visit to the families of the Dalit boy and the Brahmin
girl, she said the Dalits had been threatened by the Brahmins that if
they didn't return the girl, they would 'take' one of the Dalit girls.
The father of the boy had spent Rs. 1.5 lakh and sold his land to
search for the couple. The police had even picked up another Dalit
youth from the village to threaten the others.
Vulnerability
Ms. Karat, who demanded a separate law on honour killings earlier this
month, said the fear was so large that it showed 'the vulnerability of
the Dalit boy, who was only one and a half hours away from Delhi and
yet couldn't point a finger at the police and say they were wrong.'
Stating that fundamentalism is a major challenge to democracy, Ms.
Karat said France's ban on the burqa in public spaces will only
strengthen fundamentalism.
"The concept of what constitutes freedom should be clear. Claiming to
be right under the pretext of secularism is wrong," she said.
Women's freedom
There is no difference then, between countries who force the veil on
their women and countries who force them not to wear it. Either way,
the freedom of the woman is not respected, she said.
On the issue of food security, she said the government's decision to
start a targeted PDS with selected districts and then expanding it to
the rest of the country to make it universal is a poor compromise.
"This selective method will do more damage than good. The partial
universalisation should not end up being sham universalisation," she
said.
She said the kind of work that women are being offered in the
neo-liberal system is another challenge that has to be overcome.
In the 65 MNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee
Act) sites that she had visited, she found that women are made to lift
approximately 1500 kg of soil everyday and get paid Rs. 100 whereas
their male counterparts who are industrial workers get Rs. 350 for the
same amount of work.
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