Saturday, March 13, 2010

[ZESTCaste] Changes, repartees aplenty

http://www.deccanchronicle.com/chennai/changes-repartees-aplenty-605

Changes, repartees aplenty

March 13th, 2010
By DC Correspondent , DC Correspondent


Chennai, March 12: The historic Assembly in Fort St. George saw the
enactment of several landmark legislation, including the Hindu
religious endowment Act, voting rights for women, child marriage
restraint Act and abolishing the Devadasi system (dedicating girls to
temples).

Later, the state enacted legislation to change the name of Madras
state into Tamil Nadu; that the state would have two official
languages — Tamil and English; self-respect marriages Act; 33 per cent
quota for women in local bodies; equal property rights for women;
abolition of hand rickshaws; special reservation for MBCs, minorities
and Arundathiyars.

In the midst of all this legislative activity, there was room for a
lot of repartees and witty exchanges. In one such exchange between the
treasury benches and the opposition, the Justice Party's towering
leader Sir A.T. Panneerselvam locked horns with premier Rajaji.

When the first anti-Hindi agitation led by Periyar was at its height
in 1938, Rajaji sought to dismiss it as lacking popular support and
said only two persons — Ramasamy Naicker (Periyar) and Pasumalai
Somasundara Bharathi — were opposing Hindi in the state.

But, Sir Panneerselvam rose to say: "At least two people are opposing
Hindi. But how many are supporting it? Only you."


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[ZESTCaste] Social engineering and bigotry(Opinion)

http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/devangshu-datta-social-engineeringbigotry/388446/


Social engineering and bigotry
Devangshu Datta / New Delhi March 13, 2010, 0:05 IST

The Economist recently quoted a Tennessee shopkeeper who described
Barack Obama as a "F**ing N***". Those words and the person they were
directed at, together summed up the limits of social engineering.

Obama could not have been elected without the Civil Rights Movement
and the social engineering it triggered. However, though the US'
social engineering reduced racial bias, it did not eliminate bigotry.
The Tennessee shopkeeper's words hark back 50 years, to a time when
racists reviled a charismatic preacher named Martin Luther King in
exactly the same terms.

The timeframes required to re-engineer social attitudes are
mind-boggling. When a black seamstress, Rosa Parks, was arrested for
refusing to give up her seat in a Montgomery (Alabama) bus to a white
man in 1955, the 48-year-old Obama was not even a glint in his
parents' eyes. Parks' arrest sparked a bus-boycott, orchestrated by
King. That led directly to desegregation and affirmative action.

India started its social engineering experiments even earlier.
Gandhiji was preaching about the evil of untouchability in the 1920s.
Legal equality and affirmative action through reservation have been
embedded in the Indian Constitution since its adoption.

Sixty years later, it's evident that those social engineering efforts
have not been entirely successful. The reservation concept was flawed
from inception in its definition of eligibility criteria. It ignored
the issue of high-caste poverty, for one.

High-caste poverty continues to be ignored, leading to massive
resentment. Increasingly, arbitrary definitions of caste-eligibility
have also been adopted. The concept of the "creamy layer" is prone to
leaks, given inefficiencies of governance.

Yet, flawed as it may be, the social engineering embodied in
reservations has created routes out of poverty for millions. It has
empowered the previously marginalised. Mayawati has a genuine shot at
becoming Prime Minister someday. That would have been plain
unthinkable for Dr Ambedkar, or even Jagjivan Ram.

Urbanisation, and the mixing it enforces, has also lowered many
barriers. Most cubicle-dwellers neither know nor care about the
antecedents of canteen staff. Nevertheless, bigotry persists. Many
still baulk at the thought of marrying out of caste. Professional
descriptions like leather-worker and sweeper are commonly employed as
insults.

These examples show that social engineering is long-gestation. Any
analysis of the Women's Reservation Bill has to start from that
context. It is undeniable gender discrimination exists. Across India,
women lag in terms of education; the population gender ratio is
unfavourable. In many professions, women are paid less. Domestic
violence ranging from wife-beating to honour-killings and dowry
murders is endemic.

It would be clearly beneficial if these evils were removed, and the
imbalances corrected. The Women's Reservation Bill is supposed to
energise the process of reform and correction. But it could take
decades before outcomes, favourable or otherwise, are apparent.

The immediate outcome is that more women will enter Parliament. Given
dynastic biases, the beneficiaries will probably be members of
political families. Will those ladies do right by their
under-privileged sisters? Panchayat reservation hasn't noticeably
accelerated the uplift of rural women and that has been in force since
1993.

There may have been other ways to correct gender imbalances.
Affirmative action aimed at educating girls and adult women may have
produced quicker returns. Adapting micro-finance models to target
female entrepreneurs may also have been more direct.

Chances are, the Bill and its efficacy will still be debated in 2050.
But while more women in Parliament may not do much good in the short
term, it cannot do any harm. At worst, the new MPs will emulate the
men they replace by ignoring their responsibilities, screaming and
sitting in the Well. If so, at the minimum, more women bailiffs will
be hired. So, that is one guaranteed positive outcome.


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[ZESTCaste] Colours of discrimination

http://beta.thehindu.com/arts/magazine/article243255.ece?homepage=true

Arts » Magazine
Published: March 13, 2010
Updated: March 13, 2010 15:42 IST March 13, 2010

Colours of discrimination

By Harsh Mander

Dalit literature of our times, born out of lived experience and art,
is a significant contribution both to the collective social conscience
and to our notions of aesthetics.

The best of art for me is that which speaks — in various forms and
voices — of the lives of dispossessed people, of the ways they live,
cope and overcome; and of dreams and visions of a better, fairer,
kinder world.

Among the most moving reminiscences of a dispossessed childhood that I
have encountered, for instance, are in a new genre of dalit
autobiographies. Close to my heart is Sharankumar Limbade's
autobiography Akkarmashi. Limbade begins with memories of a school
picnic to a forest near his village. The dalit children play and eat
separately embarrassed in front of their upper caste classmates by
their stale dry rotis, chutney and a dried fish. They can smell the
delicacies from the other group: fried paranthas, delicious laddoos,
fresh spiced vegetables, gujiyas and so much else. Some girls feel
sorry, and give them some vegetables, careful not to touch them.
Limbade is embarrassed by their pity. When they have eaten, the
teacher asks the dalit boys to gather the leftovers in an old piece of
newspaper. They can barely wait to eat the scraps, which they attack
as soon as their classmates have walked ahead. When he returns home
that night, his mother asks him sourly why he did not also bring some
of the leftovers home for the rest of the family to taste.

Gripping record

There are many days when his sisters sleep hungry. His mother makes do
with water, his grandfather with puffs of tobacco. They all await his
grandmother Santhama, who goes from house to house to beg, the aanchal
edge of her sari outstretched in which people throw their leftovers.
He waits impatiently. Why is she taking so long? Why has she not
returned? When at last she comes home, she opens out her sari edge to
reveal a variety of stale half-eaten foods from the homes of the upper
caste wealthy folk of the village. But, to the little boy, it seems as
though his grandmother stores a little piece of heaven everyday in the
aanchalof her sari.

His grandmother gathers cow dung to sell. She looks for undigested
pieces of grain in each cow dung heap before she tosses it into her
basket. She washes these pieces of grain in the village pond, dries
them in the sun, and grinds these into flour. She finally kneads these
into rotis that she roasts only for herself, as she feeds the family
with brown millet rotis. The little boy suspects that his grandmother
must be eating something special, and snatches a piece from her plate
one evening. He bites into it and immediately retches. It tastes like
cow dung. He wonders then how his grandmother manages to eat the cow
dung rotis so calmly every evening.

L.S Rokade fiercely laments the injustice of unequal birth:

Mother, you used to tell me

when I was born

your labour was very long.

The reason, mother,

the reason for your long labour:

I, still in your womb, was wondering

Do I want to be born-

Do I want to be born at all

in this land?

Where all paths raced horizonwards

but to me were barred…

I found also many poems in dalit literature in India expressing
gratitude for their mother's efforts to help the children survive
through intense self denial and deprivation. Poignant and universal is
a poem by Jyoti Langewar, which could be addressed to every mother in
the world who feeds and raises her child amidst challenges of great
want:

I have never seen you

wearing one of those gold bordered saris

with a gold necklace

with gold bangles

with fancy sandals.

Mother! I have seen you

burning the soles of your feet in the harsh summer sun

hanging your little ones in a cradle on an acacia tree

carrying barrels of tar

working on a road construction site…

I have seen you

sitting in front of the stove

burning your very bones

to make coarse bread and a little something

to feed everybody, but half-feed yourself

so there'd be a bit in the morning…

I write of a woman condemned by her caste to carry human excreta on
her head; of a child who grows up on the harsh city streets; of a
mother who has to teach her child the lesson of how to live with
hunger; of a small child who recalls how murderous mobs slaughtered
each member of his family; of the hopelessness of bondage; of people
who are dispossessed from their forests and lands. Each time I write,
I carry a little of their suffering in my own body and soul. But I
have still not lived their suffering. Therefore my writing can never
achieve the authenticity and significance of writing of those who have
themselves lived with want and social humiliation.

Precious legacy

A great deal of the world's finest literature and art — much finer
than anything that I have been capable of — is created by men and
women of empathy and social conscience, who are unable to look at
injustice and suffering, and then just turn their faces away and close
their hearts. Their art constitutes some of the most precious legacies
of human civilisation, because they represent the struggles,
strivings, and aspirations among all peoples in all ages, for a world
of justice and kindness. But what is even more extraordinary about
dalit literature and art is that it is written directly by people who
have themselves lived through the enormous suffering of want, of empty
stomachs, of discrimination, insult and shame as a way of life. And in
the same lifetimes they have not only been able to break off these
chains. They have also acquired the skills, language and idiom, to
communicate these to people who have never slept hungry, or been
shamed or forced into humiliating occupations and social practices
because of their birth. Therefore I regard this to be some of the most
significant contributions both to the collective social conscience and
to our notions of aesthetics.

The K.R. Narayanan Centre for Dalit and Minority Studies, Jamia Millai
Islamia, Delhi, recently organised an outstanding exhibition of
paintings by dalit artist Savi and his students. It was imaginatively
curated by his comrade of nearly two decades, Lokesh Jain, who
successfully used painting and theatre to initiate a dialogue with
students about inequity and discrimination.

Savi has developed his iconography over 22 years, influenced by the
experiences of lived discrimination, Buddhist aesthetics and
Ambedkar's teachings. He combines on the one hand brush strokes that
are bold and confident, even sometimes deliberately chaotic, immersed
in the colours of suffering, despair and rage. He locates within these
some of the most astonishingly delicate line strokes. His is a unique
eclectic imagery.

In Savi's oeuvre, we encounter the anguish and anger of dalit people
who have suffered millennia of social discrimination. We share with
his dark and brooding images, the burdens of centuries of humiliation
of devdasis, or women who are 'dedicated to the gods' and used for sex
work by men of what are called higher castes. Savi's compassion and
anger is not in any way sectarian. He suffers equally with the
survivors of the Gujarat carnage of 2002, and of religious communal
violence, and the fires that burnt their lives, inflame the canvases
of his paintings as well. And interspersed among his images are the
homeless on city streets, devalued and lonely, with only the sky for a
roof, and the pavement for a bed.

None of Savi's paintings is portrayal of helpless suffering. Each
canvas is illuminated by human dignity and the spirit which survives
the most daunting odds. In his work, there is uncompromising
resistance against injustice and inhumanity. Savi's colours and line
strokes are shorthand for hope for a better, kinder future for all of
humanity. And for this, he deserves our admiration and gratitude.


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[ZESTCaste] His Canon Spiked

http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?264646

review

His Canon Spiked

Kancha Ilaiah's Homeric rage and his idea of a grand armada that would
sink Hinduism holds little water
Ajoy Bose
Post-Hindu India: A Discourse On Dalit-Bahujan, Socio-Spiritual And
Scientific Revolution

By By Kancha Ilaiah
Sage | 340 pages | Rs 295

Kancha Ilaiah's Post-Hindu India should be essential reading for all
who get panicky about Mayawati's brand of Dalit politics. Unlike the
bsp supremo's bid to empower marginalised groups through the levers of
electoral democracy by wooing a wider 'sarvajan samaj', Ilaiah wants
to launch an all-out civil war between Dalit Bahujans and Hindu
society. This is an angry, provocative book written by a leading Dalit
thinker, who is convinced that Hinduism is the root of all evil in the
country. Indeed, virtually every sentence here drips with venom
against Hindu society, underlining why we need Mayawati's social
engineering skills to succeed.

Despite the outrageous nature of Ilaiah's onslaught on Hinduism, it
would be unfair and inaccurate to describe him as just a poseur. He is
no armchair scholar but a self-made 'organic' intellectual who grew up
in an impoverished shepherd Kuruma Golla (not Dalit, but poor backward
caste) family in the forests of Andhra Pradesh. His mother, who cast a
seminal influence on his thinking, was a fierce fighter for his
community and was actually killed while battling forest guards. So
there is a ring of genuine commitment and passion in whatever Ilaiah
says, however confrontational it may be.

There is also much to learn from the author, a political science
professor at Osmania University, Hyderabad, as he painstakingly
unravels the scientific talent and social skills of various tribal,
Dalit and backward caste communities, albeit mainly from Andhra.
Ilaiah is right that much of these customs and practices have remained
little known, because established social anthropology and history have
sought to highlight only the life and times of dominant caste groups.
The other refreshing, rather curious dimension of the book—considering
the author is a man—is its vigorous espousal of women's rights even as
Hinduism is criticised for keeping down the feminine gender along with
other underclasses.

Unfortunately, despite these thought-provoking insights, the book
loses much of its credibility because of the author's obsessive zeal
to deprecate Hinduism. This lack of balance is evident from Ilaiah's
attempt to tarnish the Hindu faith as "spiritual Fascism" as opposed
to "spiritual democracies" like Islam, Christianity and Buddhism. Even
if one was to concede that unlike Hinduism, the others are unburdened
by a codified caste hierarchy, to glorify them as all-embracing
democratic religions is way over the top, particularly in the case of
Islam and Christianity. He seems to conveniently forget the many
iniquities of the two faiths as they have been practised over the
centuries, and that even if they did not have an internalised caste
system, they were no less guilty than Hinduism in ill-treating or
ostracising others, both within and outside the community.


Ilaiah describes Hinduism as "spiritual fascism", as opposed to the
"spiritual democracies" of Islam, Christianity and Buddhism.

Nor does Ilaiah's utopian dream of a spiritual democracy propelled by
any united push from Dalits, backward castes and tribals have any
basis in the real world. We have seen how, in the only state where
Dalits have managed to achieve political empowerment, their main
opponent has not been the Brahmins or other upper castes but the
Yadavs, a community which the author places firmly in the bahujan
social segment. Indeed, this fierce hostility between the Dalits and
one of Ilaiah's chosen bahujan communities is the result of the
standoff between the former, who are landless, and the latter, who are
their landlord oppressors, which renders fallacious the author's
logic. Similarly, Muslims, another social segment in Ilaiah's proposed
coalition, are not unanimous in their approach to Dalits or tribals.
In fact, there are many Muslims, particularly in the upper crust, who
would much rather have a Brahmin-Hindu leadership. Even tribals and
Dalits are not always on the same side, as seen tragically in the
Kandhamal carnage when tribals massacred Dalit Christians.

Clearly, Ilaiah's prediction about the demise of Hinduism based on the
future formation of a giant anti-Hindu congregation is far-fetched.
Interestingly, the author, otherwise publicly supportive of Mayawati
and her politics, is silent in the book on her social engineering
experiments in Uttar Pradesh and the remarkable success she has had in
manoeuvring Brahmin-dominated political parties and communities to
empower Dalits.


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[ZESTCaste] TN Govt Directed to Pay Monthly Pension to Dalit Woman

 

http://news.outlookindia.com/item.aspx?676619

TN Govt Directed to Pay Monthly Pension to Dalit Woman
Madurai | Mar 13, 2010

A division bench of the Madras High Court has directed the Tamil Nadu
government to pay a monthly pension of Rs 1000 to a Dalit woman, whose
husband was murdered by caste Hindus in Tiruchirapalli district.

Justices F.M.Ibrahim Kalifullah and K B K Vasuki directed the
government to provide educational allowance to the woman's children in
one month,disposing a Public Interest Litigation.

The bench directed Tiruchi District Collector and Adidravidar and
tribal welfare department secretary to take steps to pay pension
arrears, besides ensuring that the money was disbursed on or before
the tenth day of every month.

Petitioner's Counsel said the Government had paid only a lump sum of
Rs two lakh and not the monthly pension,as stated under SC and ST
tribes (Prevention of Atrocities rules 1995.

The Bench said the government should follow statutory provisions. "In
as much as the reliefs have tobe borne by the state by virtue of
statutory prescription, it is imperative that such benefits are
granted without any further loss of time to the victims," they said.

The Judges asked the Tiruchi Police commissioner to issue suitable
instructions to cantonment, police station under his jurisdiction to
register cases against all those who allegedly threatened some
witnesses when the latter had gone to the first Additional Session
court on Septemer 14 last

The Commissioner was ordered to ensure that after the case was
registered, it was transferred to an officer in the rank of Assistant
Commissioner of Police,as stipulated under SC/ST(Prevention of
atrocities Act).The ACP should file the report within one month.
Filed At: Mar 13, 2010 15:19 IST , Edited At: Mar 13, 2010 15:1

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