http://www.colby.edu/news_events/c/n/091211/2577004/oak-fellow-fatima-burnad-fights-indias-caste-system-/
Oak Fellow Fights India's Caste System
September 12, 2011
by Stephen Collins '74
Oak Fellow Fights India's Caste System
Fatima Burnad, Oak Fellow, 2011
At age 11 Fatima Burnad was already making trouble for civil
authorities. Near Chennai, in southern India, where Burnad grew up,
one of her friends was severely mistreated -- burned and beaten -- by
the family that employed her as a maid. The 11-year-old girl
complained to the police but was taken right back to work at her
employers', who were not even reprimanded. Burnad was so outraged she
wrote up a petition of protest, collected signatures around the
neighborhood, and presented it to the police.
So began a lifetime of activism that led to more than one
incarceration -- and to Burnad being named the 2011 Oak Human Rights
Fellow at Colby. The fellowship offers a semester of respite for
research, teaching, and writing and is awarded to one front-line human
rights activist each year.
For the past 35 years Burnad, 59, has worked to end India's caste
system and discrimination against the Dalit (sometimes called
"Untouchable") and tribal people. Those groups, which make up 24
percent of India's population, are routinely excluded and
marginalized. Affirmative action has led to educational opportunities,
said Burnad. But, despite degrees and credentials, they are denied
interviews, not to mention actual employment in government and private
sectors, because their names reveal their caste.
"We have about 550 judges in the supreme court. Out of that, we have
only 13 to 15 Dalit judges," said Burnad, herself a Dalit who, like
her father, is a Christian convert. "The Dalit will get the
fourth-class job. First, second, third is occupied by the higher
castes, so Dalits are always at the bottom." The result: the Dalit
people remain poor and largely landless. "The discrimination
continues."
Burnad previously visited the United States (Atlanta), Japan, and
Australia, where she saw de facto segregation and discrimination
against African Americans, Burakumin, and Aborigine populations
respectively. She also studied United Nations human rights reports.
"The worst thing is in my country. The worst of all. We are not able
to change the situation, and it's getting worse."
And Dalits are increasingly afraid to challenge the status quo. "No
other communities are helping them to develop," Burnad said. "If a
Dalit girl is raped, only the Dalit are raising their voice. Only the
Dalit women -- the Dalit men do not take it as a problem."
Burnad said her father encouraged her to become an activist in the
1970s, when she was a teenager. "I was trained as a community
organizer on Alinksy's method -- Saul Alinsky from Chicago ghettos." A
colleague of Alinsky's came to her village to lead the training. "That
was my beginning."
Her father urged her to take up the cause of 30 poor shoemakers's
families in the village where he taught. They had been given 49 acres
in the 1950s, but other Dalits sold the land to a higher-caste man for
construction of a church. "It created a very big problem," Burnad
said. When she brought the church's bishop to the village to confront
him, local leaders disrupted the meeting and deported the trainer from
Chicago.
In 1979 Burnad founded the Society for Rural Education and
Development, which seeks economic opportunity and political influence
for the marginalized people of India, especially Dalit women. She is
now recognized as a national leader in India's social movements.
Burnad was jailed in the 1990s for protesting land grabs by the
government when it displaced Dalits from their ancestral community to
build a naval air station. "They were all the time talking about
national security," she said. "For us, people security is very
important."
Soon after arriving at Colby she was mobilizing allies to protest the
planned execution of Sri Lankans implicated in the assassination of
Rajiv Gandhi 17 year ago. They merely supplied batteries they didn't
know would be used to make a bomb, she said, but the moral issue was
her opposition to taking anyone's life. The condemned were granted an
eight-week postponement by a court in Chennai, she said, vowing to
continue the protest.
She also looked ahead to her semester on campus. "I want to read and
write and then, in seminars, to learn from the students what their
reactions are to what I'm doing," Burnad said. "I want to see how far
the protests, the demonstrations, the public meetings are exposing the
issues. Is this enough? Or do I have to do something much more? What
is going on? Why still our community remains the same? How are we
going to change the mindset of the people? It's not enough if we are
not questioning the whole fundamental aspect of the caste system."
Her goal -- to take her activism to a new level. "I want this college
help me to see a proper way of doing things."
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