No One Killed The Dalits

No One Killed the Dalits  Text of the Seventh Anuradha Ghandy Memorial Lecture 2015  Today, we are haunted and outraged by what has just happened a few days ago in Faridabad. Two little children, two-and-a-half-year-old Vaibhav and eleven-month-old Divya were burnt to death.1 These are the latest victims, in a long list of victims that caste has consumed. And yet, even as we are moved to tears and rage by the sheer inhumanity and the cruelty, let us remember, and let us make it a point to never forget that this is not the first time that caste-Hindus have killed children. Enough to make us borrow Rushdie’s words and say: “The killing of children is a caste-Hindu specialty.” 2 What are our most stark memories of the Gujarat genocide in 2002 where thousands of Muslims were killed by Hindu mobs?3 Can we ever forget the row of dead bodies of children, arranged one next to the other, lined up endlessly? It is not only something that exhibits itself in On 20 October 2015, a Dalit family’s hut was burnt by Rajputs in the village of Sunpedh in Faridabad near New Delhi, killing the two children Vaibhav and Divya, and seriously burning their parents Rekha (23 years) and Jitender (31 years). The oppression of the Dalits by the landowning Rajputs was well-known, and seven police personnel had in fact been directed to provide protection to Jitender’s family for the previous months. They failed to protect the family. 2 Salman Rushdie, writing in The Guardian, in the immediate aftermath of the Gujarat riots in March 2002, observed: “The murder of children is something of an Indian specialty.” His article also ended on the characteristically flamboyant note: “So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name. The problem’s name is God.” To extend his metaphor, those of who look at the history of atrocities against Dalits might also add that the problem’s name is caste. 3 For details please refer the Human Rights Watch report, “We Have No Orders to Save You: State Participation and Complicity in Communal Violence in Gujarat”, April 2002; and “Threatened Existence: A Feminist Analysis of the Genocide in Gujarat” by the International Initiative for Justice, December 2003 among a host of other fact-finding reports that highlight the violence, murder and brutality that children and pregnant women faced. 1 1 these inter-religious clashes, but let us realize that this is something that constitutes the caste mindset, the Hindu mindset. There is an undeniably long history of the killing of children. And especially the killing of Dalit children—it requires a treatise in itself. It would do well to remember Kilvenmani. On Christmas Day 1968, 44 men, women and children were burnt alive to death—all of them were Dalit and landless, all of them from the village of Kilvenmani, striking for higher wages, demanding their little, immediate rights. 23 of those burnt to death in Kilvenmani were infants and children. Even as we talk of this atrocity, I want to tell you a story that is repeated again and again, by all those who have survived the massacre in Kilvenmani, by those who are their descendants. Almost everyone of them who has stayed in the village has taken refuge in Pandari Ramayya’s hut. When the mob of landlords comes to burn them to death, a young mother tries to save her one year old son by throwing the little boy out of the hut, hoping, in that moment of complete, total despair, that someone in the mob will take pity, that someone will at least spare the life of the child. That does not happen. That child is caught by the mob, hacked into pieces, and its body is thrown right back into the burning hut. This happens again and again, all through India’s glorious history of killing Dali