Ram’s Indian Majority Party, which maintains that lower caste Hindus make up 75 percent of India’s population, has in recent weeks been intensifying its campaign to do something about the 10,000 atrocities that are recorded every year against untouchables.
Prime Minister Singh is clearly on the defensive. After Dhanraj’s death, he hastily organized a visit to his constituency, Fatehpur, where the incident took place. He did not stop in Kuchchi’’s village; there was no point. Congress I people had already brought the widow to Delhi and sequestered her at party headquarters, But Singh did visit the villages nearby, and at each stop he spoke out on the issue.
“These atrocities will not be tolerated,” he declared at one point. “I dare anyone to make any atrocities against harijans.”
A Western journalist accompanying the prime minister asked how such a thing could happen in his own district, within his own caste, and he replied:
“It’s all over the country. Upper castes have a hand over the lower castes. But our policy is clear. We stand behind the (untouchable) castes.”
But no one stood behind Dhanraj and his bride until his death became a national issue not the police, not Singh’s civil administration, not even ‘the courts.
“When Dhanraj was screaming in pain, shouting, “Save me, save me, save me,” no one helped us at all,” Kuchchi told a reporter, weeping throughout a three hour interview. “Everyone just let him die.”
For Kuchchi, the incident that led to her husband’s death is hardly a political affair.
Both she and her husband were chamaras,” a shoemaker caste, and in India anything to do with the feet is considered so vile it is left to the untouchables. Over the years, as machines took over the task of making shoes, the “chamaras” were brought to the fields by landed upper caste Hindus and became little more than slaves, who work for a few rupees a day, or a fist sized ball of wheat.
But even among the “chamaras,” ancient human customs such as marriage, for example are sacred.
Article extracted from this publication >> June 15, 1990
