Many empirical studies have been produced by the renowned institutions to prove how the caste system creates a vicious cycle of poverty and discrimination that affects the people at the lower rungs depriving them not only their rights as human beings but also deprives of them of their lives. The National Crime Report Bureau reports periodically the sad state of crime against humanity committed by India’s caste system. The worst hit of this discrimination is women who belong to the Dalit population. In the scale of social degradation, the worst kind of discrimination is faced by the women from the so-called scavenging community. Their lives are the daily tales of discrimination, degradation and untimely deaths.

The UN drawing on from the research done by the Indian Institute of Dalit Studies reported that the lifespan of Dalit woman is 14 years lesser than the other women in India. For more details, please see the news published in the Indian Express.

Why is it so?

The caste system and the system of patriarchy in India are intertwined in such a way that the annihilation of the caste system is impossible without the liberation of women in India. Caste as an enclosed endogamous class must enslave and control the sexuality of women and therefore there are strict codes for women throughout the social structure. The women as such were never given as much as importance in the religious scriptures of Brahminism. They were not even considered in the divine theory of creation. The religion and culture of India are anti-women, but it becomes inhumanly anti-women in case of women from the Dalit community. The UN reports objectively proves what is the case of the Dalit women: they have to pay for the discrimination with their lives.

Dalit women suffer the worst form of discrimination, not only for being a woman but also for being a Dalit women make the life of Dalit women miserable to the extent which can’t be described in words.

A social movement strongly inspired and led by the Dalit women is ultimately going to destroy the caste system. For most of the Dalit women, the double (in the majority if the case, triple) discrimination of gender and caste (and class, in the majority of the cases) is difficult to surmount as they have to also face the problems within as much as without the society they live in. An emergence of the highly educated class among the Dalit women recently can potentially play a great role in the liberation of not only Dalit women but also Dalit men and this development is perhaps the witness to the shape of things which are going to emerge.

Author – Mangesh Dahiwale, Human Rights Activist

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