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Recently by RiazHaq
- Pakistan's Siachin Film Wins Top International Award
- Sane Indian Warns Against "Unconcealed Delight"
- India's Broken People
- The True Picture of India versus Pakistan
- Pakistani Tailenders Phenomenal Stand at Abu Dhabi
- Wide Gender Gap in South Asia Leaves Women Behind
- Pakistanis Defy Taliban Terror
- Feudal Slavery Survives in Pakistan
- Nepalese Maoists Aiding Indian Rebels
- South Asians Lack Focus on Primary Education
- Pakistan's Haq Beats Roger Federer in Tennis Doubles
- Is Pakistan Too Big to Fail?
- 1984: Sikhs Remember Murdered Friends and Family
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- Bloody Revolution in India?
Caste System: India's Apartheid
More than 240 million people in South Asia live a precarious existence, shunned by much of society because of their ranks as untouchables or Dalits at the bottom of a rigid caste system. Dalits are discriminated against, denied access to land, forced to work in slave-like conditions, and routinely abused, even killed, at the hands of the police and of higher-caste groups that enjoy the state's protection.
Dalits in India may not cross the line dividing their part of the village from that occupied by higher castes. They may not use the same wells, visit the same temples and churches, drink from the same cups in tea stalls, or lay claim to land that is legally theirs. Dalit children are frequently made to sit in the back of classrooms, and communities as a whole are made to perform degrading rituals in the name of caste. Dalit women are frequent victims of sexual abuse.
In what has been called Asia's hidden apartheid, entire villages in many Indian states remain completely segregated by caste. Caste-based abuse is also prevalent in Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Japan, and several African states.
The situation:
* Over 100,000 cases of rape, murder, arson, and other atrocities against Dalits are reported in India each year. Given that Dalits are both reluctant and unable (for lack of police cooperation) to report crimes against themselves, the actual number of abuses is presumably much higher.1
* India's own agencies have reported that these cases are typically related to attempts by Dalits to defy the social order, or demand minimum wages and their basic human rights. Many of the atrocities are committed by the police. Even perpetrators of large-scale massacres have escaped prosecution.2
* An estimated forty million people in India, among them fifteen million children, are bonded laborers, working in slave-like conditions in order to pay off a debt. A majority of them are Dalits.3
* According to government statistics, an estimated one million Dalits are manual scavengers who clear feces from public and private latrines and dispose of dead animals; unofficial estimates are much higher.4
* The sexual slavery of Dalit girls and women continues to receive religious sanction. Under the devadasi system, thousands of Dalit girls in India's southern states are ceremoniously dedicated or married to a deity or to a temple. Once dedicated, they are unable to marry, forced to become prostitutes for upper-caste community members, and eventually auctioned into an urban brothel.5
Developments
* Since the early 1990s, violence against Dalits has escalated dramatically in response to a growing Dalit rights movements.6
* Although untouchability was abolished under India's constitution in 1950, and numerous laws have since been enacted to tackle caste-related problems of bonded labor, man ual scavenging, devadasi, and other atrocities against Dalit community members, much of the legislation remains completely unenforced. Laws are openly flouted and state complicity in attacks on Dalit communities has become a well-documented pattern.
* In December 1999, the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights -a grassroots movement of Indian human rights groups in fourteen states - collectively submitted over 2.5 million signatures to the Indian prime minister demanding the abolishment of untouchability and urging U.N. bodies to squarely address the issue of caste-based abuse and discrimination.
* Numerous U.N. treaty bodies have called on the Indian government to improve the situation of Dalits. The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) has clearly stated that the situation of Dalits falls within the scope of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and that the term descent contained in Article 1 of the Convention does not refer solely to race, and encompasses the situation of Dalits.
* Activists from around the world, including anti-apartheid activists in South Africa and African-American activists in the United States, have already begun to support the Dalit struggle.
* The Indian government has consistently attempted to sabotage the efforts of Indian NGOs to raise awareness of the caste struggle at preparatory meetings in the lead-up to WCAR. The situation of Dalits stands alone as the only issue to have been systematically cut out of the conference's intergovernmental process so far.9
Next Steps
* India and other concerned governments should enact and/or enforce legislation to abolish caste-based discrimination, and where applicable, caste-related practices of untouchability, bonded labor, manual scavenging, and the devadasi system.
* Concerned governments should also extend invitations to the Special Rapporteur on racism to investigate caste-based discrimination and other forms of discrimination based on descent in their respective countries.
* All nations should ensure that caste-based and similar discrimination against marginalized populations in Asia and Africa is explicitly addressed in the draft declaration and programme of action of the WCAR.
* Dalits, Burakumin in Japan, and other populations in similar situations should be explicitly acknowledged as groups of people who have been subject to perennial and persistent forms of discrimination and abuse on the basis of their descent.
Source: Human Rights Watch
Related Links:
Haq's Musings
Can Indian Democracy Deliver?
G rinding Poverty in Resurgent India
Pakistan's Choice: Globalization or Talibanization
The Tornado Awaiting India
Countering Militancy in FATA
Political, Economic and Social Reforms in Pakistan
Fix ing Sanitation Crisis in India
Western Myths About "Stable, Peaceful, Prosperous" India
Taliban Target Landed Elite
Feudal Punjab Fertile For Terror
Caste: India's Apartheid
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Latest comments
Posted by RiazHaq on
Sunday November 1, 2009 08:23 am
My Dear Pathetic Bigots:
This is the problem with you guys, you cannot digest truthful observations and honesty....and the plain and obvious truth is that India remains a poor, backward, third world country with grand ambitions in its neighborhood.
India has over a billion people with a government having a worse record than Pakistan's in terms of hunger, poverty, sanitation and other very basic human necessities. UN agencies and various aid orgs from other nations are pumping billions of dollars to provide basic relief to help the poor in India barely survive.
India's share of the world's poorest people has increased to 39 percent from 25 percent in 1980. In comparison, the Below Poverty Line population worldwide has decreased from 1,470 million to 970 million. There are reportedly 301 million Indians below the poverty line, just 19 million less than in 1983. The Human Development Report by the UN has been ranking India among the lowest 60 or 65 countries in the list of 193 nations that are part of the annual study. India's poor performance on this score was in spite of the around nine percent growth rate in its GDP. There are reports in the media about farmers committing suicide or selling their wives to pay mounting debts. Though the recorded figures of such cases aren't high in a big country such as India with 1.17 billion people, it still indicates the desperate state of certain communities.
This is the problem with you guys, you cannot digest truthful observations and honesty....and the plain and obvious truth is that India remains a poor, backward, third world country with grand ambitions in its neighborhood.
India has over a billion people with a government having a worse record than Pakistan's in terms of hunger, poverty, sanitation and other very basic human necessities. UN agencies and various aid orgs from other nations are pumping billions of dollars to provide basic relief to help the poor in India barely survive.
India's share of the world's poorest people has increased to 39 percent from 25 percent in 1980. In comparison, the Below Poverty Line population worldwide has decreased from 1,470 million to 970 million. There are reportedly 301 million Indians below the poverty line, just 19 million less than in 1983. The Human Development Report by the UN has been ranking India among the lowest 60 or 65 countries in the list of 193 nations that are part of the annual study. India's poor performance on this score was in spite of the around nine percent growth rate in its GDP. There are reports in the media about farmers committing suicide or selling their wives to pay mounting debts. Though the recorded figures of such cases aren't high in a big country such as India with 1.17 billion people, it still indicates the desperate state of certain communities.
Posted by bharat25t on
Thursday October 29, 2009 02:40 pm
Some one on Chowk wrote...
"This divide has been obscured by the smoke of all the other conflicts going on in Pakistan and its immediate neighbourhood:
(a) inter-provincial, associated largely with Punjabi domination and chauvinism
(b) inter-ethnic - Punjabi vs Baluch vs Pathan vs Muhajir vs Sindhi etc.
(b) sectarian
(c) across Pakistan's international borders - with Iran, with Afghanistan, with India in Kashmir and elsewhere
(d) with the US.
None of these conflicts can be considered in isolation - they tend, literally, to bleed into one another. Nevertheless, it was probably an explicit concern of long-term Pakistani state strategy to try to keep various internal and external conflicts disentangled (For example - it must have tried to prevent its use of Punjabi jihadis in Indian Kashmir from fuelling sectarian violence in Pakistan Punjab). Ironically, it may be part of the establishment's current tactics to intentionally overstate the linkages between the various other conflicts, and to cause 'minor' flareups in some of them, in an attempt to deflect the flow of events from the anti-feudal Islamic-Maoist fusion that terrifies them the most"
This shows India shd focus more on saving its neighbors from killing each other like animals.....
"This divide has been obscured by the smoke of all the other conflicts going on in Pakistan and its immediate neighbourhood:
(a) inter-provincial, associated largely with Punjabi domination and chauvinism
(b) inter-ethnic - Punjabi vs Baluch vs Pathan vs Muhajir vs Sindhi etc.
(b) sectarian
(c) across Pakistan's international borders - with Iran, with Afghanistan, with India in Kashmir and elsewhere
(d) with the US.
None of these conflicts can be considered in isolation - they tend, literally, to bleed into one another. Nevertheless, it was probably an explicit concern of long-term Pakistani state strategy to try to keep various internal and external conflicts disentangled (For example - it must have tried to prevent its use of Punjabi jihadis in Indian Kashmir from fuelling sectarian violence in Pakistan Punjab). Ironically, it may be part of the establishment's current tactics to intentionally overstate the linkages between the various other conflicts, and to cause 'minor' flareups in some of them, in an attempt to deflect the flow of events from the anti-feudal Islamic-Maoist fusion that terrifies them the most"
This shows India shd focus more on saving its neighbors from killing each other like animals.....
Posted by bharat25t on
Thursday October 29, 2009 02:34 pm
We have a name for discrimination in India "Caste".
Pakistan has also discrimination but is broadly categorized as one of several ills of Islam..
1) Discrimination of millions of poor....if they revolt kill them....is Pak policy....or say...Jihad...Jihad....to mislead them...
2) Discrimination of Women from low life Pakis to the few English Speaking Pakis who thrive on robbing their own poor.
3) Discrimination against Pasthuns..... millions died in Afghan and Pak tribal areas.... and Pak Panjabis are tradeing death as commodity in International begging market.
4) Discrimination against a Child..... Pak is one of very few countries...where the line "Mothers hate Others more than they love their Children" holds good.
5) Discrimination against Common Sense..... Pakistan is up in flames and slowly dying a Dogs death....and Riaz bhai cant keep his Internet Jihadi mindset aside for a few hours and mourn the dead......
In view of Pakis being arrsted in Chicago.for anti India activities...Its getting to a situation where Pakis on Chowk....are to be carefully scrutinized for subversive activities and possible links to Terror outfits.... Who know what closet Jihadis, terror sympathizers are upto...
RAW shd set up several USA offices and monitor Pakis in USA 24/7
Pakistan has also discrimination but is broadly categorized as one of several ills of Islam..
1) Discrimination of millions of poor....if they revolt kill them....is Pak policy....or say...Jihad...Jihad....to mislead them...
2) Discrimination of Women from low life Pakis to the few English Speaking Pakis who thrive on robbing their own poor.
3) Discrimination against Pasthuns..... millions died in Afghan and Pak tribal areas.... and Pak Panjabis are tradeing death as commodity in International begging market.
4) Discrimination against a Child..... Pak is one of very few countries...where the line "Mothers hate Others more than they love their Children" holds good.
5) Discrimination against Common Sense..... Pakistan is up in flames and slowly dying a Dogs death....and Riaz bhai cant keep his Internet Jihadi mindset aside for a few hours and mourn the dead......
In view of Pakis being arrsted in Chicago.for anti India activities...Its getting to a situation where Pakis on Chowk....are to be carefully scrutinized for subversive activities and possible links to Terror outfits.... Who know what closet Jihadis, terror sympathizers are upto...
RAW shd set up several USA offices and monitor Pakis in USA 24/7
Posted by fatehmolla on
Thursday October 29, 2009 02:24 pm
"""Do you understand the subject of this post?"""
YES!
Here is what your post says about Indians:
More than 240 million people in South Asia live a precarious existence!
Precarious means what?
Need the dictionary online?
····Dangerously lacking in security or stability·····
Hence I responded adequately vis a vis yr stupid post.
And here is your other post:
"""According to UNICEF-WHO and Indian government data, two-thirds of the people in India defecate in the open.""""
Against which I have pluged the holes accordingly.
As for the academic qualifications, you dont know who I am. As I dont advertise myself as a a bitch next door to attract the bsns, just because I dont have any axe to grind here at chowk least.
YES!
Here is what your post says about Indians:
More than 240 million people in South Asia live a precarious existence!
Precarious means what?
Need the dictionary online?
····Dangerously lacking in security or stability·····
Hence I responded adequately vis a vis yr stupid post.
And here is your other post:
"""According to UNICEF-WHO and Indian government data, two-thirds of the people in India defecate in the open.""""
Against which I have pluged the holes accordingly.
As for the academic qualifications, you dont know who I am. As I dont advertise myself as a a bitch next door to attract the bsns, just because I dont have any axe to grind here at chowk least.
Posted by RiazHaq on
Thursday October 29, 2009 01:38 pm
fate: Where did you learn to read? Have you ever passed any basic reading comprehension test?
Do you understand the subject of this post? If you do, please tell me how your rabidly bigoted comments have any relevance to the topic at hand?
Are you denying that caste discrimination and caste-based segregation exist in India? Or simply diverting attention from the ravages of caste-ism that UN considers racism?
Do you understand the subject of this post? If you do, please tell me how your rabidly bigoted comments have any relevance to the topic at hand?
Are you denying that caste discrimination and caste-based segregation exist in India? Or simply diverting attention from the ravages of caste-ism that UN considers racism?
Posted by fatehmolla on
Thursday October 29, 2009 01:12 pm
Since Pakistan is taking advantage of liberal kafer financing from IMF-WB-ADB to whom they have not paid off - on the contrary when the time comes to plead (owing to non availability of funds) THEY RESCHEDULE THE PAYMENTS.....Pakistan has never paid to its creditors earnestly as have other nations.
Bottom line:
This nefarious nation is living beyond means on kafer´s money which is termed HALAL, hence Pakistan is up to old tricks - help us, otherwise Taliban will take over Pakistan´s nukes.....
This bluff has been called by Indians (when they shot Atlantique with 16 Paki crews), and by Americans in 2001 (are u with us - or against us?).
Pakistan is fooked up nation who is surviving on treachery. Musharaf has found his way into a 100 million dollars deal with US-UK, tell all (AQ Khan-Nukes).
Based on this, Israel to attack Iran end of this year. And USA is slowly taking control of Pakistani terretorial and political interests.
1000 marines landing in Pakistan, and USA building 54 acres fortress as embassy for what?
Just to fook Pakistan slowly down the road!
Bottom line:
This nefarious nation is living beyond means on kafer´s money which is termed HALAL, hence Pakistan is up to old tricks - help us, otherwise Taliban will take over Pakistan´s nukes.....
This bluff has been called by Indians (when they shot Atlantique with 16 Paki crews), and by Americans in 2001 (are u with us - or against us?).
Pakistan is fooked up nation who is surviving on treachery. Musharaf has found his way into a 100 million dollars deal with US-UK, tell all (AQ Khan-Nukes).
Based on this, Israel to attack Iran end of this year. And USA is slowly taking control of Pakistani terretorial and political interests.
1000 marines landing in Pakistan, and USA building 54 acres fortress as embassy for what?
Just to fook Pakistan slowly down the road!
Posted by fatehmolla on
Thursday October 29, 2009 12:37 pm
1,500 activists have been trained in Pakistan, as part of the Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) campaign, to try and persuade people to stop defecating in the open.
The campaign, initiated by the World Bank's Water and Sanitation Program (WSP), is striving to banish open defecation from 564 villages. The main problem is to change the way people think and behave. 'We want people to need a toilet,' says activist Wasim Aslam. 'We don’t just give it to them as they may not necessarily use it. We work on their psychology.'
The campaign has been quite successful. Javed Ali Khan of the Ministry of Environment says that open defecation in rural areas fell from about 74% in 1990 to 45% in 2006. According to the Ministry, 73% of the population now has access to a latrine - 96% in urban areas and 62% in rural areas.
Although the majority of the activists are men, much of their success is due to the women behind them. Irfanullah, a local counsellor in Peshawar, said that had it not been for his wife, he would not have made any headway.
PLEASE NOTE - WORLD BANK´S DOLLARS ARE AT WORK....
The campaign, initiated by the World Bank's Water and Sanitation Program (WSP), is striving to banish open defecation from 564 villages. The main problem is to change the way people think and behave. 'We want people to need a toilet,' says activist Wasim Aslam. 'We don’t just give it to them as they may not necessarily use it. We work on their psychology.'
The campaign has been quite successful. Javed Ali Khan of the Ministry of Environment says that open defecation in rural areas fell from about 74% in 1990 to 45% in 2006. According to the Ministry, 73% of the population now has access to a latrine - 96% in urban areas and 62% in rural areas.
Although the majority of the activists are men, much of their success is due to the women behind them. Irfanullah, a local counsellor in Peshawar, said that had it not been for his wife, he would not have made any headway.
PLEASE NOTE - WORLD BANK´S DOLLARS ARE AT WORK....
Posted by RiazHaq on
Thursday October 29, 2009 10:38 am
Here is a recent report in the Nation by Barabara Crossete:
Navi Pillay, the South African judge who became the United Nations high commissioner for human rights last year, is moving to the forefront of a campaign to free more than 250 million people from the indignities and horrors of caste discrimination. No previous commissioner has dared to openly take on this pernicious system, the majority of whose miserable victims live in India.
"This is the year 2009, and people have been talking about caste oppression for more than a hundred years," Pillay says. "It's time to move on this issue."
For Pillay, who is of Indian descent, the subject of caste has been hidden too long by obfuscation on the part of governments, not only in India, that have successfully argued in UN conferences that existing international conventions against human rights abuses do not apply. Caste did not figure in the official conclusions of a conference on racism and other forms of intolerance in Durban in 2001, after intense lobbying by India, and remained on the periphery of a review of that conference earlier this year.
That being the case, Pillay said in an interview in her New York office on a visit from her headquarters in Geneva, there may well have to be a new international convention written to apply directly to caste.
The campaign is gathering momentum among a wide range of global nongovernmental organizations, religious groups and, lately, a few governments working from a draft document on eliminating discrimination based on work or descent--in other words, being born into predestined deprivation, assigned to the most menial of jobs and segregated socially from the better born.
Pillay would like to see this draft endorsed by the member nations of the Human Rights Council and by all governments, many of which are in denial over the harmful effects of the caste system.
She relayed a story about a group of women who came to her in Geneva recently with a brick from a latrine they had torn down in protest against being forced to carry away human excrement in their bare hands. They wanted to make the point that despite India's frequent assertions that "untouchables," who call themselves Dalits ("broken people"), were no longer condemned by birth to do this job, there were still tens of thousands of such latrines in the country, and the filthy, soul-destroying work continues.
"They have good laws in India, and they have media; they have well developed civil society organizations," Pillay said. "So how come there is no implementation of these good laws, these good intentions?" Discrimination by caste is unconstitutional in India, which also has affirmative action programs for Dalits and others at the bottom of society. Dalits have risen to high office through politics, though even democracy has not helped most of them.
It was, ironically, Nepal that broke ranks with India in September and publicly joined the campaign against caste discrimination. Nepal, a majority Hindu nation like India, is home to 4.5 million Dalits, according to the Feminist Dalit Organization of Nepal. Women among the Dalits everywhere are especially vulnerable to victimization of all kinds, most often sexual abuse.
Women of lowly birth are also sometimes accused of witchcraft, and not only in Asia. Pillay said that in a country in Africa girls and women have been jailed, and officials say they cannot release them or they would be killed. Recently in India's Jharkhand state, village women, apparently Muslims who were labeled witches by accusers, were beaten, stripped naked and forced to eat excrement, the BBC reported.
The Times of India described Nepal's unanticipated decision to align with the campaign against caste discrimination as an "embarrassment" to India, saying that it contradicts India's "stated aversion to the internationalization of the caste problem." The newspaper noted that Sweden then piled on an endorsement from the European Union, "adding to India's discomfiture."
The influence of the Hindu caste system has seeped across other borders in South Asia, into Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, sometimes affecting even Muslims based on their birth or ancestry. Converts to Christianity or Buddhism who flee Hinduism to escape caste often remain branded for life nonetheless.
Dalits, regarded widely as unclean or polluted, can, and have, faced death at the hands of upper caste people for infractions such as taking water from a forbidden well or entering a Brahmin temple. There have been lynchings for intermarriage with higher castes. In some places, particularly in north India, Dalits vote at segregated polling stations. At roadside cafes they often get separate utensils, if they are served at all.
It need not be that way, Pillay, 68, notes from her own experience. Indians in South Africa, a minority in a suppressed black majority under apartheid, soon abandoned caste consciousness, she said. "I know that in the early days they did practice that, because my parents told us," she said. "I think it would be my grandparents' generation. But it broke down by force of social pressures."
As high commissioner for human rights, Pillay takes a broad view of her responsibilities, and that applies to causes she is willing to take up as well as to her definition of human rights. She focuses not only on political or civil rights but also societal shortcomings and abuses. On caste, she said she looks for other forms of similar discrimination globally, anywhere people are held in forms of slavery based on birth, for example, or are relegated to second-class citizenship for other reasons.
"What alerted me to it is that a Bolivian woman minister who addressed the Durban review conference spoke about slavery in Bolivia and described the conditions. In Mauritania [there is] slavery as well."
Pillay has also made three public speeches on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues and produced a video on the subject to encourage governments to frame a declaration on LGBT rights.
When we spoke, Pillay had just come from a UN panel where victims of human trafficking presented powerful testimonies. She was struck by a fact thrown out by the panel's moderator: that there are more people being trafficked today than in the entire historical slave trade.
Caste and new forms of slavery are not unrelated, she argued in a recent op-ed article for the Huffington Post, where she wrote that landlessness, debt bondage and labor bondage, involving millions of young children, are the lot of the lowest castes.
"As high commissioner I promised to be evenhanded and raise all issues affecting all human beings," Pillay said. "I can't flow with the political concerns of anyone who doesn't want one or another issue addressed because it embarrasses them or because they are dealing with it in their own way."
Caste is now on notice: the UN has failed, she said, to educate people and change mindsets to combat the taint of caste. "How long is the cycle going to go on where those who can do something about it say, We can't, because it's the people, it's their tradition; we have to go slowly.
"Slavery and apartheid could be removed, so now [caste] can be removed through an international expression of outrage."
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091109/crossette?rel=EmailNation
Navi Pillay, the South African judge who became the United Nations high commissioner for human rights last year, is moving to the forefront of a campaign to free more than 250 million people from the indignities and horrors of caste discrimination. No previous commissioner has dared to openly take on this pernicious system, the majority of whose miserable victims live in India.
"This is the year 2009, and people have been talking about caste oppression for more than a hundred years," Pillay says. "It's time to move on this issue."
For Pillay, who is of Indian descent, the subject of caste has been hidden too long by obfuscation on the part of governments, not only in India, that have successfully argued in UN conferences that existing international conventions against human rights abuses do not apply. Caste did not figure in the official conclusions of a conference on racism and other forms of intolerance in Durban in 2001, after intense lobbying by India, and remained on the periphery of a review of that conference earlier this year.
That being the case, Pillay said in an interview in her New York office on a visit from her headquarters in Geneva, there may well have to be a new international convention written to apply directly to caste.
The campaign is gathering momentum among a wide range of global nongovernmental organizations, religious groups and, lately, a few governments working from a draft document on eliminating discrimination based on work or descent--in other words, being born into predestined deprivation, assigned to the most menial of jobs and segregated socially from the better born.
Pillay would like to see this draft endorsed by the member nations of the Human Rights Council and by all governments, many of which are in denial over the harmful effects of the caste system.
She relayed a story about a group of women who came to her in Geneva recently with a brick from a latrine they had torn down in protest against being forced to carry away human excrement in their bare hands. They wanted to make the point that despite India's frequent assertions that "untouchables," who call themselves Dalits ("broken people"), were no longer condemned by birth to do this job, there were still tens of thousands of such latrines in the country, and the filthy, soul-destroying work continues.
"They have good laws in India, and they have media; they have well developed civil society organizations," Pillay said. "So how come there is no implementation of these good laws, these good intentions?" Discrimination by caste is unconstitutional in India, which also has affirmative action programs for Dalits and others at the bottom of society. Dalits have risen to high office through politics, though even democracy has not helped most of them.
It was, ironically, Nepal that broke ranks with India in September and publicly joined the campaign against caste discrimination. Nepal, a majority Hindu nation like India, is home to 4.5 million Dalits, according to the Feminist Dalit Organization of Nepal. Women among the Dalits everywhere are especially vulnerable to victimization of all kinds, most often sexual abuse.
Women of lowly birth are also sometimes accused of witchcraft, and not only in Asia. Pillay said that in a country in Africa girls and women have been jailed, and officials say they cannot release them or they would be killed. Recently in India's Jharkhand state, village women, apparently Muslims who were labeled witches by accusers, were beaten, stripped naked and forced to eat excrement, the BBC reported.
The Times of India described Nepal's unanticipated decision to align with the campaign against caste discrimination as an "embarrassment" to India, saying that it contradicts India's "stated aversion to the internationalization of the caste problem." The newspaper noted that Sweden then piled on an endorsement from the European Union, "adding to India's discomfiture."
The influence of the Hindu caste system has seeped across other borders in South Asia, into Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, sometimes affecting even Muslims based on their birth or ancestry. Converts to Christianity or Buddhism who flee Hinduism to escape caste often remain branded for life nonetheless.
Dalits, regarded widely as unclean or polluted, can, and have, faced death at the hands of upper caste people for infractions such as taking water from a forbidden well or entering a Brahmin temple. There have been lynchings for intermarriage with higher castes. In some places, particularly in north India, Dalits vote at segregated polling stations. At roadside cafes they often get separate utensils, if they are served at all.
It need not be that way, Pillay, 68, notes from her own experience. Indians in South Africa, a minority in a suppressed black majority under apartheid, soon abandoned caste consciousness, she said. "I know that in the early days they did practice that, because my parents told us," she said. "I think it would be my grandparents' generation. But it broke down by force of social pressures."
As high commissioner for human rights, Pillay takes a broad view of her responsibilities, and that applies to causes she is willing to take up as well as to her definition of human rights. She focuses not only on political or civil rights but also societal shortcomings and abuses. On caste, she said she looks for other forms of similar discrimination globally, anywhere people are held in forms of slavery based on birth, for example, or are relegated to second-class citizenship for other reasons.
"What alerted me to it is that a Bolivian woman minister who addressed the Durban review conference spoke about slavery in Bolivia and described the conditions. In Mauritania [there is] slavery as well."
Pillay has also made three public speeches on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues and produced a video on the subject to encourage governments to frame a declaration on LGBT rights.
When we spoke, Pillay had just come from a UN panel where victims of human trafficking presented powerful testimonies. She was struck by a fact thrown out by the panel's moderator: that there are more people being trafficked today than in the entire historical slave trade.
Caste and new forms of slavery are not unrelated, she argued in a recent op-ed article for the Huffington Post, where she wrote that landlessness, debt bondage and labor bondage, involving millions of young children, are the lot of the lowest castes.
"As high commissioner I promised to be evenhanded and raise all issues affecting all human beings," Pillay said. "I can't flow with the political concerns of anyone who doesn't want one or another issue addressed because it embarrasses them or because they are dealing with it in their own way."
Caste is now on notice: the UN has failed, she said, to educate people and change mindsets to combat the taint of caste. "How long is the cycle going to go on where those who can do something about it say, We can't, because it's the people, it's their tradition; we have to go slowly.
"Slavery and apartheid could be removed, so now [caste] can be removed through an international expression of outrage."
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091109/crossette?rel=EmailNation
Posted by RiazHaq on
Thursday October 29, 2009 10:07 am
fate: "According to the Ministry of Environment (in Pakistan), 73 percent of the population now has access to a latrine – 96 percent in urban areas, and 62 percent in rural areas.
According to Javed Ali Khan, director-general of the Ministry of Environment, ODF initiatives have benefited about 1.12 million people. But what about the rest???"
Now compare that to the situation in India. According to UNICEF-WHO and Indian government data, two-thirds of the people in India defecate in the open.
The Unicef recently said India is making progress in providing sanitation but it lags behind most of the other countries in South Asia, including Pakistan and Bangladesh, even war-torn Afghanistan.
A former Indian minister Mr Raghuvansh Prasad Singh told the BBC that more than 65% of India's rural population defecated in the open, along roadsides, railway tracks and fields, generating huge amounts of excrement every day.
According to Javed Ali Khan, director-general of the Ministry of Environment, ODF initiatives have benefited about 1.12 million people. But what about the rest???"
Now compare that to the situation in India. According to UNICEF-WHO and Indian government data, two-thirds of the people in India defecate in the open.
The Unicef recently said India is making progress in providing sanitation but it lags behind most of the other countries in South Asia, including Pakistan and Bangladesh, even war-torn Afghanistan.
A former Indian minister Mr Raghuvansh Prasad Singh told the BBC that more than 65% of India's rural population defecated in the open, along roadsides, railway tracks and fields, generating huge amounts of excrement every day.
Posted by RiazHaq on
Thursday October 29, 2009 09:36 am
Is Caste-based discrimination the same as raceism?
UN and India disagree!
In 2002, the United Nations' (UN) Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, in its general recommendation no.29, expanded the meaning of the term 'descent' in Article 1 of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), to include discrimination based on caste. The convention, which came into force in 1969, has been ratified by 173 countries, including India. Despite this, and despite the United Nations Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights reiterating that discrimination based on work and descent is a form of racial discrimination, the Indian government's stand on this issue has remained the same: caste is not race.
The CERD, an independent panel of experts established under the international convention on racial discrimination, monitors how well signatories are implementing the convention, through periodic reports submitted by State parties. The CERD provides "concluding observations" on these State reports.
India's reluctance to consider the issue seriously is clear from the way it has treated its responsibilities as a signatory to the international convention. Though periodic reports are due to the CERD every two years, all of the reports from 1998 to 2006 were submitted to the committee only in 2006 as a joint 15th-19th periodic report. When this report came up for review at the CERD's 70th session meeting at Geneva in February-March 2007, many activists were hoping that there would be a change in the Indian government's position. But it didn't happen.
Source: http://www.indiatogether.org/2008/jun/soc-casterace.htm
UN and India disagree!
In 2002, the United Nations' (UN) Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, in its general recommendation no.29, expanded the meaning of the term 'descent' in Article 1 of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), to include discrimination based on caste. The convention, which came into force in 1969, has been ratified by 173 countries, including India. Despite this, and despite the United Nations Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights reiterating that discrimination based on work and descent is a form of racial discrimination, the Indian government's stand on this issue has remained the same: caste is not race.
The CERD, an independent panel of experts established under the international convention on racial discrimination, monitors how well signatories are implementing the convention, through periodic reports submitted by State parties. The CERD provides "concluding observations" on these State reports.
India's reluctance to consider the issue seriously is clear from the way it has treated its responsibilities as a signatory to the international convention. Though periodic reports are due to the CERD every two years, all of the reports from 1998 to 2006 were submitted to the committee only in 2006 as a joint 15th-19th periodic report. When this report came up for review at the CERD's 70th session meeting at Geneva in February-March 2007, many activists were hoping that there would be a change in the Indian government's position. But it didn't happen.
Source: http://www.indiatogether.org/2008/jun/soc-casterace.htm
Posted by pmishra2 on
Thursday October 29, 2009 08:57 am
strange indeed...behind the hate-india obsession of folks like pakdoc and riaz haq is a kind of peculiar mental illness.
Never mind that things in their own country are in a big mess. They are always ready to lecture others about their deficiencies. It appears as though this is their one and only goal.
I wonder where this kind of disease comes from. Extreme inferiority complex? A kind of islamic stockholm complex - after all pakis are just indians converted to islam - so making these bizarre statements about india and indian society is a kind of deflected self-hatred?
I certainly dont know. But they would be good candidates for mental health counseling (actually sounds like most of paki educated class could do with some help in this area). There are many new medications available today to help with these problems.
Never mind that things in their own country are in a big mess. They are always ready to lecture others about their deficiencies. It appears as though this is their one and only goal.
I wonder where this kind of disease comes from. Extreme inferiority complex? A kind of islamic stockholm complex - after all pakis are just indians converted to islam - so making these bizarre statements about india and indian society is a kind of deflected self-hatred?
I certainly dont know. But they would be good candidates for mental health counseling (actually sounds like most of paki educated class could do with some help in this area). There are many new medications available today to help with these problems.
Posted by anil on
Thursday October 29, 2009 08:41 am
Caste system is worse than Apartheid. It is an evil, and has no place in civilized (or uncivilized) world. RSS walas must apologize each day at their morning shakhas for the next two generations, and talk about its evilness each day in their discourses for the next two generations. Only then it can be cleaned out.
Posted by fatehmolla on
Thursday October 29, 2009 06:11 am
""" no doubt about it, can you give me a ticket to Jamaica instead?""""
The message was for Paki aluminium beer can, who has his Hindu forefathers in India.
The message was for Paki aluminium beer can, who has his Hindu forefathers in India.
Posted by SalmanBkhan on
Thursday October 29, 2009 06:05 am
This is tragic for India.They must look at Pakistan, the pride of the Islamic world, just behind the numero uno, Somalia and mend their kuffr ways. There is rocketing growth in all sectors of the economy here and the people are prosperous and satiated,despite some loss of hearing due to heavy blast of growth.
The economy of Pakistan grew by a very healthy 1.77% this year and Inshallah next year will see the figure reach
negative 2.5% and then Pakistan will take its right place as the pride of the Islamic World.
Allah Hu!
The economy of Pakistan grew by a very healthy 1.77% this year and Inshallah next year will see the figure reach
negative 2.5% and then Pakistan will take its right place as the pride of the Islamic World.
Allah Hu!
Posted by Jugni on
Thursday October 29, 2009 04:06 am
Fate, my ancestors were Hindus no doubt about it, can you give me a ticket to Jamaica instead? I have a long weekend coming and I would like to go there. Thanks.
Posted by fatehmolla on
Thursday October 29, 2009 04:03 am
"""""I will be happy to pay you a ticket to go back to the land of your ancestors."""""
I will be happy to pay you a ticket to go back to the land of your ancestors (WHO WERE HINDUS).....
I will be happy to pay you a ticket to go back to the land of your ancestors (WHO WERE HINDUS).....
Posted by Jugni on
Thursday October 29, 2009 03:59 am
Also, if you are concerned about India this much, I will be happy to pay you a ticket to go back to the land of your ancestors.
Posted by Jugni on
Thursday October 29, 2009 03:36 am
correction: you are still not as bad as the badass Masadi, so there's still hope for you.
Posted by Jugni on
Thursday October 29, 2009 03:35 am
Dear Riaz (Riadh in Arbi) you are the dumbest motherfuker on this website. What the fk did inspire you to write about this? And stop writing worldwide in your signature, it makes Pakistan looks worser than it is. Get a fuking life.
Posted by fatehmolla on
Thursday October 29, 2009 02:38 am
"""But You have Islam......"""
The root cause of all the evils.
Mother of all the evils.
Causing murder and mayhem in the name of religion.
Creating children fidayeens - future of tommorow!
The root cause of all the evils.
Mother of all the evils.
Causing murder and mayhem in the name of religion.
Creating children fidayeens - future of tommorow!
Posted by bharat25t on
Thursday October 29, 2009 01:33 am
We have Caste system..................
But You have Islam......................LOL
But You have Islam......................LOL
Posted by fatehmolla on
Thursday October 29, 2009 12:29 am
Decry about social upheavals in India, go ahead, as no society is perfect. But when it comes to women in Pakistan and perticularly under mysygenist Islam, something where half the gender is oppressed - what would you say of that?
You people put your women in burqa, make them look like walking tents, mobile prisnors, walking trash bags - what about those ¿¿¿¿¿¿
You people put your women in burqa, make them look like walking tents, mobile prisnors, walking trash bags - what about those ¿¿¿¿¿¿
Posted by fatehmolla on
Thursday October 29, 2009 12:19 am
""""No toilet, no bride," ""
And?
27 percent of Pakistanis defecate in the open field!
According to the Ministry of Environment, 73 percent of the population now has access to a latrine – 96 percent in urban areas, and 62 percent in rural areas.
According to Javed Ali Khan, director-general of the Ministry of Environment, ODF initiatives have benefited about 1.12 million people. But what about the rest???
At least there is a awareness in India, which is lacking big time in Pakistan......where cousins marry each other, hence no such demand. LOL
And?
27 percent of Pakistanis defecate in the open field!
According to the Ministry of Environment, 73 percent of the population now has access to a latrine – 96 percent in urban areas, and 62 percent in rural areas.
According to Javed Ali Khan, director-general of the Ministry of Environment, ODF initiatives have benefited about 1.12 million people. But what about the rest???
At least there is a awareness in India, which is lacking big time in Pakistan......where cousins marry each other, hence no such demand. LOL
Posted by RiazHaq on
Wednesday October 28, 2009 11:18 pm
This is from CNN today:
New Delhi, India (CNN) -- Most Indian mothers want their daughters to marry decent men who make a good living. Now, in parts of rural India, women have a new -- and rather unusual -- demand for matrimony: a toilet.
"No toilet, no bride," has become a rallying cry for women raising a stink about the lack of a basic amenity.
They see it as a human rights issue, especially in villages where plumbing can be nonexistent.
It was that way in Sunariyan Kalan in the northern state of Haryana. Sumitra Rathi said village women had no choice but to relieve themselves without privacy.
They would go before sunrise or hold it in until darkness fell once again to avoid being seen. Or they would walk out to the fields and endure embarrassment. They don't want their daughters to face the same indignity.
"Many of them do make serious inquiries from the families of grooms about latrines," she said.
As a member of the local council, Rathi has helped build toilets in 250 houses in Sunariyan Kalan since 1996.
Still, about five dozen homes lack covered bathrooms.
The problem is so big in India that the country would need to construct 112,000 toilets every day if it wants to meet its sanitation goal by 2012, according to the Ministry of Rural Development.
Even as India emerges as a global economic power, millions of its citizens still live in poverty. The government estimates that less than 30 percent of villagers have access to latrines, which poses serious health risks and increases the threat of deadly diseases like typhoid and malaria.
To help overcome the enormity of the sanitation challenge, the government is offering incentives to encourage villagers to build bathrooms. The poorest
of the poor in Haryana stands to receive Rs. 2,200 ($48) for each toilet they install, said P.S. Yadav, a state coordinator for the sanitation campaign.
The incentives are especially attractive to women, for whom the problem transcends health issues.
Local women, often illiterate, have taken a keen interest in bathroom construction, said Roshni Devi, the council chief in Haryana's Kothal Khurd village.
And through it, they have gained a sense of self, making the lowly toilet seat feel more like a lofty throne.
New Delhi, India (CNN) -- Most Indian mothers want their daughters to marry decent men who make a good living. Now, in parts of rural India, women have a new -- and rather unusual -- demand for matrimony: a toilet.
"No toilet, no bride," has become a rallying cry for women raising a stink about the lack of a basic amenity.
They see it as a human rights issue, especially in villages where plumbing can be nonexistent.
It was that way in Sunariyan Kalan in the northern state of Haryana. Sumitra Rathi said village women had no choice but to relieve themselves without privacy.
They would go before sunrise or hold it in until darkness fell once again to avoid being seen. Or they would walk out to the fields and endure embarrassment. They don't want their daughters to face the same indignity.
"Many of them do make serious inquiries from the families of grooms about latrines," she said.
As a member of the local council, Rathi has helped build toilets in 250 houses in Sunariyan Kalan since 1996.
Still, about five dozen homes lack covered bathrooms.
The problem is so big in India that the country would need to construct 112,000 toilets every day if it wants to meet its sanitation goal by 2012, according to the Ministry of Rural Development.
Even as India emerges as a global economic power, millions of its citizens still live in poverty. The government estimates that less than 30 percent of villagers have access to latrines, which poses serious health risks and increases the threat of deadly diseases like typhoid and malaria.
To help overcome the enormity of the sanitation challenge, the government is offering incentives to encourage villagers to build bathrooms. The poorest
of the poor in Haryana stands to receive Rs. 2,200 ($48) for each toilet they install, said P.S. Yadav, a state coordinator for the sanitation campaign.
The incentives are especially attractive to women, for whom the problem transcends health issues.
Local women, often illiterate, have taken a keen interest in bathroom construction, said Roshni Devi, the council chief in Haryana's Kothal Khurd village.
And through it, they have gained a sense of self, making the lowly toilet seat feel more like a lofty throne.
Posted by RiazHaq on
Wednesday October 28, 2009 11:07 pm
As far as I know, Dhirubhai Ambani, like Mohandas Gandhi, was a banya.
India's caste system and resulting segregation are no different than Apartheid in South Africa or Jim Crow segregation in America's Southern states. The consequences of such segregation are as devastating for Dalits as they were for Blacks in South Africa and US.
India's caste system and resulting segregation are no different than Apartheid in South Africa or Jim Crow segregation in America's Southern states. The consequences of such segregation are as devastating for Dalits as they were for Blacks in South Africa and US.
Posted by sunil7090 on
Wednesday October 28, 2009 10:49 pm
problem is not so simple as you think,even among dalits 30 categories are there,bhangi and mochi are lowest and shunned by all other dalits.among brahmis about 60 varieties are there,most maintain their independant status and do not mingle with other brahmins.Problem has seeped in to other religions also like you can see "sunni brahmin" or catholic brahmin" bride required in matrimonial ads. Even withese problems there is little importance attached to caste and religion in cities,army and industry and films.for eg india's biggest industrialist dhirubhai was a dalit.Many film actors,musicians ,lyricists are muslims both in hindi and other regional film industry
Posted by pakdoc on
Wednesday October 28, 2009 10:12 pm
hmmm... interesting relation..that may actually be true...
Posted by RiazHaq on
Wednesday October 28, 2009 10:10 pm
As Dost_Mittar described it in his recent article &qu ot;Squatters, Scavengers and a Gandhian", the problem of Dalits (aka Scavengers) and India's horrible lack of sanitation are related. Dalits are forced to handle human excrement by bare hands and then they are shunned by the rest of population. If they have a proper sanitation system, like the flush toilet developed by Dr. Pathak, then there is a chance that the untouchables may finally break out of the stigma of untouchability, and break free of the system of Apartheid that they are subjected to.
Posted by pakdoc on
Wednesday October 28, 2009 09:49 pm
how can these guys be blind to these issues within their state and be interfering with the neighbour's problems??
ironically india claims to be secular state, and oppresses all its religious minorities.....
it claims to be one of the biggest democracies but yet, does not represent its majority...the poor and supressed...
what a hyprocrite nation!
ironically india claims to be secular state, and oppresses all its religious minorities.....
it claims to be one of the biggest democracies but yet, does not represent its majority...the poor and supressed...
what a hyprocrite nation!
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