Dalit girl raped by dairy owner – Free Press Journal
http://www.freepressjournal.in/dalit-girl-raped-by-dairy-owner/
Thrashed Poet Battled Bondage, Humiliation – The New Indian Express
http://www.newindianexpress.com/states/karnataka/Thrashed-Poet-Battled-Bondage-Humiliation/2015/10/25/article3096133.ece
Family court comes to rescue of couple separated by woman’s parents – DNA
http://www.dnaindia.com/mumbai/report-family-court-comes-to-rescue-of-couple-separated-by-woman-s-parents-2138150
Why doesn’t the violence against Dalits incite liberal fury, as does violence against Muslims? – Scroll
http://scroll.in/article/764594/why-doesnt-the-violence-against-dalits-incite-our-fury-as-violence-against-muslims-does
Transgenders welcome move to set up welfare commission – The Hindu
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/karnataka/transgenders-welcome-move-to-set-up-welfare-commission/article7801558.ece?ref=tpnews
Please Watch:
Violence against Dalits on the rise
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IjC7Y1HxqY
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Free Press Journal
Dalit girl raped by dairy owner
http://www.freepressjournal.in/dalit-girl-raped-by-dairy-owner/
— By OUR STAFF REPORTER | Oct 25, 2015 02:28 am
BHOPAL : A Dalit girl was allegedly raped by a dairy owner in Bairagarh Kalan within the limits of Khajuri police station. A case was registered against the accused on Saturday following the complaint of the victim.
According to police, the 21-year-old victim resides at Bairagarh Kalan village and was pursuing BA course from a private college. In her complaint she stated that around two days ago she went out from her house for purchasing some items from a nearby grocery shop.
The accused Virendra Meena, who also resides in the same village and runs a dairy, lured her and took her to a desolate place in his car where he outraged her modesty and also threatened to kill her on revealing the incident to anyone. He later dropped her at Khajuri Kalan.
The terrified victim girl remained silent for a day but on the next day she mustered courage and narrated her ordeal to her sister-in-law after which she along with her parents, she approached Khajuri police station and lodged an FIR. A case under sections 376 and 506 of the IPC and several provisions of SC/ST Act has been registered against the accused. In another incident, two men barged into an under-construction house and tried to outrage modesty of a 22-year-old married woman while she was asleep in Gandhi Nagar area late on Friday night. When the victim raised an alarm, her husband who was sleeping in the adjacent room woke up following which both the miscreants fled from the spot. Gandhi Nagar police said that complainant Durgesh Vanshkar told police that he is guard in the under-construction house of Murari Sharma in Gandhi Nagar where he resides along with his wife.
The New Indian Express
Thrashed Poet Battled Bondage, Humiliation
http://www.newindianexpress.com/states/karnataka/Thrashed-Poet-Battled-Bondage-Humiliation/2015/10/25/article3096133.ece
By M Shashikumar and Sarjoo Katkar Published: 25th October 2015 04:14 AM Last Updated: 25th October 2015
DAVANGERE/BELAGAVI:Uchchangi Prasad, the young poet roughed up by Hindu right-wingers in Davangere on Thursday, has risen from adverse social circumstances to become a journalism student.
“I was born to a Devadasi mother. My aunt was a Devadasi too,” he told Express. “And I was a bonded labourer till I was about 10.”
Working for an upper caste family, he was once told to remove a piece of jewellery that had fallen into a pile of human excreta. “I can’t forget such humiliations,” the 23-year-old told Express.
His Inspiration
As a PG student, Prasad has been studying Ambedkar, and that inspiration is reflected in his poetry.
Prasad’s Odala Kichchu (The Blaze Within) won a prize from the Kannada Book Authority last year. “It speaks against Manuvadi culture and seeks equality for all human beings,” Prasad said.
‘Manuvadi’ refers to ideas derived from the ancient Hindu text Manusmriti. The British used the text to codify Hindu law, and Ambedkar holds it responsible for India’s caste system.
After Book Launch: Prasad’s book was launched on March 29 by Prof
K S Bhagawan, a writer recently in the news for his polemical views on Hinduism, in Davangere. “I got threatening calls on my cell phone on March 29 and 30,” he said. The callers warned him not to write anything against Hinduism. The calls had stopped for six months.
Midnight Knock: On October 21, at 11.30 pm, when Prasad was studying in his room at the SC/ST Hostel near Bada Cross, a visitor arrived at his door.
“The stranger claimed my mother Yeshodamma had suffered a heart attack and had been admitted to CG Hospital,” Prasad recalled. “From his account, she wanted to see me.”
When Prasad asked the man who he was, he said he was related to a patient in the same hospital. “Believing him, I went riding pillion with him,” Prasad said.The man took a turn towards DCM Township instead of CG Hospital. When Prasad asked him the reason, he said he had no DL, and was trying to evade traffic cops.
The two reached the APMC Yard, where eight or nine men pounced on him.“They asked me why, despite being born a Hindu, I was writing poems and articles against Hinduism,” he said.
Offensive Talk: They insulted him saying he was born a Dalit for sins committed in his past lives. “Someone then said my fingers should be chopped off and a man attacked me with a knife,” he said.
Prasad managed to escape but not before his right hand was slashed. He ran, jumped a wall and hid behind a bush, terrified, for a full hour. When it looked like the group had dispersed, he came out, and hitched a lift on a two-wheeler to Gandhi Circle. He then went to CG Hospital. After getting his wound dressed, he lodged a complaint with the RMC Yard police station. He said he had no idea about the identify of the assailants. “I don’t know if it was some association,” he said. SP Boralingaiah visited the hostel and gave him protection.
Prasad Saved Fingers by Pushing Assailants: Had Prasad not pushed away his assailants, he might have lost the fingers on his right hand. “One man in the group of assailants wanted to know why I wrote about caste and religion. Another said they should chop off my fingers so that I wouldn’t write against Hinduism any more,” Prasad told Express.
A man in the group pulled out a knife and clutched Prasad’s hand. “I pushed him away, and then another man, and fled,” he said.
Prasad’s parents still work as labourers in Santebennur, 40 km from the district centre. Rescued from bonded labour and admitted to school by the Davangere administration, he is a second year MA journalism student at Davangere University.
What a Caller Said: One of those who had called Prasad to threaten him told him to write about the significance of gods like Rama and Krishna in people’s lives.
Prasad replied he was writing about his own experiences, which reflected the woes of the Dalits and the downtrodden.
against odds
Uchchangi Prasad’s parents are labourers to this day.
He got to attend school after the district administration freed him from bonded labour.
His book of poems Odala Kichchu reflects the ideals of Dr Ambedkar.
Midnight Action
Prasad gets a visitor who tricks him out of the hostel.
Stranger takes him on a bike to a deserted place, where a gang is waiting.
A man pulls out a knife to cut off his fingers. Prasad’s palm is slashed.
Prasad pushed him away, jumps a compound, hides behind a bush.
He hitches a ride and goes to a hospital.
After Threat, award ceremony deferred
Belagavi: The Karnataka Sahitya Academy, which received threats from right wing activists for announcing the Academy’s annual honorary Lifetime Achievement Award for 2013 to writer K S Bhagawan, has decided to defer the award ceremony which was slated to be held on November 7. The venue of the ceremony, which was initially Dharwad, will also be changed. Academy chief Malathi Pattanshetty said the decision regarding the awardee will not be changed. The ceremony will be held in January or February, an Academy member said. However, Pattanshetty told Express that the function will be held in Bengaluru.
DNA
Family court comes to rescue of couple separated by woman’s parents
http://www.dnaindia.com/mumbai/report-family-court-comes-to-rescue-of-couple-separated-by-woman-s-parents-2138150
Sunday, 25 October 2015 – 6:50am IST | Agency: dna | From the print edition
The 26-year-old man, in his complaint, claimed that he and the woman had eloped and got married in a temple in 2009. The couple had stayed together in Lonavala from February till June 2009, and then shifted to Colaba.
The family court recently came to the rescue of a city-based couple, who had been forcibly separated by the woman’s parents after marriage because the man belongs to a scheduled caste. The court has directed that the couple be allowed to live together within two months from the date of passing the order.
The 26-year-old man, in his complaint, claimed that he and the woman had eloped and got married in a temple in 2009. The couple had stayed together in Lonavala from February till June 2009, and then shifted to Colaba.
“When the two returned to Mumbai, the woman went to her maternal house. However, for unknown reasons, she refused to live with her husband. Further, when the man went to her house, asking her to come and stay with him, the woman’s family approached the local police and filed a complaint against him for harassing them,” read the order copy.
Helpless and having failed to convince the woman’s family, he finally approached the family court and filed a petition under the restitution of conjugal rights under the Hindu Marriage Act.
The court, after going through the evidence, asked the woman to file a reply, but none came. The woman did not challenge the man’s say. The court, because the petition went unopposed, then passed an order in favour of the man, thus holding his claim of the woman’s family not allowing them to stay together as he belonged to a reserved caste to be true.
Scroll
Why doesn’t the violence against Dalits incite liberal fury, as does violence against Muslims?
http://scroll.in/article/764594/why-doesnt-the-violence-against-dalits-incite-our-fury-as-violence-against-muslims-does
Could it have something to do with the fact that it does not affect our
urban lives and ‘rural India is like that only’?
Ajaz Ashraf · Today · 09:15 am
It seems our liberalism is impervious to issues arising from rural India. That might be another country, its people deemed to live by another order of values. It is almost certain that the immolation of the two Dalit children, Vaibhav and Divya, in Sunpedh village of Haryana will not constitute the nation’s memory, as will the lynching of Mohammad Akhlaq in Dadri. Why is it that the violence against Dalits does not incite our fury, as does violence against Muslims?
Rural India is often the site of unspeakable atrocities against Dalits. The violence there doesn’t imperil the urban sprawls where we live – the political class, journalists, policy people, opinion-makers included. Communal riots, barring a few exceptions, are an urban phenomenon. They threaten to upturn our ordered lives.
Then again, caste violence stems from a dominant social group’s quest to retain its socio-economic superiority, whether through payment of low wages, or competition for resources, or through imposition of the social code affirming the Hindu caste hierarchy. We in urban India can comprehend caste violence in rational terms. What we can explain is also easy to reconcile with, particularly when it doesn’t menace our urban space.
Atrocity upon atrocity
Take some of the major incidents of violence against Dalits – the Kilvenmani massacre in Tamil Nadu in 1968 (44 Dalits killed), the gang-rape of Phoolan Devi and her own vengeance against 22 Rajputs in Behmai in 1981, the 1996 killing at Bathani Tola in Bihar (21, including three infants, died), the Laxman Bathe bloodbath in Bihar (58 died) in 1997… You could go on and on. Last year, in Dangawas, Rajasthan, a tractor was driven over three Dalits, crushing them to death. The names of places marked in bold are all villages.
Yet, in the wake of the burning alive of two children in Haryana last week, most media commentaries referred to the September 2006 incident at Khairlanji. This too is a village, near Nagpur, in Maharashtra. A land dispute resulted in a caste mob stripping naked a Dalit woman and her 17-year-old daughter, and marching them through the village before they were raped, in front of an assembly of people, and killed. The woman’s two sons were also murdered.
Why is it that we remember Khairlanji so vividly? Because of the shocking nature of the crime, you’d say. But perhaps a more compelling reason is that Khairlanji intruded upon the urban space. The resentment brewing among the Dalits over Khairlanji spilled out at the desecration of an Ambedkar statue in faraway Kanpur, UP. Nanded, Nashik, Aurangabad, Pune and Mumbai and its neighbouring areas began to burn. The urbane equipoise was ruffled, indelibly etching Khairlanji on our consciousness.
Threat to urban life
By contrast, Hindu-Muslim riots represent a perpetual threat to urban life. No doubt, these have an ideological framework, but the immediate goad for the periodic eruptions is petty, even irrational. They fight over the route a religious procession should take, the singing of kirtans and the recitation of azaans in temples and mosques simultaneously, the discovery of pork or beef at places of worship, and, now increasingly, over gender relationships. The causes for riots don’t have an economic underpin, and in cases where it is indeed present, it is not visible to us.
Communal riots, therefore, seem like an outburst of atavistic passion, anathema to the organising of urban space. This is because life in a city can’t be lived in isolation. Regardless of the emergence of fenced neighbourhoods, we are required to attend offices or schools or colleges or shop around for our necessities. The atavistic passion can swamp us all, as the densely populated urban sprawls help spread it rapidly.
Villages, in contrast, are relatively isolated and self-sufficient to a degree, at least enough to create a firewall to stem caste violence. It affects only a few; a village or two brought to a standstill can’t insinuate into the national consciousness. We remember violence because of the severity of its impact, its ability to impinge on urban life.
Terribly one-sided
Caste violence in India is terribly one-sided. Barring a few exceptions, it follows a typical course – members of a family or a couple of friends are killed for defying the dominant caste; at times, the dwelling units of the community are set ablaze. Dalits protest, pelting stones or blocking traffic on an obscure highway, police make arrests, and politicians issue statements. Life slips into its familiar pattern of exploitation.
The Dalits are too disempowered to retaliate against their tormentors, whose social group is often of the urban privileged. We know a circle of violence will not be created to suck us into it. This is why Maoist violence shocks, for it targets the representatives of the state. Its growth is potentially a threat to our future.
Riot after riot
We prioritise what we want to remember on the basis of our past experiences. Communal riots have a distinct echo in the collective memory because of the price already paid. There were stray incidents of rioting in the beginning of the 19th century, such as the one Banaras witnessed in 1809.
But riots became alarmingly frequent in the 1880s and 1890s, particularly in UP, over issues such as, yes, cow-slaughter. Then there were those horrific Partition riots: millions were killed. Every riot, or the communal ambience, as it exists today, whispers a warning of the bloody past visiting us again.
This is ostensibly paradoxical. Though the large-scale Hindu-Muslim violence witnessed between the 1960s and the 1980s has faded away, barring the riots in Gujarat (2002) and Muzaffarnagar (2013), yet we recall our bloody past more frequently now.
This is because the riots now serve ideological purposes. The concept of a Hindu rashtra is to us today what separatism and the demand for Pakistan was to the people before Independence. A minor communal incident acquires menacing overtones because of the growing strength of the Hindu Right, mimicking, in some ways, the rise of the Muslim League in the years before the Partition.
The politics of caste
The politics of caste doesn’t have as violent a legacy as the politics of religion, though Tirunelveli witnessed riots in 1899 because of the Nadars’ insistence on entering temples. Caste riots stained Kerala in 1905.
However, the dominant legacy of caste is reservations. It evokes in us urban Indians the fear that the idea of building a meritorious society has been compromised. They took a percentage of government jobs and seats in educational institutes that could well have been our children’s, we argue. This conjured sense of deprivation has perhaps made us insensitive to the barbarity against Dalits.
Another cause could be that violence is built into the caste system. The violation of caste codes traditionally invited sanctions. It legitimised violence. Since the caste system persists even today, so does the justification for the violence implicit in it. We are wedded to the equality of all as enshrined in the Constitution. But then we add: “Rural India is like that only.”
Through caste is exercised social control. It has loosened, no doubt. But a good many Dalits wonder what their fate would have been had Gandhi not undertaken a fast unto death and compelled Ambedkar to relinquish the demand for a separate Dalit electorate. In return, seats were reserved for the Dalits in a joint Hindu electorate. It is because of the system of reserved constituencies that there are 84 Dalits in the Lok Sabha today, 85 MLAs in Uttar Pradesh, 29 in Maharashtra, 38 in Bihar, and 17 in Haryana.
Why don’t the elected representatives of Dalits protest against the atrocities committed against their community with a monotonous frequency? This is because the system of reserved constituencies means every political party must field a Dalit candidate. The votes of Dalits are therefore split. The winner in these constituencies is one who polls the maximum votes of non-Dalit communities.
In other words, a Dalit MP or MLA has to be dependent on the goodwill of even the oppressing castes. He or she can’t alienate them through their rhetoric or action. He or she must not also stray away from the line of the party to which he or she belongs. This is particularly true of those parties dependent on the votes of the oppressive groups, whether upper or intermediary castes. The famed middle path full of ambiguity and lip service to the Dalit cause becomes the party line.
Perhaps the only exception to the above rule is Tamil Nadu’s Pattali Makkal Katchi, whose leader Anbumani Ramadoss has been vitriolic in his attacks against Dalits. But urban India mostly knows there are methods of social control subtler than invoking fear.
I often turn to Dr Satish Prakash, a Dalit activist and associate professor in Meerut College, for issues pertaining to the community, as I did for this piece. He said, “Let me be very frank – the presence of Muslims in India is the greatest protection for Dalits.”
Indian democracy, Dr Prakash argues, relies on mobilisation through the politics of identity. The Hindu Right seeks to control Dalits – that is Scheduled Castes and lower OBCs – by turning them against Muslims, by making them feel a part of the Hindu monolith. Had the Muslims not been around, the Dalits would have been targeted directly.
Urban India understands this, doesn’t it? We all know the atrocities against Dalits will be episodic, will remain confined to rural India, and not spiral out of control to enmesh us in cities as well. We trust the Hindu Right on this count at least.
Ajaz Ashraf is a journalist in Delhi. His novel, The Hour Before Dawn, has as its backdrop the demolition of the Babri Masjid. It is available in bookstores.
The Hindu
Transgenders welcome move to set up welfare commission
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/karnataka/transgenders-welcome-move-to-set-up-welfare-commission/article7801558.ece?ref=tpnews
FIROZ ROZINDAR
The transgender community is hoping for better dayswith the establishment of a separate welfare commission.— photo: by special Arrangement
Rajashree, who is in her 40s, was ostracized by her family when she was eighteen fearing social stigma of having a ‘Hijra’ in their home.
Living with her community for over two decades, she said people like them are no better than ‘existing invisible’ for society as they are treated like persona non grata.
However, persons like Rajashree are hoping that the situation will change at least in Karnataka as it is the first in the country that has proposed to constitute a separate welfare commission for transgenders, as announced by Health Minister U.T. Khader recently.
“The Karnataka government has taken a welcome step to ensure a dignified position for transgenders in the society,” said Mallappa Kumbar, State coordinator of the Karnataka State Sexual Minorities Forum. He said in the absence of a constitutional body for uploading their rights, the community has been ill-treated in the society. “While we do not get any jobs, the police treat us like social burden. For survival, we are forced into begging or prostitution,” said Veena, a transgender and activist. She says people feel disgusted when Hijras beg in trains, but they do not let them work even as a domestic maid. “Most of us are school dropouts and very few have completed graduation. Even their socio-economic condition is no different from other transgenders,” she said.
Meanwhile, Mr. Kumbar said the forum has prepared a draft report for the welfare of the community. As per a survey, there are over 50,000 transgenders in the State. However, the numbers are likely to be higher if a fresh census is conducted, he said, adding that the draft report has recommendations such as introduction of lessons on transgenders in schools.
Mr. Khader told The Hindu that the process of establishing a commission had begun, and it would come into effect within a year.
As per a survey, there are over 50,000 transgenders in the State.
News monitored by AMRESH & AJEET
