From: Peoples Media Advocacy & Resource Centre-PMARC <pmarc2008@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 9:37 PM
Subject: [PMARC] Dalits Media Watch - News Updates 28.02.10
To: Dalits Media Watch <PMARC@dgroups.org>
Dalits Media Watch
News Updates 28.02.10
Sreelatha Menon: The dalit treasure hunt - The Business Stanard
http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/sreelatha-menondalit-treasure-hunt/387073/
Dalits have no burial ground - The Hindu
http://www.hindu.com/2010/02/28/stories/2010022859540300.htm
Budget silent on Plan outlay for SC/STs - The Economics Times
A world of difference - Express Buzz
The Business Stanard
Sreelatha Menon: The dalit treasure hunt
http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/sreelatha-menondalit-treasure-hunt/387073/
The social justice and empowerment ministry is linking dalit research with dalit activism, which may some day lead to celebration of dalitism
Sreelatha Menon
New Delhi February 28, 2010, 0:42 IST
There is no end to the variety of demons that the mind can engender. The feeling of hatred or fear based on one's position in the caste hierarchy is only one of them.
In a Madurai village, some people recently went to the extent of building a wall so that they are saved the "impure'' sight of dalits living in the other part of the village.
In north Indian villages, a Harijan basti is a common sight. Caste-based discrimination is a mental illness, a virus that hits the brain, as Dr A Rosaiah of Tata Institute of Social Sciences Mumbai puts it.
In this lunacy, all institutions become suspect. Recently, the social justice ministry's Ambedkar Chair at Indian Institute of Public Administration (IIPA) and Pria, a non-government organisation, organised a workshop on dalit leadership in panchayats. At the event, activists pointed fingers at the panchayati raj system itself.
Is panchayati raj the right way to go? Is it right just because Mahatma Gandhi recommended it? It was something BR Ambedkar, known as the father of the Constitution, was against. He felt it could not work in a caste-ridden society.
There are so many cases of dalit panchayat presidents acting as rubber stamps, of panchayat presidents being forced to sit on the floor, of being forced to wash their chairs at the time of leaving.
Today, if a dalit becomes a panchayat president, he becomes the worst enemy of his community, says Paul Diwakar, who heads the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights. The reason is that he is chosen by the upper caste leaders of the community. So, he acts in the interests of his "masters," leaving the dalits feeling betrayed.
This proves right the thesis of dalit leaders that India got freedom from external masters but continued to be a slave of internal masters.
There had to be a cultural revolution, Ambedkar had said, to reverse the hierarchical system. How can dalits get their due?
Quotas are like a balm. But a balm is not enough, for there are fresh wounds every day.
Five years ago, Arun Khote, a dalit activist, started an online news magazine to document atrocities on dalits. It goes to almost everyone who matters in the country. Yet, the country doesn't recognise the apartheid that is being played out in the name of democracy.
Just shedding tears about these atrocities is not enough. There has to be a celebration of the wealth that the community stands for. The wealth of its tradition and history needs to be studied.
The social justice and empowerment ministry's Budget allocation has seen a huge jump in this Budget. It beats both the National Employment Guarantee Scheme and the government's education and health programmes.
The Ambedkar Foundation under the ministry has already made a beginning by setting up ten research chairs in ten different states. In New Delhi, the IIPA conference brought together researchers and dalit organisations. This will lead to more information on dalit culture, where seeds of a cultural revolution lie. Khote is talking about dalit festivals, dalit music. It's a new beginning to kill the virus of hatred.
The Hindu
Dalits have no burial ground
http://www.hindu.com/2010/02/28/stories/2010022859540300.htm
MANGALORE: When a Dalit dies in Ambedkar Nagar Colony in Malavaru Gram Panchayat, the family members are forced to seek some place from 'caste' Hindus in the neighbourhood for cremation.
"Sometimes the 'caste' Hindus oblige but we have been refused space for cremation several times," said M. Bhaskar, a resident of the colony.
He said there was a crematorium at Kenjar, around 1.5 km away. "But it is controlled by Bunt and Billava communities."
Dalits have been going through this humiliating experience since 2005 when the local cremation ground was acquired for the expansion of the Bajpe airport. On Wednesday, when Gulabi (45) died of cancer, the members of the community decided to put an end to this ordeal. They stormed the Malavaru Gram Panchayat office around 9.30 a.m. and started preparing the ground to cremate Gulabi's remains right in front of the office.
Tahsildar Ravichandra Naik, who arrived there finallysummoned the surveyor, who set off to find a government land for crematorium.
He returned around an hour later only to state that a land was available near a Hindu temple, but the temple committee would not allow it to be used as a crematorium.
The Economics Times
Budget silent on Plan outlay for SC/STs
NEW DELHI: What is the budgetary outlay for the welfare of Scheduled Castes and Tribes? The answer is not immediately apparent to a lay reader of
the Budget documents. For a government and a political leadership trying to establish its pro-Dalit credentials, this kind of sloppy accounting is quite surprising.
Dalit leader and Indian Justice Party president Udit Raj, for example, has demanded that the government increase the outlay for the ministry of social justice and empowerment from the Rs 4,500 crore allocated in the Budget, to Rs 61,187 crore, the share of the total Plan expenditure that corresponds with the share of Scheduled Castes in the population. While conceding that outlays of other ministries would also include the special component outlays meant for Dalits, the sheer lack of accounting transparency in this regard has led him to conclude that the government is unlikely to have allocated more than 5% of the total Plan expenditure to Scheduled Caste welfare and development.
The government now undertakes gender budgeting. A question that arises from Mr Raj's demand is whether the government should not create an accounting framework that makes it clear how much of the taxpayers money actually goes to improve the lives of the subaltern sections of society that the government and the political class seek to uplift.
Express Buzz
A world of difference
Last Updated : 27 Feb 2010 11:51:41 PM IST
Desraj Kali puts it like this. "There is a writer at this festival who like me is from Jalandhar. We have both written novels set in a particular period of Punjab's history. There was a king and in his employ, among others, were a group of flour grinders. They were untouchables, their salary for a long day's work was one meal. Now, this writer comes from a higher caste and he has written about the king and his court. I am a Dalit, my novel is about those untouchables. That is the difference in perspective."
Kali, whose humour transcends linguistic barriers, is a prolific writer in the Punjabi. His take on what sets Dalit writing apart came in conversation on a chilly January evening at the Jaipur Literature Festival. The festival's focus this year was on Dalit writing (though the sessions themselves were titled the "Bhaskar Bhasha" series) and Kali was among eight other luminaries who are little known beyond their region and rarely translated or recognised.
Kali, in fact, was meeting another prolific writer for the first time at the festival. The Delhi-based Ajay Navaria teaches at Jamia Milia Islamia and writes in Hindi. He too is Dalit.
"The spirit behind our writing, literature is the same. They are related to Dalit ideologies, our struggles. Only the creative translations of that are affected by the cultural regions we come from," Navaria explains. The Assistant Professor from Jamia Milia Islamia writes about the experience of the middle class urban Dalit, unlike Kali whose work involves narrative accounts gathered from rural Punjab. But Navaria points out, "There is a grey area of atrocities and untouchability even in a city." He gives examples. "For instance, at lunchtime at work, when you open your tiffin box, your colleagues who share everyone else's food, avoid touching yours. When that happened, I stopped taking food from them either." His wife experienced something similar while she was completing her graduation. "Her classmates stopped sharing her food when they found she was Dalit."
"There appears to be a natural hatred in the minds of some people, which may come from they training they receive in their families, these things become part of the culture," he says, at the same time stressing that his position teaching Hindu Ethics is a triumph of democracy and modernisation. "You couldn't even imagine something like that 15-20 years ago."
For Kali, the treatment the writers received at the festival itself seemed unimaginable — the mainstream literary bodies in India have never honoured them in this manner. "This is the first time we are receiving so much love and honour from readers and other writers," he says, excitedly listing his favourite authors that he got to meet, such as Girish Karnad. His works have looked at various kinds of marginalised peoples. For instance, in Thumri, he focused on the Dalit musicians who had been protected by the Mughals. "They enriched their music and made it very rich but after the Mughals, their contributions were sidelined by the hegemony of Sikhism," he says, adding that ultimately English is the medium you need to know to be able to sell your books.
Kali and Navaria also met the legendary Laxman Gaikwad, a Maharashtrian writer belonging to a De Notified Tribe, whose work both had been reading for the past 20 years. Gaikwad, who says he became a writer purely out of hunger, adds a few more dimensions to the debate: firstly on neo-brahminism — how a Dalit becomes successful and then chooses to cut himself off from his community, secondly on why there was never any debate on ending casteism itself. "I am the only one from my family who went to school. I became a writer on my own because of hunger. That is why while anyone can write about Dalits, our writing is the most powerful."
P Sivakami is in the unique position of one who can relate to both the rural and urban experiences of a Dalit. "I grew up in a small village and was later sent to hostel because I was a good student," she smiles. But she recalls how as a young girl, when she went to her friend's house and tried to drink from the well, the friend's grandmother tried to bar her entry because she was Dalit.
"At that time it didn't matter because my friend was important to me and she stood up for me. Later, when I grew older, these things hurt," the former IAS officer says. Indeed Sivakami, who has been writing from the '80s was initially wary of being called a Dalit writer, but later accepted it. More difficult to accept was the subtle discrimination she faced in her career as a civil servant. "I was put in charge of the Tamil Nadu Adi Dravidar Welfare Board, but many of my suggestions or inputs were brushed aside as being communal," she recalls. "I didn't ask to be put in that department but my work was always viewed through the prism of my caste," she sighs.
Her children, however, faced little discrimination. "In fact no one in their school bothered about caste until their Class X board exams when they had to produce a caste certificate. Their friends could not believe they were Dalit, because they didn't look like Dalits, whatever that means," she laughed.
Today, Sivakami has plunged into politics. "I don't think there is adequate representation for the community so though we have no funds, we are forging ahead," she says.
--
.Arun Khote
On behalf of
Dalits Media Watch Team
(An initiative of "Peoples Media Advocacy & Resource Centre-PMARC")
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Peoples Media Advocacy & Resource Centre- PMARC has been initiated with the support from group of senior journalists, social activists, academics and intellectuals from Dalit and civil society to advocate and facilitate Dalits issues in the mainstream media. To create proper & adequate space with the Dalit perspective in the mainstream media national/ International on Dalit issues is primary objective of the PMARC.
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