Sidhi, Satna, Rewa (Madhya Pradesh): Sitting in a sunny patch outside his one-room house and using a machete to make baskets from bamboo sticks. Munna Bansal, a 60-year-old Dalit man, spoke of how he could not enter the homes of the upper-caste people who bought his wares.
“Whenever I sell my baskets, I put them on the ground from where they pick them up, and then they pay for the basket from a distance without touching me,” said Bansal, who lives in Ward number 21, a Dalit colony in Sidhi city in eastern Madhya Pradesh.
“Brahmins, Banias, Thakurs and everyone else use the baskets made by our community, but they won’t touch us,” he said. “We feel bad, but we can’t do anything.”
His 25-year-old nephew, Ravend Bansal, like his uncle, is from the Besvaar caste, which has traditionally made baskets from bamboo.
“People in Sidhi will touch faeces, but they won’t touch a Dalit,” said Bansal, a 6-ft tall man, who sports a tattoo along the length of his arm and paints houses for a living.
“Upper caste people will use these baskets my uncle is making for religious rituals during birth celebrations and death rituals,” said Bansal. “But we can neither go to the home of any upper caste person nor touch them.”
“Whenever they come into our area, they put a cloth on their nose and try to maintain a distance,” he said. “My brother is a graduate, and some of our people have studied, but education has not changed anything for us. I have never touched a Brahmin in my life. Upper caste people tell us that Besvaar are lower caste and they will stay lower.”
Both Bansals complained about the local civic body, alleging it was staffed with Brahmins and Rajputs. They did little to keep the Dalit colony clean; residents had to pay from their pockets to build a pucca naala or a drain for wastewater.
Thriving Casteism & Untouchability
In three districts of Madhya Pradesh, where Article 14 travelled to in October, Sidhi, Satna and Rewa, people from scheduled caste or Dalit communities, other backward classes (OBCs), and scheduled tribes or Adivasis spoke of caste discrimination and untouchability, unchecked in the central state run by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for almost two decades. And while the OBCs face discrimination by upper castes, they similarly discriminate against Dalits.
Crimes against SCs are rising as per the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), with cases registered increasing from 42,793 to over 50,291 in 2020. In 2021, 50,900 cases were registered to show an increase of 1.2%. Crimes against STs rose by 6.4% from 2020 to 2021.
While Uttar Pradesh recorded the highest number of crimes against the Dalits, as per the NCRB, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan recorded the two highest crime rates (cases per lakh of the population) against Dalits in 2021, well ahead of UP and more than twice the national average. MP and Rajasthan registered 63.6 and 61.6 cases per 100,000 population, respectively.
Earlier this year, the home ministry under the BJP government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, wrote to all states and union territories, saying, “the Government of India is deeply concerned with the crimes against the weaker sections of society, particularly Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes” and “vigorous and conscientious enforcement of the statutory provisions and existing legislations”.
This story was originally published in article-14.com . Read the full story here