Page 111 - Islam and Far Eastern Religions
P. 111
109
The BBC News reports the ongoing violence and cruelty inflicted
on the untouchables as follows:
Despite 50 years of reform, laws banning discrimination and education and
economic development, India’s 160 million dalits (about 16 % of the popula-
tion) are dehumanised in a million ways every day. Why would an upper caste
Hindu listen to people deemed so dirty and vile that their very shadow was
polluting? Their children are denied education. If allowed into a classroom,
they are forced to sit apart, or even outside.
Tea shops have a “two-cup” system which forces dalits to drink from separate
cups. In villages, they live in segregated areas, do all the dirty jobs, cannot draw
water from the same well as the higher castes or worship in the same temples.
Most are landless labourers at the mercy of landlords who will not flinch from
lynching, raping and burning their huts if dalits dare to answer back or even
defend themselves against abuse. A prize-winning Indian journalist, P
Sainath, has described a dalit man’s nostrils being pierced with a packing nee-
dle and a string drawn through his nose by upper-caste villagers in Rajasthan.
His tormentors held the string like a horse’s reins, made him walk in the
streets and later tied him to a peg meant for cattle. Woe betide dalits trying to
better themselves.
A couple of years ago, a young village woman in the southern state of Tamil
Nadu found a job as a social worker in the nearest town. The first time she re-
turned to visit her family, the upper castes fell into a rage because she had been
“uppity” enough to wear shoes. She was manhandled and paraded naked for
not knowing her place. 32
Eric Margolis, a Canadian journalist with the Toronto Sun newspa-
per, described the inhuman system ruling in India in an article written
in 2001 and titled “India’s Hidden Apartheid”, as follows:
Fair-skinned Brahmins, 3.5% of the population, are India’s ruling elite, hold-
ing 78% of judicial positions and half of parliament’s seats. In recent tests,
Harun Yahya (Adnan Oktar)