Dalit Human Rights Research Articles

Symbiotic Justice: Hate Crimes, Police Humiliation, and Layered Legal Consciousness in Dalit Human Rights

This article responds to scholarly critiques, which highlight the failures of hate crime legislation in delivering justice to historically oppressed groups. Drawing on ethnographic data on the mobilisation of India's only hate crime law – the Prevention of Atrocities (PoA) Act– among Dalit (untouchable) communities, the article proposes that the potential of hate crime law to create a restitution must be analysed in conversation with other social justice frameworks. In India, Dalit legal aid advocates interweave hate crime cases with a culturally specific discourse of Dalit human rights. By strategically bringing “failed” PoA investigations before India's National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), Dalit advocates hold the police accountable for negligent investigations, while also creating collective affects of hope for survivors of casteist crimes. This process, which I call symbiotic justice, engenders a form of legal consciousness, which regards hate crime law as a creative tool that can offer new avenues of agency.

Human rights perspectives of Indian Dalits

Indian institution of inequality is elaborately constructed in the form of caste system which has been in existence since ancient times. Dalits are traditionally lower caste people who are regarded as untouchables and are discriminated socially, economically and politically. Their human rights are regularly violated. Recent cases of Dalit human rights violations include, Jat -Dalit violence case killing 3 Dalits and 13 injured in Rajasthan, in 2015, suicide of Rohit Vemula, a Ph. D. scholar for caste discrimination in Hyderabad Central University in 2016, National crime Record Bureau recorded 33356 cases of rapes during 2018. In Unnao, Uttar Pradesh there was gang rape of 17 year old girl in June 2017 involving BJP leader and MLA and five others. Other Unnao case wherein 23 year old girl was raped, filmed and set on fire while going to court for hearing on 5th December 2019; Dr Payall Tadavi, belonging to a Dalit, Bhil sub caste of Tribal community and a post Graduate student of Topiwala National Medical College and BYZ Nair Hospital Mumbai, Maharashtra committed suicide on May 22nd 2019 as her senior colleagues continuously harassed her on caste basis. In an Honor killing case, 25 year Nandhish from dalit community fell in love with Swathi, an upper caste woman, got married and lived together. Both were murdered in December 2018 by the father of the girl and their bodies were thrown in river. 25 people were arrested on 5th January 2019 for social Boycott of SC community members from Nizamabad District in Telangana who dug and erected pillars for the Ambedkar Sangam building. A complaint was filed by a 64 year member of the tribe, Prabhaker Bhosale alleging that an accused boycotted him and few others from his community since 2010 for failing to attend the funeral of his brother Shani Shinganapur temple in Ahmednagar of Maharashtra lifts ban on women’s entry yielding to High Court of Mumbai directive in April 2016, Supreme Court in Sabarimala temple, Kerala case held in land mark judgment that Sabrimala Ayyapa temple women cannot be restricted from entering holy sites such as this temple. All these cases, besides numerous similar cases in the past, point to the fact that violence against Indian Dalits in present time is no way less rampant and horrible than reported in the past. Key words: Untouchables, caste discrimination, Dalits, empowerment, human rights violations.

Race as a political frontier against caste: WCAR, Dalits and India’s foreign policy

This article explains why caste has not become part of the international approach to eliminate racial discrimination by examining a paradigmatic debate in India on the relevance of caste at the 2001 World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa (WCAR) and its ‘Review Process’. In 2001, the NGO-led organisation, National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights, made an attempt to include caste-based discrimination in the Durban Declaration; however, the Government of India prevented this development on the grounds that caste was irrelevant in international law. Caste and race became contested political concepts, and the rationale of the Dalit campaign was challenged. Furthermore, the Indian government’s diplomatic opposition to include caste in the WCAR was consolidated by adopting a strict concept of race to create a political frontier against an international human rights regime. The ‘Durban process’ thus reactivated a hegemonic discourse in India concerning race to avoid international scrutiny of caste discrimination.

Dalit cosmopolitans: Institutionally developmental global citizenship in struggles against caste discrimination

AbstractBesides stating that global or cosmopolitan citizenship is an incoherent concept in the absence of a global state, some critics assert that it represents a form of Western-centric moral neoimperialism. This article develops some responses to such objections through examining the efforts of Indian activists who have undertaken intensive international engagement in their struggles against caste discrimination. The National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights has sought to close domestic rights-implementation gaps for Dalits (formerly called untouchables) in part through vertical outreach to United Nations human rights bodies. This mode of outreach is shown to represent an important practice of global citizenship, and to challenge a view of South agent as primarily passive recipients of moral goods within a global citizenship frame. Further, the Dalit activists’ global citizenship practice is shown to be significantly ‘institutionally developmental’, in that it highlights implementation gaps in the global human rights regime and can contribute to pressures for suprastate institutional transformation and development to address them. NCDHR actions are, for example, highly salient to the recently renewed dialogue on creating a World Court of Human Rights.

Going Global: The Transnational Politics of the Dalit Movement

This article analyses the involvement of the Dalits (formerly ‘untouchables’) in the World Social Forum (WSF) processes. The focus will be on one networked organization in particular, the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR) as a key organization which served as a catalyst for linking the Dalit struggle against neoliberal globalization and casteism with the social forum process and the global justice movement. The article argues that the Dalit struggle, domestically and internationally, can best be understood from a Polanyian perspective, as a countermovement for social protection against neoliberal globalization. It examines the dialectic of globalization within an Indian context first in terms of the impact of neoliberal globalization upon the Dalit community and then the NCDHR's decision to go global, to the WSF. In taking their cause beyond India, a central focus of Dalit activity remains rooted in making the Indian state serve as a means of social protection for the Dalit peoples.

Descent-based Discrimination in International Law: A Legal History

The word 'caste' does not appear in any international treaty. Consequently when increasingly vocal Dalit human rights organisations began successfully highlighting the widespread discrimination on the basis of caste still taking place in India and other areas of South Asia, and the failure of domestic policies to tackle the issue, there was a need to find a precise source of international legal obligations for the eradication of caste-based discrimination. That source is Article 1(1) of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), and in particular the word 'descent', one of the five grounds listed in the definition of racial discrimination. Caste-based discrimination, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination confirmed in a series of Concluding Observations beginning with India's State Report in 1996, is a form of descent-based discrimination and thus a form of racial discrimination, and falls within the purview of the Convention. The article traces the legal history of the word 'descent', from its inclusion in the ICERD to the 1950 Indian Constitution. What emerges is an entirely different meaning from that put forward in 1996.

Untouchability in India with a Difference: Ad Dharm, Dalit Assertion, and Caste Conflicts in Punjab

Recent caste clashes in Punjab have destroyed the myth that untouchability is alien to this part of India and indicate that the downtrodden no longer can be subjected to social oppression and humiliation. A manifestation of Dalit assertion, these clashes have sharpened the issue of Dalit human rights.