UK Law: India's Hindu Caste-slavery is racism

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The worlds worst violation of human rights are going on in India. World conscience has been asleep. Indians hide the status of the Dalit and delve into tokenism to justify Caste discrimination. Half the population of India is shackled in slavery and hidden from plain view. This has to be exposed.

• The vehement arguments of some high-profile fanatic Hindu Mahasabah groups notwithstanding, the UK’s new Equality Bill will include references to caste.
• n November 2009, a report on caste in the United Kingdom was issued by a Derby-based group called the Anti-Caste Discrimination Alliance (ACDA). It showed that caste discrimination, far from having been eliminated through migration and resettlement, was alive and thriving in the large Indian communities of the UK.
• Despite their disturbing nature, the revelations are not surprising: immigrant communities often carry with them the most vicious dispositions and hierarchies of the societies they travel away from geographically.
• Indeed, such communities often entrench such biases further as they settle into other (at times hostile) cultures, and as they carve out new political niches for themselves. Himal Magazine

Every human being on this planet must write about and speak up against institutionalized slavery in India.

Why I am not a Hindu: Kancha Ilaiah

“2009 Draft principles and Guidelines for the Effective Elimination of Discrimination based on Work and Descent” when the U.N. Human Rights Council reconvenes in June….Officials admit social activist Paul Diwakar’s contention that it was an Indian who proposed the inclusion of descent in the definition of racial discrimination in the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) when it was first being drafted in the mid-sixties. The Hindu

India’s Dalit slaves Page

The world is not listening to the excuses from Delhi. The UN has asked all countries to ban Hindu Caste system–essentially banning Hinduism. The UK has started the world revolution to liberate the Dalit slaves of Bharat.

Indians themselves do not have a single term for describing the Caste system as a whole, but have a variety of words referring to different aspects of it, the two main ones being varna and jati.

The varna consists of four categories, each ranked differently in terms of social honour. Below these groupings are the so-called ‘untouchables’- those in the lowest position of all. The Jati are locally defined groups within which the caste ranks are organised. Jati is coupled with one’s occupation and the meaning of varna in Sanskrit is ‘colour’ that signify a social category or a social classification. It is used to enforce a social stratification but does not mean colour of skin.

According to those who practice and promote it, Caste is determined by birth and cannot be changed. In a class based system there is ‘vertical mobility’ but this is denied in a Caste based system. In India, Social Stratification, historically, gave rise to ‘Untouchables’. Although, practice of Untouchability is legally prohibited in India but ‘Untouchables’ continue to be shunned socially and economically. Each Caste continues in a state of social paralysis antagonistic and hostile towards each other’s interests. http://www.castewatchuk.org/

However there is a ray of hope–ignited by a new law in the United Kingdom. Once this law finds a way into the world media, it may spread like wildfire through the European Union–and eventually to America. Once that happens, India will have to buckle under international pressure and be forced to end the slavery of 450 million souls who are fighting for the right to be considered a human being.

Why do India’s Dalits hate Mohandas Gandhi?

Dalit leader Dr. Ambedkar struggled to emancipate the “untouchables” from the shackles of Hindu prescribed slavery– the caste system.

Ambeekar wanted to free the Dalits & to allow them to regain their inalienable rights as human beings–highlighting the servitude, humiliation, trials & tribulations of being born in a low caste family and struggled to uplift the “untouchables”, the indigenous people, women & other disadvantaged sections of society. Dr. Ambedkar on Pakistan

• Following intensive lobbying by the National Secular Society (NSS, an IHEU member organization), the UK’s House of Lords on 2 March 2010 adopted an amendment to the new UK Equality Bill, paving the way for caste discrimination to be made illegal. Lobbying by the NSS was given a new focus by the first international conference on untouchability hosted by the IHEU and held in London last summer.
• Keith Porteous Wood of the National Secular Society commented: “This victory is historic; the UK is the first Western country to pass such legislation. I hope it will encourage other states where caste discrimination is practised to do likewise, or – in the case of India – enforce the legislation it already has.”
• http://www.iheu.org/uk-house-lords-adopts-measure-against-caste-discrimination
• http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8546661.stm
• Parliamentarian Praveen Rashtrapal in a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in which he said, the National Commission for Scheduled Castes was inadequate in addressing caste based discrimination as it lacked resources, staff and teeth. The Hindu
• However, they pointed to a scenario where a delegate from a foreign country berated India for caste based crimes if the U.N. body adopted caste as one of the elements of racial discrimination. The Hindu
• With particular focus on the Hindu caste system, this book (Caste-based Discrimination in International Human Rights Law) represents a comprehensive analysis of the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination in international law. It evaluates the strategies that have informed the work of the United Nations in this area, mapping a new path that moves from standard-setting to implementation. Combining legal analysis with the meaning and origin of caste, it explores the remedies human rights law can propose towards the prohibition of caste-based discrimination, and the abolition of the caste system itself.
• The decision to allow the Equality Bill’s clause  on race to be amended to allow for a Minister of the Crown to “provide for caste to be an aspect of race” is a significant step forward. At the same time, it is one that will only be meaningful only if there is wider acknowledgement and awareness of the problem.
• It is time to salute the sustained lobbying of campaigners and sympathetic parliamentarians, while at the same time needing to further investigate the issue and remain vigilant. In this matter, as in others, it is essential that organisations such as the Hindu Council and Hindu Forum are shown to be operating with self-interested agendas and skewed perspectives, which deny the persistence of historical wrongs and structural social inequalities.
• To this end, all progressive Southasians and Britons alike must throw their weight behind legislation that will unambiguously outlaw caste discrimination, along with all other forms of hatred.Priyamvada Gopal is an academic and writer based in Cambridge, UK.

Bharat (aka India) has tried to keep Caste discrimination under the radar. Now a new law in the United Kingdom equates the horrendous practice of caste slavery as racism. Mr. Mohandas Gandhi had the opportunity to end Caste discrimination and liberate the Dalits. He however defended the Hindu Caste system and said that he would defend it with the last breath of life in him. Gandhi forced Dr. Ambadekar into abandoning the separate electorate for the Dalits. Separate electorates would have liberated the Dalits from Brahamin enslavement. Dr. Ambadekar considered the abandonment of separate electorate as the biggest blunder of his life.

• Delhi: 3500-yrs of massacres of Dalit-Sudra Blacks by Arya-Brahmins
• Who are the Untouchables? by Dr. Ambedkar
• Sudra Holocaust:Ongoing Genocide of millions of Dalits in India

It should be noted that the horrific anti-Dalit violence and atrocities of the sort that routinely erupt in India and elsewhere are not duplicated in Britain. At the same time, what the ACDA report makes clear is that within British Southasian communities, already fragmented into religious groupings, caste still determines patterns of social interaction. It is also clear that those perceived to be from ‘lower’ castes, particularly Dalits, are routinely subjected to hostile behaviour ranging from intrusive and unwelcome questioning about caste status, unspoken disapproval and verbal insults (including deploying chamar and chuhra as pejoratives), to forms of social exclusion and outright discrimination in schools, workplaces, places of worship and within the eldercare and hospital systems. A pub in Bedford, in the east of England, is apparently known as the ‘Chamar Pub’ due to perceptions about its clientele. The former mayor of Coventry, a person of Dalit origin, felt it necessary to shift his campaign from a mostly Indian ward to a non-Southasian constituency in order to get elected to that post. There are accounts of workers being demoted at work once his or her caste is ‘found out’. Others are not allowed to work shifts with high-caste colleagues; nurses have refused to bathe low-caste patients; and children report being teased at school for being Chamar.

Meanwhile, complaints to non-Southasian supervisors about name-calling are often met with incomprehension. If there was any doubt about the existence of the phenomenon, an angry hate mail sent to CasteWatch UK for its involvement in equality campaigning speaks volumes: “Chhoti jaat chhoti hi rahegi. Kauve ko tilak lane se vo hans nahin banta…kutte the, kutte ho, kutte hi rahoge” (Low castes will remain low. Putting a tilak on a crow does not turn him into a swan … You were dogs, you are dogs, you will remain dogs). Himal Magazine

• Plight of 450 million Indian enslaved Untouchables. More than 60 per cent of Dalits are landless. Over 40 million of them are bonded labourers. Dalits are the worst victims of labour coercion
• “The 1991 Government survey of India states that on an average day, two Dalits are killed, three Dalit women are raped, two Dalits’ houses are burned and fifty Dalits are assaulted by people of a higher caste.”
• ” High-caste Brahmins formed a private army, the Ranvir Sena, to stop communists from encouraging Dalit field workers to demand higher wages

Dr. Kancha of the Dalit Freedom Network predicts the “Post Hindu India” where 450 million Dalits, Untouchables and Scheduled classes will leave the shackles of Hinduism and convert to Christianity Islam and Buddhism.

NEW DELHI: In the first such legislative move anywhere in the world, and much to the embarrassment of India’s official position, the British House of Lords has passed a law that treats caste as “an aspect of race”.

On March 24, the House of Lords passed the Equality Bill empowering the British government to include “caste” within the definition of “race”. This threatens India’s much-touted success in keeping caste out of the resolution adopted at the 2001 Durban conference on racism. The provision to outlaw caste discrimination in Britain came in the form of an amendment made by the Lords as a result of intensive lobbying by dalit groups, including followers of Ravidass sect who had suffered a violent attack last year in Austria.

The bill will become a law after the House of Commons passes it. The legislation draws its legitimacy from a recommendation made in 2002 by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) that all member states of the International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), including India and the UK, should enact domestic legislation declaring that descent-based discrimination encompassed caste and “analogous systems of inherited status”.

This development comes at a time when the Manmohan Singh government is already under pressure before the UN Human Rights Council as the draft principles and guidelines issued by it last year on discrimination based on work and descent recognized caste as a factor. The British legislation may provide impetus for the adoption of those draft principles and guidelines.

Though the bill originally contained no reference to caste, the Gordon Brown government agreed to its inclusion even as it commissioned a research on the nature of the problem that is believed to have come into Britain through the Indian diaspora. A parliamentary committee, while recommending last year that caste be considered as a subset of race, cited specific instances of caste discrimination in Britain. UK bill links caste to race, India red-faced, Manoj Mitta, TNN, Mar 31, 2010, 04.17am IST

• Today Dr. Kancha Iiaiah carries on the struggle of the Dalits.
• Civil Rights Activist Dr. Kancha Ilaiah
• Why I am not a Hindu and other Dalit articles
• Muslims must work AMONG Dalits & liberate them: Dr. Ilaiah
• INDIA: Dr. Ilaiah, persecuted Dalit author of “I am not a Hindu”

In one such case, a qualified dalit working in the National Health Service suddenly suffered discrimination at the hands of his supervisor soon after the latter discovered his “low caste” status. The dalit employee was reportedly harassed and suspended from work for a whole year. While a trade union managed to obtain compensation for him, the case highlighted a lacuna in the law to deal with caste discrimination. The Gordon Brown government accepted the amendment tabled by Liberal Democrats subject to the outcome of the research ordered by it on caste discrimination. Baroness Thornton, speaking for the government, told the peers, “We have looked for evidence of caste discrimination and we now think that evidence may exist, which is why we have now commissioned the research.”

Lord Avebury, who had tabled the amendment, said he believed that the research would “conclusively prove that caste discrimination does occur in the fields covered by the bill”. India’s opposition to the linking of caste with race began in 1996, when it tried to free itself of “reporting obligation” under CERD, saying that caste, though perpetuated through descent, was “not based on race”.

This is a drastic departure from the position originally taken by India in 1965 while proposing the historic amendment to introduce descent in CERD. It had actually cited its experience with caste as an argument for recognizing all forms of descent-based discrimination. UK bill links caste to race, India red-faced, Manoj Mitta, TNN, Mar 31, 2010, 04.17am IST

The UK law is be part of the United Nations Resolutions. India should face the same type of international isolation, sanctions and approbation ’till it ends Caste discrimination and makes real laws that actually make it illegal to discriminate on the basis of birth. The current laws on the book in Bharat (aka India) are a joke.

The Hindu community is in total denial and will not accept the truth.

…it is remarkable that the Hindu Council UK (HCUK) thought it necessary to issue a 30-page report underlining how unimportant and irrelevant it is. In a 2008 document, the Hindu Council utilised a great deal of ink to show precisely how ‘irrelevant’ caste is. In the style of magisterial ignorance long cultivated by the HCUK general-secretary, Anil Bhanot, the foreword stated, “the caste-system in the last millennia did develop an over-protectionist streak, mostly due to the oppressions of foreign rule” but that “the caste phenomenon [in the UK] has evolved into more of a ‘clan’ system, where people draw support from each other as if in a club.” Moreover, there is evidently a risk of “an unwelcome interference by the host community” and a danger that Hindu society would lose “its respect for the Hindu priest … as people develop misguided contempt for the Brahmin and attempt to do away with the core and beautiful values under which Adi-Manu, the first man to civilise the world, created the original caste system.” Thus, in the HCUK’s incoherent view, the caste system no longer exists except as a club activity, its core “beautiful” values must nevertheless be shored up. Such are the organisations that the British government thinks it must consult before deciding whether to include caste as a category for protection from discrimination.

Another specious argument that has reared its head is the idea that caste is somehow more fluid than other protected categories. British politicians have argued against attempts to define caste in terms of “hereditary, ascribed and permanent … social stratification” (as noted by in the British Parliament on 11 January), by suggesting that the fact that a woman might change her caste upon marriage shows that “caste is not always permanent.” However, race is not a biologically fixed category either, but likewise a historically constructed and shaped construct, even if characteristics such as skin colour and hair texture figure in its definition. At the same time, it is rightly seen as a category to be protected from discrimination. To argue that because a woman’s caste can change upon marriage renders the category somehow less recognisable than others is to suggest that people do not, for instance, change their sexual preferences and behaviour. Second, the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination, to which the UK is a party, does now include discrimination based on ‘descent’, which as an inherited social status must surely apply to caste. At the same time, though, insisting that it is a domestic concern, the Indian government has repeatedly refused to allow the issue of caste to be considered within an international legal framework – domestic legislation and its own constitutional obligations notwithstanding. Himal Magazine

The only way to end Dalit slavery is to allow them to them to have separate electorates so that they can elect their own representatives proportional to their population. These Dalits who make it to parliament must make up about half of the Lok and Rajgha Sabah. that is the only way to liberate them.

The day the House of Common passes the law on Caste-slavery will be a great day for freedom loving people everywhere. From that day onward, the Dalits can see a ray of hope.

UK Law: India's Hindu Caste-slavery is racism

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