Dead cows left in western India as low-caste Dalits strike

Thus, Mayawati is able to use the Una incident, in addition to the fallout following BJP’s Daya Shankar Singh’s derogatory comment about her, to her advantage as UP warms up to the forthcoming assembly elections. In effect, this has blown the lid of the famed “Gujarat model” and exposed the deep caste divide that continues with Dalits leading a largely separate and marginalised existence. Mass movements, and indeed riots, around caste have been a feature of Gujarati life for the past four decades. According to data assembled by the website IndiaSpend, in 2014 only 3.4% of crimes against Scheduled Castes in Gujarat led to conviction; the national average was 28.8% that year. However, 2016 is new because this is the first time Dalits are taking the initiative to fight for their rights. The government should also help dalits learn martial arts, he said. Then they targeted Dalit youths. The Dalit neo-middle class is not as resourceful as the Patidars, the most occupationally diversified community of Gujarat. Dalits form only about 7% of the population of the state – far below the 17% for India as a whole. With rituals of purity and pollution at its core, Brahmanical Hinduism perpetrates structural caste-based violence through division of labour, relegating “polluting” tasks of skinning, disposing carcasses to Dalits, who are already landless. Natubhai Parmar, a former government official who is an active organizer of the July 31 mahasammelan, claims that they are “collecting funds” from the more resourceful sections of Dalits, many of them “beneficiaries” of the government reservation system. The spontaneous Dalit anger received a major “fillip” following the spread of another video showing Shambhunath Tundiya, a “dharmaguru” among Dalits with a religious seat (gadi) in Zanzarka, angrily speaking out against cow vigilantes. The inevitable fallout of the cow politics that the BJP and its ideological fraternity are pursuing with such vigour is the alienation of not just Muslims but also Dalits.

The maximum persons to take the extreme step were from the Saurashtra region, where the Mota Samadhiya village of Una taluka is located. “This will endanger the democratic fabric of the society”, Kanhaiya Kumar said. “They know the Congress has done nothing for them – these are only crocodile tears”. “Many Dalit brothers work with me in protecting cows in Hyderabad and Telangana”, he said.

Ever since Narendra Modi took over as prime minister two years ago, the Una assault has been one in a long line of cases where the BJP has come off looking anti-Dalit.

Latching on to BJP MP Udit Raj’s criticism of “so-called protectors” of Hinduism, Delhi Chief Minister and AAP convenor Arvind Kejriwal on Sunday asked him and other Dalit MPs to resign from the party to protest the “countrywide assault” on the community. In Punjab, which goes to polls in 2017, one of every three residents is a Dalit.

If Dalits and Muslims join hands for good, they would be a force to reckon with.