Problems Facing Dalit Women In India

Pranjali Bandhu

“Many people like to be our bosses; we don’t anymore like to be their slaves.”
(Dr Ambedkar)

There is a long history of anti-caste struggle and ethos in the ancient classical and popular cultural traditions of the ‘untouchables’ in India. Caustic anti-Brahmin proverbs, songs and contemporary Dalit writing question Brahminical supremacy and assert human equality. The following are a couple of such proverbs from Kerala.

“Blood suckers three on earth there be,
The bug, the Brahmin and the flea.”
“O God, let me not be reborn as a Brahmin priest,
Who is always begging and is never satisfied.”

The God, Pottan Theyyam of the Pulayas of Malabar, condemns caste and preaches a religion of common human values in a dance song, demolishing all arguments for dominant caste supremacy, and ends with the following words:

“Why quarrel over caste?
When your body or ours is hurt
It is human blood that gushes out.
The blood is the same,
Why then quarrel over caste?”
(Translated by Abraham Ayroorkuzhiel)

It was Jotirao and Savitribai Phule who first used the term ‘Dalit’ to refer to the Mahars in the nineteenth century. Dr Ambedkar also used it along with the terms ‘Depressed Classes’ and ‘Bahiskrit’ (marginalised, outcast) for the untouchables of India. The word Dalit means broken people, which is a Marathi word, and is derived from the Sanskrit word ‘Dal’, which means to break, crack and open, split, scatter, crush and destroy. It is used to denote the oppressed, downtrodden and broken victims of caste-ridden society. Later, the Dalit Panthers of Maharashtra used the term broadly to include the SCs, STs, landless, poor peasants, women and all those economically exploited (in other words, the marginalised sections of society in both rural and urban areas). In contrast to M K Gandhi’s Harijan, and the Government of India’s “Scheduled Caste”, the word is a symbol of assertive pride and resistance to the linked oppressions of caste and class.

As per the 2011 Census, Dalits comprise 16.6% of the population. But it is important to note that Muslim and Christian Dalits are not included in this figure, only Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist Dalits are. If their population is added (15-20 million Christian Dalits and 100 million Muslim Dalits) they would comprise a quarter of India’s total population. And a broader understanding of Dalit that includes all those marginalised and oppressed would make it into a Bahujan Samaj comprising the majority in the society. Historical evidence points to the fact that Dalits, along with the so-called Scheduled Tribes, were the first settlers, the most original inhabitants, of this subcontinent. The roots of their absence of power and their low socio-economic status lie in ancient racial and ethnic conflicts, tribal prejudices, military defeat, loss of territory and eventual enslavement to the victorious group.

Today their deprivation is reflected mainly in the form of absence of material resources like land, education and jobs. Socio-economic crises in post-1947 India, due to the developmental path adopted, have sharpened caste-based conflicts, and have led to an escalation of violence and atrocities committed by other castes against the Dalits. The officially admitted number of incidences of atrocities against Dalits in 2021 is 50,900. But this figure is far from correct as often even where the police have registered the cases they have done so under the Indian Penal Code provisions, instead of registering the crime under the Scheduled Castes and Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989 (PAA), or under the Protection of Civil Rights Act (PCRA), 1976. The conviction rate is also low. One must remember that Article 17 of the Constitution abolishes untouchability and makes it a punishable offense. In 1955 the Untouchability (Offences) Act was enacted and notified, which was renamed Protection of Civil Rights Act in 1976.

A Public Hearing on Atrocities Against Dalits with Specific Reference to Dalit Women, organised as far back as in March 1994 by Women’s Voice, Bengaluru, and the Asian Women’s Human Rights Council, Manila, showed through the testimonies and evidences presented, that the major offences against the Dalits have been committed by the police themselves in violation of law, or they have colluded through indifference and inaction. The atrocities follow a particular pattern of burning homes and fields, murder, torture and beating, inhuman treatment and deaths under lock-up and custody, molestation, beating and rape of women and minor girls. Moreover, victims of bonded labour, child labour and trafficking of women and children come largely from Dalit communities.

The People’s Verdict after the Public Hearing declared that this state of affairs is due to a systemic flaw in the Constitution itself, which does not provide for a dynamic programme of positive action to raise the level of Dalits to that of the rest of the people of India. The Verdict charged the Indian state with gross and systematic violence against the Dalits, a pattern of repression, which clearly fits into the definition of genocide–a crime against humanity. And the situation has far from improved since then; rather it has deteriorated.

Dalit Women–Downtrodden among the Downtrodden
The Fifth National Conference of Women’s Movements in India held in Tirupathi in January 1994 was a landmark. For the first time in the history of the new women’s movement, starting in the 1970s, Dalit and Tribal women’s issues were raised as needing specific focus on the initiative of the Andhra Pradesh Vyayasaya Coolieulu Samakhya, a Federation of Agricultural Workers.

Dalit women are the ‘Dalits among Dalits’ because they are thrice alienated on the basis of caste, class and gender. Many studies have documented in measurable and objective terms that Dalit women are in a worse-off position than Dalit men or non-Dalit women in terms of sex ratio, wages, employment and occupation, assets, education, health, social mobility and political participation. There is a hierarchy among Dalit groups too.

It is found that the sex ratio favours the men due to the women’s harder living and working conditions. There is discrimination in daily wages even when the women work the same length of time and equally hard. There is disparity in the literacy rate due to widespread prejudice against women’s education. The practice of dowry, and the fact that after marriage they will go away, induces many parents not to invest their meagre earnings in their daughters’ education. Early marriages are the trend because of the girl’s vulnerability to sexual oppression by oppressor caste men, or the fear of an inter-caste or inter-community marriage. If an older son is being married, it is economical to marry off a much younger daughter at the same time.

The liberalisation-privatisation-globalisation (LPG) policies and the structural adjustment programme of the government in the 1990s worsened the conditions of Dalit women: unemployment, underemployment, casualisation of labour increased together with scarcity of essential resources like fuel and water. The sexual division of labour in the family ensures that women carry the double burden of household work and work outside the home. In rural areas, this may involve hours spent in the collection of fuel, fodder and water, in addition to other household tasks of cooking and rearing children, because of the ruthless environmental destruction and degradation caused by the rapacious imperialist/capitalist exploitation of natural resources.

Greater numbers of women work in rural areas, in the agricultural sector, most of who are either landless agricultural labourers or belong to the category of poor peasant cultivators. Increasing imperialist penetration into agriculture in some areas in the form of the green revolution, introduction of GM crops, corporatisation of agriculture, has led to an increased class polarisation among the peasantry giving rise to a new class of rich capitalist farmers with big landholdings on the one hand, and to an increased pauperisation, indebtedness and landlessness of large numbers of small landholding peasantry on the other. The bulk of the landless labourer women and poor peasant women belong to the Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes. They do the most unskilled of agricultural jobs and receive one-half to two-thirds of the earnings of male labourers. Many still work as manual scavengers, though this is prohibited and manual scavengers are supposed to be rehabilitated under the “Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act,” 2013, which was an upgrade of the 1993 “Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act. The introduction of technology in agrarian operations has led to women’s displacement and underemployment because it is often tasks carried out by them that are subject to mechanisation. At the same time, they are not incorporated into the skilled, mechanised jobs on the required scale. It is also more difficult for them to find jobs in the cities as compared to men.

The development of capitalist relations in agriculture has not led to a disappearance of pre-capitalist, feudal modes of exploitation. Indebtedness and precarity have led to an increase in the incidence of bonded labour, for example, whereby at times the entire family is forced to work free for the master. Selling of women into prostitution is closely connected with this phenomenon of indebtedness and bondage which is sought to be redeemed in this way. In fact, the massive scale of prostitution and trade in women has to be seen in the background of the prevalent land relations, an impoverished and landless peasantry and a mode of industrialisation incapable of absorbing the surplus labour force.

There are areas where the worst kind of feudal tyranny continues to prevail and the peasantry is obliged to render all kinds of services and free labour to the landlords. The right of the landlords over the bodies of the peasant and landless labourer women were exercised at the time of marriage but also otherwise. Rape is rampant by the landlord-dominant castes, but also by the police and army. Dalit women working in the fields are often molested, humiliated, abused, even raped, by oppressor caste young men and landlords as a matter of their right. The National Crime Records Bureau report of 2022, for the year 2021, shows a trend of rising rape cases against Dalit and Adivasi women. According to this report at least 10 Dalit women are raped every day, a 44% increase over the past decade. Women’s bodies are violently targeted in the context of the larger caste war.

Some such cases that have been highlighted in the news media in the last few years: In Uttar Dinajpur district, in Kaliaganj town, one minor Rajbongshi girl (coming under the SC category in West Bengal) was gang-raped and murdered in April, 2023. In September 2023, Dalit women were subject to a bloody attack by dominant caste Thakur men in Ayodhya. On 9 January this year there was the news that two minor girls from the Musahar community were raped and dumped in a field in a Bihar village. Two minor Dalit sisters were gang-raped, strangled and then hung from a tree to make it appear as a suicide case in Uttar Pradesh’s Lakhimpur Kheri district in September 2022. The gang rape and subsequent death in a Delhi hospital of a 19-year-old Dalit woman that took place in Hathras district, UP, in mid-September 2020 was another such notorious case – flowers that are crushed soullessly and with impunity. In this case her body was forcibly cremated by police without the consent of her family. Girl children of as tender an age of four years are not spared such a fate. Now due to the overall degradation of culture in all groups, rapes and subsequent murder are not only being committed by dominant caste males but also by males, sometimes young and adolescent, from within their own communities. Porn consumption on mobile phones, drug and alcohol abuse, ubiquitous mafia gang culture added to consumerist and patriarchal capitalist values purveyed through media (including films) and society have increased their victimhood in this respect.

It is claimed that Dalit women enjoy greater liberty when compared to their sisters from other castes because the socio-cultural and economic patterns and severe deprivation faced by the community as a whole do make for a more balanced and equal relationship between Dalit men and women. Still, the percolation into and internalisation of male supremacist ideology in the community leads to varied kinds of discrimination and oppression: wife beating, harassment, and desertion are common. The already meagre household budget takes a beating if up to 40% is spent on alcohol. Alcoholism of men can make the women into victims of male violence. If the wife also takes to alcohol consumption domestic strife multiplies and the children suffer, sometimes taking to drug and alcohol abuse at a tender age themselves, and they can resort to petty thefts to cater to their addictions and other wants.

Women are overtly excluded from the political decision-making processes. It is almost exclusively men who are in leadership positions in the Dalit movement, though women participate actively. The agendas of the Dalit movement, as the fight for land (but no entitlement for women), for minimum wages (but not equal wages), expose the male biases among the Dalits. Dalit women now openly question these patriarchal values and a trend of Dalit feminism has come up.

Dalit Women and the Women’s Movement
Dalit women also simultaneously question the wider women’s movement. They charge that it is dominated by oppressor caste/class women, who have so far put their own priorities in the forefront, and have failed to address the caste and class issues of Dalit women, which are subsumed under a generic caption of women’s issues. Dalit women are not integrated and focused upon in the discussion of issues like equality in higher education, unemployment, atrocities against women, sexual violence and harassment, salary/wage parity, the glass ceiling in work places, particularly in the corporate sector, division of labour and other equality matters in the man-woman relationship, exclusion/marginalisation in public spaces, inadequate representation in the political domain, the Draupadi syndrome (the public shaming of rebellious, independent women), problems faced by those opting for inter-caste and inter-community marriage, and so on. They allege that this approach is also found in government documents on women’s issues.

The struggles of Dalit women against untouchability, upper caste atrocities, land alienation, evictions, bonded labour, low wages, the liquor policy of the state, are rarely perceived to be within the purview of the women’s movement. Some activists like Ruth Manorama, and organisations, question such an approach and want the issues facing Dalit and Adivasi women to become the focus of the women’s movement in India.

Annie Namala, Director of the Centre for Social Equity and Inclusion, Delhi, thinks that Dalit women’s struggles find their place more naturally within the Dalit movement. By taking up a more independent role within this movement they can ensure that the gender issue is addressed. From such an identifiable, strong position within the Dalit movement, the Dalit women can be a part of the general women’s movement, which on its part needs to take up the cause of Dalit women and question all aspects of caste, class and gender, if it is really to work towards a society based on equality and justice. Dominant and intermediate caste women also need liberation from caste structures because it is a crucial factor operating behind the control of their fertility and sexuality and the evil of dowry.

Dalit women’s organisations formed the National Federation of Dalit Women in 1995 to challenge the premises of the women’s movement and governmental declarations of women’s equality. This Federation presented a Status Paper on Dalit Women at the World Conference on Women: Action for Equality, Development and Peace convened by the UN in Beijing in September of the same year. In it they focused on their issues from the human rights point of view, of being victims of racism/apartheid and genocide, as well as on their economic margi-nalisation due to the new economic policies of the government in the 1990s under World Bank/IMF aegis. In 2006, the All India Dalit Adhikar Morcha Manch was formed by Vimal Thorat and Asha Kowtal. With a social justice and human rights orientation it tries to help Dalit women move out of traditional occupations like sewer and toilet cleaning through support for their education and skills development and to tackle other problems faced by them.

To conclude, it is urgently necessary to create a new paradigm of egalitarian, sustainable, self-reliant, self and mutually respecting class- and casteless communities where everyone can lead a life of dignity in tune with Nature.

Back to Home Page

Frontier
Vol 57, No. 15 - 18, Oct 5 - Nov 2, 2024