Is there hope? What can we do?

In India, I met with the former Prime Minister's Head Adviser (who more or less runs the country) and we talked about the Dalit people, the oppression, politics, the economy, etc. I tried my best to keep up. He told us that a few years ago, he thought there was no hope for the Dalit people, but since this modern grassroots movement, there is hope that the Dalit people of India will gain their freedom sometime in our lifetime.

I've worked with DFN for a few years now and the work they do as a non-profit is extremely admirable. They help in four main areas: education, economic development, health care, and social justice. Similar to most non-profits, the most effective and tangible way to help is a monetary donation. I could go into extreme detail about where the donations go, but I'll just sum it up by saying that every penny goes to supporting the Dalit people, because I know people have that concern. My favorite way to support is by sponsoring a child. I met Stephan Prakesh in a DEC (school) in Bangalore. By donating $28/month, Stephan is able to stay in school and be fed, and he writes me a letter and draws me a picture each month.

These were three of the kids we dressed up in nicer clothing, wigs, and sunglasses for a skit at their school.

You can go to this website if you'd like to look into sponsoring a child:
http://www.dalitchild.com/

I know that most people our age don't have much money to give, that's why the branch of DFN that I became President of starting a fundraiser. This not only raised funds, but it spread awareness as well. You can also go to this site to sign a letter to the Secretary of State (Clinton) asking her to help International Justice Mission:
https://secure3.convio.net/ijm/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=109

Also, the Production Company I interned for (NBSE) is working on a feature-film called "Not Today". The main themes will be the oppression and poverty of the Dalit people. The movie's website:
http://www.nottodaythemovie.com/TakeAction/tabid/90/Default.aspx

I hope you have enjoyed this blog. I know it was a little confusing and probably a lot to take in, but I'd be more than happy to answer any questions or comments you may have. :)

"Dalit Freedom, Now and Forever"

How is this still happening? What is the world doing about it?

If you don't feel like reading this whole post, AT LEAST read this article. It just came out 3 days ago! This is an unbiased article in the Asian times that is a huge step for the Dalit movement.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KJ20Df02.html

It is always nice to read an article written from an unbiased attention that clearly recognizes Dalit discrimination. I think the most important part of the article are these two paragraphs...
"There's no denying that the issue of Dalits - who occupy the lowest rung of India's well-entrenched caste pyramid - is a virtual tinderbox in the country. Despite India's increasing literacy levels, mounting economic wealth and growing geopolitical heft, the benefits of national prosperity haven't quite percolated down to low-caste Indians, who are ostracized by mainstream society.

Despite over six decades of independence from British rule, Dalits are still discriminated against in all aspect of life in India despite laws specifically outlawing such acts. They are the victims of economic embargos, denied basic human rights such as access to clean drinking water, use of public facilities, education and access to places of worship."

I'm not sure if I've mentioned this or not, but a good portion of the world, especially people in India, will completely deny Dalit/caste-based discrimination. With many articles like this one out, and the UNHRC and the EU now acknowledging the issue, it seems very naive to continue to not recognize the discrimination.

Something about the look on this lady's face while she is begging for money has always gotten to me. I remember her vividly since my trip to India two summers ago.

The best way to understand why this still occurs is to say that there is a lack of enforcement, not a lack of laws. When India adopted its constitution in 1950, Untouchability was officially banned. There have been other laws passed by the Indian government and UN Social Justice Committees such as the Prevention of Atrocities Act. However, these laws are not enforced for two main reasons.
1) Religious- In the rural areas especially, Hindu roots tell people that Dalits are below the caste system and should be treated as such.
2) Economic- When talking about illegal immigration and what to do about it, people always bring up the fact that immigrants do play a big part in our economy with the jobs they usually take. On a much bigger scale, it is the same concept. Because they are considered impure from birth, Untouchables perform jobs that are traditionally considered "unclean" or exceedingly menial, and for very little pay. One million Dalits work as manual scavengers, cleaning latrines and sewers by hand and clearing away dead animals. Millions more are agricultural workers trapped in an inescapable cycle of extreme poverty, illiteracy, and oppression. And, they work for less than $1(US) per day.

Stories

I wanted to use this post to share a few stories. I have personally met some of these people, and others are people that knew someone I met in India. I hope these stories can make the Dalit oppression and slavery a little more real and alive in the minds of anyone reading this blog.

This story occurred a few years ago.
A 42-year-old Dalit woman was gang-raped and then burnt alive after she, her husband, and two sons had been held in captivity and tortured for eight days. Her crime? Another son had eloped with the daughter of the higher-caste family doing the torturing. The local police knew the Dalit family was being held, but did nothing because of the higher-caste family's local influence.
A side note to this story... It has been estimated that only about 5% of Dalit rapes are reported in India, and over 30% of these reported rapes are dismissed by the police as false complaints.

These were two beggers owned by a pimp trying to get money from people on the street.

One of the teachers in the DEC's (Dalit Education Center) that I met told us her story. She was a Dalit and I think her name was Salima. She told us that when she was five, her parents made her start sweeping streets for a living. Her parents decided that Salima wasn't bringing in enough money, so when she was seven, she was sold to a Brahmin (upper-case) for about $30. He made her beg the streets for money. All the money she and the other child slaves made, they gave to him. At age seven, Salima was determined too old to beg, so she was sold to another man as a sex slave. She was sold over fifteen other times by the time she was twenty. As a sex slave for thirteen years, she was then moved to a brothel and worked as a prostitute for a pimp. She escaped the brothel at age 22 and found DFN (Dalit Freedom Network). They took care of Salima for several years. It turned out that she had over 5 STI's (Sexually Transmitted Infections), including AIDS, and no one is sure how long she will live with the diseases. However, through DFN's help, Salima was able to gain self-confidence and told us she was determined to teach the Dalit children in the DEC's everything DFN had taught her. She was committing her life to trying to help the kids break out of their caste system and have a better childhood than she had.

I was astonished how even though Salima was crying while telling her story, before and after the story, she seemed to be one of the happiest people we had encountered on our trip. That's what DFN did for her, and why I believe that this is such a worthy cause.

We met a Christian pastor who told us that his church had been burnt down. We came to find out that a few Hindu, upper-caste extremists told one of the other pastors of this church that they wanted to meet with him and his family at the church to discuss Christianity. When the pastor and his family got there, they locked the doors and burnt the church down.

One day we were playing with the kids at one of the DEC's. A teacher asked one of the Dalit students why he wouldn't get near us. He told her that he thought we must be upper-caste people. She assured him that we had no caste and that it was ok to play with us. The student explained that an upper-caste lady once told him that if he ever got near one of the upper-caste children, he would get them extremely sick and dirty because he was a Dalit, and he would be beaten.

Education

From birth, Dalits are taught that they are sub-human and the upper-caste is taught that they should not associate or be near a Dalit. In fact, if even a Dalit shadow lands upon an upper caste member, many upper-caste members will go through a series of cleansing rituals. This attitude is carried on throughout their lives and it's extremely difficult to change.

The best way anyone can think of to really help the Dalit people is education. A large portion of Dalit children will never go to school. This is partly because the parents won't let them because they need their five-year-old to help bring in income, and partly because some of the upper-caste schools won't accept Dalits.
DFN and some other organizations work to fund and build DEC's (Dalit Education Centers), aka schools, that accept children of any caste, but are target specifically toward the Dalit children. DFN works in the Dalit slums to try to convince the parents to allow their children to go to school and uses an English-based education in all the school. Most of the upper-caste society speaks fluent English as it is the most dominant language in the business world of India, and it would be a lot easier to pass as a non-Dalit and try to get out of the mold of your caste by knowing English. See this link for further detail: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124642022941378351.html

Furthermore, the students are taught that no one should be allowed to discriminate based on caste and that all humans are born equal. By instilling this notion into kids' minds at a young age, we have the best shot at Dalits and non-Dalits growing up with an attitude of equality, and not one of hatred. Out of all the different ways to bring freedom to the Dalit people, in my opinion, this is the most effective.

I will be the 1st to admit that the DEC's that we build in India would be considered by most of us to be trash. The buildings are not very nice, the school supplies are very limited, and outside of the classroom is just dirt. However, compared to the living situations these kids are in every day, these schools are absolute heaven. Several of the children would show me their desk and their teacher. We would then walk a few blocks to their "house" in the slums, and I would see what they have to go home to-- utter poverty. So even though these schools are not anything close to schools in the US, the impact that they have on the lives of so many Dalit children is unfathomable.

Violence and Abuse

Please read this very short article about a Dalit woman being raped by a doctor before a surgery.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/news/city/lucknow/Doctor-rapes-Dalit-woman-inside-OT/articleshow/4931822.cms

Even if the accusation is completely false (which it most likely isn't), it still says something significant that the "Times of India" made a clear point to establish the fact that it was a DALIT woman who was potentially raped. If you took the word "Dalit" out of the article completely, it would have a totally different meaning. It shows that this wasn't just a crime of power and lust, but also of discrimination and prejudice.

Look at some of these other newspaper headlines. These truly tell the Dalit story of oppression in themselves.
"Dalit boy beaten to death for plucking flowers"; "Dalit tortured by cops for three days"; "Dalit 'witch' paraded naked in Bihar"; "Dalit killed in lock-up at Kurnool"; "7 Dalits burnt alive in caste clash"; "5 Dalits lynched in Haryana"; "Dalit woman gang-raped, paraded naked"; "Police egged on mob to lynch Dalits".

Lets look at that last one in perspective of modern-day America. If the headline read, "Police egged mob to lynch African Americans in Los Angeles", I think the impact would be huge. Things like this don't really happen in modern-America very often anymore, and when they do, you are bound to hear about it and the perpetrators do not (usually) get away with it. I'm not saying that racism is completely dead in America, because we know that's not true. However, I'm saying that beatings, lynchings, murders, robbery, torture, or people being publicly paraded doesn't often occur solely because of your class (upper-middle-lower), which is semi-equivalent to a "caste" in India.

Just walking through an upper-caste village is a life-threatening experience for many Dalits. Statistics show that
EVERY SINGLE DAY....
3 Dalit women are raped
2 Dalits are murdered and
2 Dalit homes are torched.

These statistics have been proven by multiple studies and are included in the article below.
What's even more interesting is that these statistics are believed not to be even close to what the real crime rate actually is. Those stats are based solely on crimes reported against Dalits, and the majority of crimes go unreported. Why? Because the people in power- the police, government officials, village councils, etc. are all upper or middle caste people.

Many people don't believe these atrocities that are being told because they think that there's no way that this many people can be treating others so horribly. I'll explain what a lot of people don't understand. The caste system is based on Hindu traditions from 1,500+ years ago, and it says that you are borne into that caste. Well, Hindus traditionally believed that you were born into that caste based on how you live your previous life. It's hard for Americans to understand how upper-caste members can be so cruel, when really, since they were born, many of them are raised to believe that because they are born Dalit, that is the way they deserve to be treated, and they see no problem in that.

This is the article from National Geographic in 2003 that many of the information in this post comes from:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/06/0602_030602_untouchables.html

What I really don't understand is how powerful articles like these are not having a drastic effect on the world and why most people on this Earth have never heard the Dalit story.

Women, Children, and the Sex Market (cont.)

Women are usually considered to be the "Dalit of the Dalit", or lowest of the low. Girls who are not old enough to work (any girl under the age of five or six), are viewed as even less valuable than adult Dalit women. No one is exactly sure of an exact percentage, but it has been estimated that over 40% of Dalit girls at birth are either killed or put into the sex market. When people first hear this, they usually can't understand how Dalit parents can be so evil and cruel. However, it's a lot complicated than that.

You have to remember that from the day a Dalit is born, he/she is taught that they are sub-human. The majority of Dalit people do NOT understand that the way they are treated and the lifestyle they lead is not ok. It is all they have ever known and they truly believe that as Dalits, they do not deserve any sort of human rights like the rights given to people of other castes (or "jatis").

If a Dalit parent finds out that they are having a girl, there is a good chance that the mother will have an unsafe abortion.
If they let the child live, the girl might be sold into the sex market for an average of about $30 (U.S.). Most of the girls sold usually have between 4 and 10 different sex owners (masters) by the age of 16.
If the girl lives with her parents, she will probably start working to bring the family income around the age of 5.
In the slight chance that she gets to go to school, well, she isn't exactly safe there either. Many "recruiters" as they are sometime called will stake out girls within schools, kidnap them, and sell them. Some of these recruiters claim to teachers or parents that they are going to take their children to a boarding school.

I know some of us didn't grow up in the most ideal situation, but I am confident that none of us had a childhood as poor as these girls do.
What if they don't go into the sex market? What is life as a Dalit child like then? Well... the Human Rights March along with the Global March Against Child Labor estimated that 100 million children in India today are working "under conditions akin to slavery." Slavery. I know some of us hate our jobs, but I'm pretty sure no organization would say that any of us are working under conditions similar to slavery.

I know this is a lot of overwhelming statistics, facts, and stories. I have spent two posts talking about the children, women, and the sex market in India because it is what I am most passionate about and if I didn't see it first-hand, I would not be able to believe that so many people in the world, or in one country, could be living like this. It is truly astonishing.

Human Trafficking, Sex Slavery, and Women

If there is a "ground-zero" for human trafficking in the world, it's India. This isn't my personal opinion, this is what the numbers show. India, soon to be the world's most populous country, has more than 1.2 million children caught up in human trafficking. Even worse, more than 100 million people are involved in trafficking related activities in India.

Let me start with a story. A thirteen-year-old girl walked into one of our (Dalit Freedom Network) clinics (hospitals) crying. The girl broke down and told doctors that at the age of 9 she was sold from her house. From then on until she was 11, she was paraded around every night naked in front of adult men. They then would rape and beat her. She is no longer paraded around now that she is thirteen, but she is raped and abused all day and night. She said that she lives in a house with six other girls and she begged the doctors to help them escape.

Human trafficking is a million dollar business. This is not just a demonstration of hatred toward the Dalit people. Trafficiking is a huge part of India's economy, and a part that ruins the lives of millions of people on a daily business. Did you know that other than South Africa, India has the most people with AIDS than any other country in the world.

27 MILLION people are enslaved today. 80% of those people are women. 50% of those people are children.

Look at the Global Forum On Human Trafficking Campaign/event that just took place a couple weeks ago.
http://www.notforsalecampaign.org/events/global-forum-on-human-trafficking/

The next post will dig deeper into the issue of the sex market and focus specifically on Dalit women and children.