Justice Liberty Equality: Dalits in Independent India

Contents: Introduction. 1. Southern part of every village is South Africa. 2. My own voice: folk voices of marginalised. 3. Testimonial therapy: an emerging hope for victims. 4. Shrinking livelihood in golden jubilee year of freedom. 5. Monument against child starvation. 6. Rule of Lord: Collison of caste Patriarch and corruption. 7. Political patronage. Annexure. Notes.

It has been 64 years since India the largest democracy in the world attained independence. Yet justice for all is still a far cry in the country where the caste system continues to determine political social and economic lives of a billion people.

Money and muscle power together with political string pulling often result in denial of justice for the hapless have-nots’ especially the Dalits untouchables ravaged by poverty and illiteracy. Atrocities and extortion on the Dalits, fake encounters refusal to register complaints against the well heeled, arbitrary arrests on false charges illegal detention and custodial deaths are in commonplace.

In the absence of a modern social audit system, the keepers of the law often unleash a police Raj, especially in rural India. A crippled National Human Rights Commission and its state subsidiaries with limited recommendatory control and a dysfunctional Legal Aid System depict a gloomy picture indeed.

In a unique way Lenin Raghuvanshi a veteran human rights activist citing the case-studies primarily drawn from Uttar Pradesh registering the highest rate of crime against the Dalits chronicles how with implicit support from the administration, the Dalits are tortured and subjected to humiliation by the higher castes like being garlanded with shoes their faces blackened or being forced to ride an ass yet, in most of the cases violence deaths or custodial tortures that are committed against the marginalised and deprived castes go unrecorded.

Ironically even after having shed the colonial yoke its legacy continues in the administrative framework of our independent India marked with widespread corruption which has rendered many government-sponsored schemes in rural India a failure.