Missing in action

One of the reasons why caste atrocities and birth-based discriminations go unpunished is because they have are so 8220;normal8221;, so much a part of everyday life and practice, so easily acquiesced to by civil society, that they don8217;t appear like the heinous crimes they actually are. That is why, despite an impressive battery of laws against such practices, the formidable political legacy of a B.R. Ambedkar, and Dalit leaders of national stature, caste hatreds continue to mark human interaction, especially in rural India.

But while ordinary citizens may not respond to such incidents with alacrity and anger, either because they are so steeped in the ideology of caste or because they are too timorous to confront it, the state government does not have such an excuse. Therefore we want to know why the Gujarat government8217;s social justice and empowerment department has chosen to be so apathetic to the evidence that many extremely offensive and divisive social practices continue to be norm in large parts of the state. This newspaper has reported on two such incidents in the course of the last few days. The first concerned the transferring of seven Dalit teachers because they did their duty by objecting to the segregation of upper-caste and lower-caste students in a school in Surendranagar district. The incident indicated how easily the school authorities and local institutions of law and order succumbed to threats from a well-organised lobby of upper-caste parents. Then came Gangaben Maru8217;s story from Bhavnagar. She and her family were deliberately subjected to caste humiliation and intimidation because she did not allow local thugs to help themselves to funds for local development. Things got to such a stage that her husband committed suicide. Yet nobody of political or administrative consequence in the region has bothered about the case, not when Gangaben was under siege, not even now when is widowed and grieving.

If the politicians and police cannot take prompt and exemplary action in such cases, why do we need these principled laws, these ministries of social justice, these departments of empowerment? Shut them down, they don8217;t make an iota of difference.