Sreelatha Menon: Nobody's children

Ear To The Ground

Independence may have given India the right to decide its destiny, but are we really serious about banishing untouchability to the netherworld?

Being born poor is a curse, doubly so if one is born a Dalit in this country. Over half a century after independence, nine-year-old Gautam Ravidas discovered last year that he should not have been born.

Attending a national public hearing for Dalits, Ravidas recalled his experience of going to school at Islamnagar village of Jamui district in Bihar. It happened exactly a year ago, in May last year. Ravidas was in his second standard when one day he went and sat in the first row of his class in the Haidra primary school. Another boy, Sunil Yadav, tried to throw his books and bag. When Ravidas resisted, Sunil went to his farther and complained. Baleshwar Yadav came and dragged little Ravidas out into an open sewer and beat him up for three hours. The boy was then bathed in human filth. "I felt like human excreta itself," he recalls.

His parents came running but were beaten up in front of students and teacher Krishna Yadav. When the parents complained to village sarpanch Rajesh Yadav, his response was: "Why do you send your child to school? There will not be any fight if the Dalits don't go to school."

Ravidas has not gone to school since. And the remaining Dalit children also don't go to the school any more. An NGO, National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR), has taken Ravidas to a school it runs there. "No one has been arrested and not even a case registered in the Chandradeep police station," the NGO said at the national public hearing on untouchability it organised recently.

It is a story of horror for the Dalit children in schools. They face untouchability in the seats they occupy (mostly backbenches), the plates they get their mid-day meals in (asked to bring from home), the marks they get, and the affection and attention they get from teachers. "In Rewadi, an NGO, which temporarily took over the management of 17 government schools, discovered that Dalit children had been assigned the task of sweeping and cleaning," says Khadija, a lawyer and activist of NCDHR who was part of the Rewadi experiment.

It is denial from the word go, not stopping even when Dalit students manage to reach institutions like the All India Institute of Medical Science (AIIMS) and Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in the national capital. The Thorat committee, set up to look into allegations of discrimination against them in AIIMS, has confirmed it. In JNU, which is looked upon as a mecca for aspiring scholars, the situation is no better. A committee set up to look into allegations of discrimination and various forms of untouchability there, compiled a report six months ago. But the report remains underground even as the tales of suffering remain.

With Dalits facing such discrimination in their first years on earth, is it a wonder that 36.5 per cent drop out before class five, 60 per cent before class eight and 73 per cent before class 10? But what is a wonder is that the Sarva Siksha Abhiyan, the UPA government's programme for universal education, does not even have a special component for keeping Dalits in schools. Is it an oversight or apathy? Or untouchability? Or refusal to acknowledge the plight of "God's children" as the Father of Nation called the Dalits.