[Video] Dr. Ambedkar launches Kalaram Temple Satyagraha, a part from Dr. Ambedkar movie.
2nd March (1930) in Dalit History – Nashik Kalaram Temple Satyagraha started
Kalaram Temple entry movement formed a pivotal role in the Dalit movement in India. B. K (Dadasaheb) Gaikwad and Dr. B. R. Ambedkar led a protest outside the temple on 2 March 1930, in order to allowing Dalits into the temple.
The movement was to have a right to enter temple, it was more towards having equal rights. We don’t want to go to temples though but we should have rights.
Read also – Pledge – Say No To Hindu Temples!
Filed under Caste Discrimination, Casteism, Dr B R Ambedkar
Filed under Caste Discrimination, Casteism, Dr B R Ambedkar, Photos
Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar had rightly said that wherever these upper caste hindus will go they will bring caste system and discrimination with themselves.
It’s a prejudice that’s been outlawed in India. But now it seems caste discrimination could be creeping into daily life in Australia.
Mitra and Rita Pariyar came to Australia three years ago, believing they would leave behind the prejudice they faced in Nepal. They were wrong.
A recent lunch in Sydney revealed how deeply ingrained the couple’s caste status is — even among friends.
“The only burgers left were beef burgers and what my friends told me was that it was alright for me to pick up the beef because I was an untouchable and therefore I shouldn’t really mind about it,” Mitra says.
“But I felt offended about it because I consider myself as much a Hindu as they are.”
Mitra and Rita are Damais — members of one of Nepal’s lowest Hindu castes, otherwise known as untouchables.
Mitra says they’re frequently the targets of jokes by other members of the Australia’s Nepalese community.
“It’s almost a part of their lingo that they use these derogatory terms. You are damai, you are as black as a kami, these comments are common. So the upper caste people might not feel it, they might use it as a form a joke, but it badly hurts us.”
Two weeks ago, Rita was interviewed for a job. She says the interview was going well — then the Nepalese interviewer learned her surname.
A week later, Rita called the manager to confirm her start date.
“She said No. And I said why? And she said no reason, I am going overseas, like that. And I feel that I am low caste, and that’s why.”
But the discrimination extends beyond employment prospects.
Mitra says their low caste identity also isolates him socially within the Nepalese community.
“The discrimination or the exclusion is more subtle – they won’t say ‘you are low caste, get away,’ but it’s more likely that I am not included in family events, and functions and festivals. There is more open and more formal sort of segregation as well, that’s because caste associations are creeping in in the country.”
“They use these derogatory terms, ‘You are damai, you are as black as a kami’ – these comments are common. So the upper caste people might use it as a joke, but it badly hurts us.”
Raj Azad agrees caste discrimination is happening in Australia.
He is a Dalit — a caste so low in India that it is not recognised officially in the country’s social hierarchy — and has found the discrimination he faced in India had followed him to university in Melbourne.
“In my class I found two boys arguing with each other and they were using different caste names to abuse each other.”
“Indians are really good at identifying the castes of each other. They microscopically peel it layer by layer and then they come to know and that is what hurts me.”
Monash University researcher Lavanya Raj says when Indian Australians realise she’s a Dalit — also known as an untouchable — they change the way they behave towards her.
Her flatmate was from the highest caste, Brahmin, and when he found out her caste their once friendly relationship turned sour.
“Once we were just having a discussion and I was supposed to give him some money – some money that we use for the house to buy stuff,” she says.
“When I gave it to him, he put his hands out as if he was going to take it but then something told him in his mind that probably he should not touch me, and he withdrew his hand and asked me to keep the money on the table.”
“I was extremely angry and I threw the money, not exactly on him but somewhere near him and I walked off.”
Many South Asian countries have outlawed caste-based discrimination, while in Britain, caste is recognised as a form of discrimination under its equality act.
John Kennedy is president of the United India Association, a group representing many Indian-Australian associations in Sydney.
He acknowledges caste is increasingly creeping into Indian-Australian communities, but he rejects the practice.
“Casteism, yes I can see that certain communities have started their own caste-based associations in Australia, and I can see that it is being practised in Australia,” he says.
“But as an Australian citizen I don’t want this to happen.”
“If racism is not allowed in this country, why should casteism?”
There are around 100 Australian-based Hindu temples and their priests all belong to the Brahmin caste.
Co-founder of Sydney’s Helensburgh Hindu temple, Natarajan Iyer, says currently there’s no need to appoint priests from lower castes.
“99 per cent of them will be Brahmins. If there is a need we may consider it. Right now, we are not in that sort of a situation.”
Caste discrimination is outlawed in many South Asian countries, including India and Nepal. Other countries affected are taking steps to address the issue.
Britain’s House of Lords adopted an amendment outlawing caste discrimination in 2013.
So far, a caste discrimination case has not reached the Australian courts.
Race Discrimination Commissioner Dr Tim Soutphommasane says there is no legal mechanism to address complaints for caste discrimination in Australia.
“If racism is not allowed in this country, why should casteism?”
“If there is discrimination that involved caste alone, then it’s by no means clear that we would accept the complaint. Caste is not specifically covered under the discrimination law that we have at the federal level.”
Professor Simon Rice from the Australian National University College of Law says caste-specific laws are not needed in Australia, as it is covered by other legal mechanisms.
“I don’t know that we need to legislate specifically for caste. Race covers a whole range of characteristics- skin colour, for example, nationality, ethnic origin, caste will just be another one in the list.”
But Mitra says specific recognition of caste-based discrimination in Australia would help to stop its spread.
He says it would also help vindicate those members of the community experiencing caste discrimination.
“If racism is not allowed in this country, why should casteism?”
–With Raymond Selvaraj and Kulasegaram Sanchayan from SBS Radio Tamil
Source – SBS
Filed under Caste Discrimination, Casteism, Dr B R Ambedkar, Latest
Few months back, Al Jazeera show on Dalit History had mentioned comments from the Dr. B. R. Ambedkar’s Caravan. Today, Times of India covered about Dr. Ambedkar Caravan. Read from here –
In recent months, racial violence has been foregrounded in the US, with the Charleston incident in which nine black church-goers were gunned down and other incidents of police brutality that are no longer possible to deny. And all of a sudden, Black Twitter has become a preoccupation with the US media, reminding it of its own evasions.
Hashtags around race like #icantbreathe #Blacklivesmatter found their way into many feeds, pushed themselves into wider view, and forced a reckoning. The LA Times recently even assigned a reporter to cover Black Twitter, while acknowledging that “it is so much more complicated than that”.
African-American struggles have inspired and tactically informed anti-caste activism. But could Dalit-Bahujan Twitter exert a similar force, in India?
Take Round Table India, a forum of writers that aims for “an informed Ambedkar age” and sees caste as the primary fissure in Indian society. They aggregate news on politics, society and culture, they comment and critique, and try to be a hub for Dalit-Bahujan voices. ‘Unlike mainstream media, we aren’t casteist – we have many upper castes writing, at least as much as their share in the population,” says Naren Bedide, one of the founders.
It’s only half a joke. The media is scandalously unrepresentative – in 1996, Pioneer journalist B N Uniyal found that he hadn’t met a single Dalit journalist in his entire working life. In 2006, a Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) study found that 90% of the decision-makers at English newspapers and 79% of TV journalists were upper-caste.
In other words, the media frames national events, but does not include most of the nation. It speaks with near-unanimity on IIT’s “standards” when it pushes out Dalit students; it misreports caste-based violence as “farmers’ clashes” or lovers’ quarrels when it reports them at all; and it often misses the real import of events. “When others interpret the world for you, can you change it?” is the question that drives Round Table India. “We don’t have, and don’t expect access in the media. It’s a conscious decision to build spaces of our own,” says Bedide. As he sees it, it is a structural conflict, and one can’t use the tools of savarnas, like mainstream media, to dismantle their edifice of hierarchy.
There are blogs like Atrocities News that wrenched attention to the Khairlanji killings and continue to document caste-based attacks. But there are also blogs with entirely different missions, Facebook and Twitter accounts, mailing lists and Whatsapp groups – and to club them all together as Dalit social media flattens their diversity. Shared Mirror, for instance, is a platform for Dalit poetry, translated and new. Savari, a space by Adivasi, Bahujan and Dalit women, speaks with its own distinctive voice.
There are forums dedicated to history and to challenging narratives and erasures, like Dr Ambedkar’s Caravan, which has over 500 articles so far. In April, activists across the board celebrated Dalit History Month, creatively resisting the attempt to reduce Dalit history solely to one of atrocity. This was, again, a nod to Black History Month. Hashtags like #Dalitlivesmatter are often used to galvanize others.
Twitter, though, is still a hostile medium, say many of these writers. “It is full of either Internet Hindus or Congressis and left-liberals, there is no understanding of other issues,” says Bedide. Facebook, which nurtures more like-minded groups and longer conversations, is more useful, says Ashok Bharti, chairman of the National Confederation of Dalit Organisations (NACDOR). “If any incident happens anywhere, it is on my Facebook page in five minutes. It’s better than a wire service, though the stories are often raw,” he says.
“Dalits are still untouchable on social media; if I post anything about Dr Ambedkar or Dalit history in a general forum, I get blocked in a few minutes,” says Pardeep Attri of Ambedkar’s Caravan.
Of course, there is no unified Dalit social media, any more than there is a single Dalit politics across the country, fragmented as it is by sub-caste, region, gender, class and ideological preference. And yet, social media offers something new. Dalit Camera, a YouTube channel, records life “from untouchable eyes”. Bathran Ravichandran, who founded it, says that social media, with the many perspectives it offers, has “broadened the views and values” of Dalit activists around the country. Social media only supplements, in a small way, the grassroots work that goes on around the country, he says.
Others are skeptical of the reach and representativeness of social media Dalit voices. Political analyst and activist Anand Teltumbde describes them as “a small fraction of Dalits, who just talk to each other”. According to him, a sharpened sense of caste and sub-caste identity makes it harder to make common cause with others, and only props up their elite adversaries.
Meanwhile, groups like NACDOR prefer to engage with mainstream media and institutions, and use social media for direct access and advocacy. So does the Ambedkar-Periyar Study Circle (APSC) at IIT Madras, which has a vocal social media presence. Akhil Bharathan of APSC thinks that caste, as an all-encompassing framework of oppression, also compels one outwards, to think of gender, class, and minority justice, and to form alliances. While these voices may now be a “counterpublic”, drowned out in the din of powerful interest groups, the “ultimate aim is to be the public,” says Bharathan.
Source – TOI
Filed under Dalit History, Dr B R Ambedkar, Good News, Latest, Today in Dalit History
What Mother Savitribai Phule had said.
Stop worshiping cows, cows were never sacred. Brahmins used to eat cows. No matter you how much you try to please these Brahmins they will still treat you untouchable. So, why follow Brahminism? Why visit the Hindu temples? Why donate at Hindu temples and when we know the same money is used against us? Boycott Hindu temples and don’t donate there.
Filed under Caste Discrimination, Casteism, Dr B R Ambedkar, Latest, Savitribai Phule
What UNICEF said about Dalit Women
Filed under Caste Discrimination, Casteism, Dr B R Ambedkar, Latest
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Dr. B. R. Ambedkar's Caravan 