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Rakesh Pandey

The incidents of harassment and murder of Dalits in Uttar Pradesh are not stopping. Just a few days ago, to be precise, on October 20, a shameful incident had come to light in which a 65-year-old Dalit man was made to lick his own urine on the stairs of a temple in the capital Lucknow. Earlier on the night of October 1, a Dalit was beaten to death in Rae Bareli after being accused of “drone theft”. The ink of these two incidents was not even dry that now confirmed news of a Dalit man being beaten to death in a village in Amethi has come to light. The only crime of the deceased was that he had dared to demand from the landlord his one week’s outstanding wages, due to which he was put to death. These three incidents, taking place at different but important places in Uttar Pradesh, create a concrete face of the terrible oppression of Dalits in the state, which the Yogi-Modi rule of BJP has proved unsuccessful in stopping.

The incident in Salimpur village of Fursatganj police station in Amethi district is an incident of mob lynching of a Dalit, which has happened for the second time in Uttar Pradesh within a month. According to media reports, a Dalit laborer named Hausila Prasad was taken by an upper caste landlord Shubham Singh and his three relatives to work as a laborer in his fields. His wage was fixed at Rs 350 per day. He was made to work for a week and later they refused to pay his wages of Rs 2,500. This wage rate seemed high to this landlord, because the MNREGA wage in the village is only half of it. In order to get the work done in his fields, he remained silent while fixing the wages, but later became reluctant to pay the wages. On October 26, Prasad had gone to the landlord’s house to demand his wages, but instead of giving him the wages, he was beaten with rods and when he became unconscious, he was put in a jeep and thrown at the door of his house. Later, he died at the hospital of King George’s Medical University, Lucknow.

This incident in Amethi shows how cheap the life of a laborer, and especially a Dalit farm laborer, is in our country! His life was taken away by the landlord to avoid paying wages of only Rs 2500 and after an uproar on social media, a case of culpable homicide not amounting to murder has been registered against him and he has been arrested, while three more criminals involved in mob lynching have not even been touched by Yogi’s police.

In the year 2022, 51,656 cases were registered in our country under the law made for Scheduled Castes, of which 12,287 cases were from Uttar Pradesh. This constitutes 23.78% of the total cases registered for Dalit crimes. Within a year, this figure increased to 57789 with a 12% increase on a nationwide scale and, certainly, there would have been at least a similar increase in the cases of Dalit oppression in Uttar Pradesh. About 16-17 percent of the total population of the country lives in Uttar Pradesh. In this context, the figures of Dalit oppression in Uttar Pradesh are one and a half times the population and much above the national average, which exposes the reality of BJP-RSS’s claims of Dalit love.

It would be a mistake to consider the incidents of increasing oppression of Dalit tribals across the country and especially in BJP ruled states, and especially in Uttar Pradesh, as mere law and order situation. The roots of this oppression have to be seen in the system which the BJP is trying hard to perpetuate. And this system is Manu’s Chaturvarnya system, which has been codified as Manusmriti. Since independence, the Sanghi gang has been running a campaign to impose Manu’s system in place of Ambedkar’s Constitution. He is also misusing the power of the Center and the states to achieve the same nefarious objective. The Code of Manu clearly refuses to consider the lower caste people as even human beings and does not consider the usurpation of their property as a crime. Sanghi fighters like Shubham are trying to honestly follow the words of Manu under the protection of Modi-Yogi and Sanghis. In a country where the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is being sparred with, murder of a Dalit farm laborer is a normal thing. This is Modi-Yogi’s ‘New Normal of New India’.

In this country, those who are against the social justice and caste oppression mentioned in Ambedkar’s Constitution and those who are fighting for the establishment of socialism based on economic equality in this country, all those Bahujans and leftists will have to come together. The future of this country is secure only in the success of their joint fight against exploitation and oppression.

(The author is a senior journalist and an officer of Uttar Pradesh Shramjeevi Journalist Union, these are his personal views.), Contact: 94242-31650)