"The State shall not discriminate against any citizen on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth or any of them".

Article 15, Constitution of India

Right to equality is the first fundamental right of people under the Indian Constitution. Article 17 specifically outlaws untouchability. "Untouchability", it declares, "is abolished and its practice in any form is forbidden."

Yet half a century after Independence, caste prejudices persist. And so does untouchability.

P Sainath, in a series of articles for The Hindu graphically details caste discrimination in various parts of the country. One of the most intense battles Dalit (lower caste) communities are engaged in is over the right to use village burial grounds or burning ghats. This struggle is heart-rending in southern India.

Bandiappa's body lay outside the village for a day and a half, half buried, half burnt. In this region, most poor people bury rather than burn their dead. Only those at the top of the caste ladder practice cremation. But Bandiappa's body underwent a bit of both. He was being buried when the family was forced to stop. Then his family tried to cremate him, but it could not afford the firewood and oil. In the Hyderabad-Karnataka region, caste is forever- even when you are dead.

Bandiappa was a schedule caste Dalit and therefore his body was not allowed to be buried near the burial place of the upper caste lingayyats. "Untouchability persists beyond death," Sainath points out.

While the battle over the burial ground continues, a few years ago the Dalits were able to break the 'separate glass for Dalits' taboo imposed by the upper castes on small tea shops. Ravindra Pandevgere did not want to have separate tea glasses for the Dalits, but the dominant upper caste of the village threatened to boycott his tea shop unless he kept separate glasses for them. It was only after the Dalit Sangarsha Samiti (organisation fighting for the backward) smashed the tea shop's glasses and took up the issue that equality was achieved.

In another article for The Hindu, Sainath says in Bikaner district of Rajasthan, where the government provided large tanks to supply water to the people, the upper caste put up smaller tanks in the upper catchment area to catch the water before it reached the common tank. Agriculture as well as irrigation is caste-based in this desert area.

In most traditional desert villages, the Rajputs live at the top of the sand dunes where the evening air is cool. But they cultivate land in the lower, more cultivable region at the base of the dunes even if it belongs to the Dalits. The poor Dalits have no choice but to cultivate elsewhere. In the rural hinterland in most parts of the country, 53 years after Independence, Dalits are unable to battle the arrogance and domination of the upper castes.

Even in the urban areas, where there is greater awareness among the Dalits of their rights and a quota is reserved for them in educational institutions and government jobs, the upper castes succeed in making the lower castes feel inferior. In a moving story for Star TV correspondent Barkha Dutt interviewed girls belonging to the community called bhangis, who traditionally swept streets and cleaned toilets, on why they were dropping out of schools.

The girls said students and even teachers belonging to the upper class would deride them: "Why don't you go back to your brooms?" There was no support for these girls, who were trying to educate themselves to break free from their traditional shackles. Some teachers would ask them to sit at the back of the class in an effort to segregate them. Discrimination was neither subtle nor insidious. The girls were admitted to school but were openly snubbed and pushed to the back of the classroom.

In September 1992, newspapers in Rajasthan reported how a social development worker of the State Women's Development Programme (WDP), Bhanwari Devi, had been gang-raped by some upper caste men for stopping a child marriage in a Gujjar family of Bhateri village, Jaipur district. The woman was only doing her job but the Gujjars decided to punish her for interfering in their traditional practices.

To be stripped naked and publicly paraded is the greatest humiliation that an Indian woman can suffer. This terrible way of cowing a woman is used to keep them in their place and to stop them from becoming "over-ambitious." Three cases of rape and public humiliation of lower caste women that have hit news headlines and were taken up by NGOs and the media. Justice, however, continues to elude the women.

Of the three cases, the humiliation of Bhanwari Devi became a national, and even an international issue. She was taken to Beijing to make a presentation at the International Conference on Women in 1995.

In 1992, the State government had asked its field-level functionaries to go all out to stop child marriages. In Rajasthan, as in several other parts of the country, mass child marriages take place every year soon after crops are harvested in late April and early May and farmers have some money to conduct marriages. But the upper caste men of the district, many with strong political links, were not bothered by the government ban on child marriages or the orders issued to the WDP to stop these marriages.

They wanted to teach this Kumhar (lower caste people who make earthen pots) woman a lesson for daring to interfere in their traditional practice of child marriage. Bhanwari's husband was beaten and pushed aside and she was raped in his presence.

The highly active women's groups in Rajasthan were enraged by the incident and went all out to take up her case. The story was played up on the front pages of national newspapers. The National Commission for Women (NCW) conducted its own inquiry and demanded prosecution of the accused. But the upper class men involved in the rape had strong political connections and it was only after two years of sustained pressure by the NCW, NGOs and an inquiry by the CBI that the five accused were arrested. In November 1995 they were let off by a district sessions judge who found no evidence to connect the accused with the crime. The NGOs who took up the case were enraged by the judge's statement that upper caste men were incapable of raping a lower caste, elderly woman like Bhanwari.

Bhanwari was despondent. Even before the judgement, her own village began to boycott her as though she had perpetrated the crime and was not a victim. This made the women's groups more determined to fight the case. They filed an appeal at the Jaipur Bench of the High Court in February 1996. But since then, nothing has been heard of the case.

In Saharanpur district of UP, in May 1993, Usha Dhiman, again a lower caste woman, who had gone to the courts in Saharanpur in a theft case filed against her by her neighbour, was stripped naked outside the courts and dragged to the police station by powerful people seeking to silence her. The story got national attention when an Indian Express correspondent reported the incident. The Express buried the story on an inner page. But it was noticed and three Commissions - the National Human Rights Commission, the National Commission for Women (NCW) and the National Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes- expressed concern.

The NCW sent teams to Saharanpur to investigate the case. Usha Dhiman was invited with her husband to testify. Following prompt media attention and public outcry against the humiliation of the village woman, three policemen were suspended and transferred. Though Usha Dhiman will never forget her public humiliation, there was a measure of justice from the courts because of the pressure of the NCW and the media.

The third case pertains to Lata Sahu, a lower caste woman of Raigarh district of the newly created Chattisgarh state. She was declared a witch, stripped naked and paraded through the village for having the temerity to contest a panchayat election against an upper caste Yadhav woman. Though Lata, an epileptic, lost by a small margin, she was punished for daring to challenge the Yadhav candidate. Yogesh Vajpayee of the Indian Express travelled to the village in September 2000 and investigated the case. The higher castes, he pointed out, maintain their hold over lower castes by branding their women as witches. (Read story attached)

The March 13, 1999, issue of The Hindu carried a report of the National Human Rights Commission intervening in an attack on Dalit women in Vadodara. In this case, the women had become victims in a clash between an NGO, Parivartan, and a religious group, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, allegedly over conversions.

However, some members of the scheduled (lower) castes are inching up in status and the biggest Indian state, Uttar Pradesh, has had a woman Chief Minister, Ms Mayawati, who belongs to the scheduled castes.

In Bihar, the landless, lower castes have banded together under a political group, the CPI-ML (Communist Party Marxist-Leninist), to fight the tyranny of the land-holding bhumihars, or upper caste, who have their own army called Ranveer Sena. Caste wars have become common, and entire villages have been wiped out. In this battle too, the Dalits, poor and unprotected, suffer the most. Though these vicious killings and the politics behind them are covered extensively in the print and electronic media, there has been no reprieve from these massacres.

The caste system is deep rooted. There were basically four castes: the Brahmins or priests and teachers, the Kshatriyas or warriors, the Vaisyas or traders and business class, and the Sudras or the menial or labour class who did everything from tilling the soil to scavenging and tanning. You had to belong to one of these four major divisions, which were divided into sub-castes and to sub-sections of sub-castes.

The nature of the work of the Sudras, a lot of it unclean, was also responsible for their isolation and marginalisation. Many of the country's social activists like Ram Mohan Roy of Bengal and Mahatma Gandhi sought to pull them out of the traditional quagmire. Gandhi referred to these lowest sections of society as harijans or the children of God. He tried to give dignity to the work they did by picking up a broom himself. But change has been slow.

Yet, ironically, the father of the Indian Constitution was a Dalit - Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891 - 1956). Born in Maharashtra, Dr Ambedkar, popularly known as Baba Saheb, had to struggle to go to a school and get education.

Taunted and teased about his lower status, Ambedkar had to overcome tremendous hardships to become a jurist, social worker and a political force. He gave voice to those of the lower castes who were not allowed to drink water from the same well as the upper caste Brahmins or enter the same temple. Like Mahatma Gandhi, who is Father of the Nation, Ambedkar is the father of the downtrodden and the Dalits.

As Law Minister in 1950, he was the chairman of the committee that drafted the Indian Constitution, and sought to remove the culture of discrimination by giving equal status to all sections of the population. Since the Dalits were kept down for centuries, reservation has been provided both in education and employment to enable them to come up in life and catch up with the traditionally more privileged members of society.

There are more than 130 million scheduled caste (SC) people in the country according to the 1991 census. They constitute over 16 percent of the total population. The States of UP, West Bengal, Bihar, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh account for 50 per cent of the SC population. Most members of the SC earn their livelihood working as labour on land belonging to others or in occupations like scavenging, flaying and tanning of leather and other menial jobs. They work largely in the unorganised sector on very low wages. Most of them live below the poverty line, earning less than Rs. 11,000 a year. Literacy levels of the SC are abysmally low - 37 per cent as against the national average of 52 per cent. The literacy level for the SC women is even lower. Not even 25 per cent of them can read or write.

However, because of reforms and the sustained campaign of NGOs like Sulabh International, the terrible practice of manual scavenging or carrying night soil on the head has stopped in most parts of the country. Special schools have been set up to provide education to children of this lowest section of the caste-ridden society and to integrate them in the mainstream of life. But there are not enough NGOs involved in this work and the status of this section of society is still abysmally low.

The Week magazine from Kerala published in 1999 the continuance of manual scavenging in Surendranagar district of Gujarat. Ironically, sweepers of the local municipal corporation were doing the manual scavenging. The report was picked up and published in Grassroots, a publication of the Press Institute of India, which reports on human conditions.

Since 1971, 15 per cent of all government jobs are reserved for scheduled castes. But these jobs are not all filled. At the gazetted officer level, most of the top A and B categories of reserved jobs continue to lie vacant. Under category A would be officers of the rank of Under Secretary to government and above, officers who would determine the policies of the country. In the B category would be section officers or lower administrative officers. There has been no scheduled caste Cabinet Secretary, the top job in the civil service hierarchy of the country. In 1998, Mr Mata Prasad, a chief secretary in UP, was tipped to be Cabinet Secretary and there was hope he might become the first scheduled caste to storm this bastion of the upper class or caste. But he did not get the job. An important reason why the scheduled castes do not rise in the gazetted posts is they join service at a late age and retire before they can reach the top echelons. Top jobs are also political appointments. So it is only in the lower cadres that the reserved quotas are filled.

In fact, reservation has acted as a double-edged sword. It has perpetuated the caste system, for elections are fought on caste lines and there has not been the expected rise in the status of the underprivileged. In the introduction to the book, Mandal Report X'rayed, K N Rao and S Ahluwalia have pointed out that "electoral politics in India's caste-ridden society is based more on the convenience of caste-alliances than on the ideal of shedding caste rigidity. Under the Prime Ministership of Mr V P Singh in the nineties, 27.5 per cent reservation was extended to over 3000 other backward castes. This means up to 50 per cent of government jobs are reserved for various castes and tribes."

The extremely high reservation in government jobs and educational institutions has caused resentment among the educated, upper caste or class who think it is blatantly unfair to keep out meritorious persons because the lower, less qualified have to be accommodated. Disenchanted, a large number of the brightest and best doctors and students are leaving the country.

Though there are 130 elected scheduled caste Members of Parliament in a House of 543 members, in real terms they have not been able to garner the dividends of reservation and other benefits for the large population they represent.

Except for a few MPs like the late Jagjivan Ram, who rose to become the country's Defence Minister, and Ram Vilas Paswan, a more recent Cabinet Minister, most of these MPs do not speak up in Parliament. In an interview published in The Times of India, Mr Paswan says he entered politics after he saw an elderly scheduled caste person being beaten up by an upper caste man in Shaharbanni village of Bihar. The old man's crime was he had taken a loan of Rs 50 (about one US dollar) which he was unable to repay. Paswan was just a student but the public humiliation of the lower caste man motivated him to fight for the rights of the downtrodden.