Dalits Media Watch Team decided to withdraw suspension of all the activities.
On Wednesday, a clash broke out in the village over a piece of land claimed by the Dalits and members of the upper caste family reportedly used lathis and other sharp weapons to kill the Jatavs.
"Two weeks ago, there was an argument between two families over SDM Khair's order to probe the case of dispute over the ownership of four bigha land property. The issue has been simmering since 2002. The land of Jatavs was claimed by the upper caste family and has ever since been the reason of the clash," said Udaiveer Malik, police spokesperson.
An FIR has been registered against seven persons by the kin of the victims, he added.
DIG Satyender Veer Singh said, "This was a civil matter. The case went out of hand because the Dalit family had called some relatives home and the upper caste family thought this is being done to build an army to attack them. They reacted without any apparent provocation."
The area is under police surveillance after the clash and the situation is now under control, police said .
Note: We are thankful from deep of our hearts to all those friends who had expressed their serious concerns and solidarity and joining us in different forms of support on our interventions & PMARC . Commitments and Contributions from mainstream society & our few Dalit friends are become great breathing for us to continue our efforts on our activities.
Though the challenge & threats are still there and it needs contributions from all of you we have decided to withdraw suspension of our all the activities. Warm Regards!- PMARC
Dalits Media Watch
News Updates 25.07.14
Dalit Girl Found Hanging- The New Indian Express
http://www.newindianexpress.
2 cops suspended after Dalits beaten to death- The Times Of India
Age Criteria Kills Deserving Dalit Student's MBBS Dream- The New Indian Express
Altering Punjab's caste equations- Business Standard
Migration Changed Khariar Dalits' Lives- The New Indian Express
This YouTube channel shows what it’s like to be an 'untouchable'- Global Post
The New Indian Express
Dalit Girl Found Hanging
http://www.newindianexpress.
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: A 16-year-old Dalit girl, who was allegedly a victim of sexual exploitation, was found hanging from the ceiling of her house near Vembayam late on Wednesday.
The deceased was a native of Muthipara near Vembayam. According to Venjaramood police, she was in love with Manilal, 20, who is now in prison on charges of raping the minor. According to the police, the deceased and Manilal, who was her neighbour, were involved in a physical relationship for nearly a year. Earlier this month, the girl’s parents came to know about their relationship, owing to which they filed a complaint before the Venjarammoodu police, which resulted in Manilal’s arrest 10 days ago.
The police charged Manilal with rape and committing atrocities against a person from the Dalit community.Though police have only registered a case of unnatural death in connection with the incident, they are exploring the possibility of booking the girl’s parents for not reporting the suicide to the police.
The Times Of India
2 cops suspended after Dalits beaten to death
ALIGARH: Three Dalits of a family were killed allegedly by some upper caste men in Veerpur village of Lodha, Aligarh over a land dispute, following which two police officials were suspended on Thursday for alleged negligence of duty.
On Wednesday, a clash broke out in the village over a piece of land claimed by the Dalits and members of the upper caste family reportedly used lathis and other sharp weapons to kill the Jatavs.
They also dragged the victims to a field and even tried to bury them alive, police sources said. The assailants beat up Babulal (55), Basanti Devi (60) and Kailash (30), all of whom succumbed to injuries.
"Two weeks ago, there was an argument between two families over SDM Khair's order to probe the case of dispute over the ownership of four bigha land property. The issue has been simmering since 2002. The land of Jatavs was claimed by the upper caste family and has ever since been the reason of the clash," said Udaiveer Malik, police spokesperson.
An FIR has been registered against seven persons by the kin of the victims, he added.
DIG Satyender Veer Singh said, "This was a civil matter. The case went out of hand because the Dalit family had called some relatives home and the upper caste family thought this is being done to build an army to attack them. They reacted without any apparent provocation."
The area is under police surveillance after the clash and the situation is now under control, police said .
The New Indian Express
Age Criteria Kills Deserving Dalit Student's MBBS Dream
PUDUKKOTTAI: A Dalit student of Pudukkottai has been left in the lurch by the selection committee of the Directorate of Medical Education after it denied admission to him by saying his age was 26 days less than that required for admission to MBBS even though he had secured the cut-off marks.
The student has sent an appeal to the Chief Minister to help him.
Ramanujam, son of Thangaraju, a resident of Kothamangalam near Alangudi, scored 1,101 marks in his Class XII exam. He secured 194 marks in Biology, 196 in Physics and 194 in Chemistry and scored 194.5 cut off marks required for medical admission and was eligible under the SC/ST category. Subsequently, he applied for admission and was awaiting the counselling call to select the college. But his name was not included in the applicants list.
Immediately he approached the Tamil Nadu Medical Admission 2014 - Selection Committee, Directorate of Medical Education, and was told that he was not eligible for admission since he would attain 17 years only on December 31, 2014.
Thangaraju, who is physically challenged, told Express that Ramanujam had secured 452 in his SSLC exam. “My relatives pooled in money and sent him to the Kurinchi Higher Secondary School in Namakkal district. He successfully completed the higher secondary course and scored 1,101 marks.
We felt proud that my son would become the first doctor in our circle,” he said.
He further said, “We have sent an appeal to the Chief Minister and Public Health Minister C Vijayabasakar.”
Ramanujam said, “It was my dream to become a doctor to the serve the poor and downtrodden. I hope our Chief Minister would help me achieve my dream.”
According to officials, the School Education Department stipulates that a candidate should have completed 15 years for writing the SSLC examination, while it is 17 years for the HSC exam. He might have got the exemption at the SSLC level.
Business Standard
Altering Punjab's caste equations
A recent paper on the post-Green revolution economic transition of Punjab’s peasantry, published by Punjab Agricultural University professors Sukhpal Singh and Shruti Bhogal, suggests that increasing productivity of rural workers is only one part of the agriculture to manufacturing transition.
Punjab has the most mechanized agricultural sector in the country, and the numbers reflect this. In 1983-84, the sector provided 479 million-man days of work a year; in 2009-10, the number dropped 16 percent to 401 million man-days. The wheat crop is almost entirely mechanized, and it is only the rice crop that still provides seasonal employment.
In Punjab, rising input costs have made small landholdings unviable so the share of cultivators in the total rural workforce has fallen from 46.11 percent in 1981 to 29.78 in 2011, while the share of agricultural labour – who worked on these fields – has reduced from 31.82 percent to 23.85 percent.
“Other rural workers”, who comprised of 63 percent of the rural work force by 2001, have made up this shortfall.This category includes workers in mining and quarrying, manufacturing, transport and construction – suggesting a pattern of “depeasantisation”, where small farmers and peasants are taking up casual labour in the informal sector.
But the shift away from farm to non-farm work has in some instances, altered village-level caste dynamics.
Last month, I travelled to Punjab to write about theEkta Club – a group of young Dalit women fighting for the right to till village land reserved for scheduled caste communities.
Such lands are leased out each year to the highest bidder, but the Ekta Club’s contention – and my reporting – suggested that dominant caste Jats usually appropriate the resource by putting forward a compliant Dalit and bidding by proxy.
This week, Sandeep Kaur, the Ekta Club’s leader, told me the land had eventually been leased to a Dalit woman fronting for an influential Jat village official, but vowed to continue fighting.
In the past, she said, Jats exerted complete control of the village’s agrarian economy, allowing them to enforce “economic boycotts” in which Dalits were simply not allowed to work on Jat fields and pushed into destitution. Over the last 20 years however, the shift away from agriculture has altered the dynamics of power in the village by blunting the boycott’s sharp edge.
Singh and Bhogal’s data also shows that people aren’t necessarily transitioning to better work. A survey of 150 farm households in Punjab suggested a third of those who left farming worked as casual labour – particularly in construction, a fifth were unemployed, and only 5 percent took up jobs in the private sector.
Once more Sandeep’s experience is illustrative: both her elder brothers work as construction labour and petty contractors in the nearby town of Malerkotla.
Sandeep however, is trying to set up her own businesses – a beauty parlour and a boutique for tailored salwar-kameez – even as she pursues a degree in accounts. With 10 million young people like her joining the Indian workforce every year,she knows even the construction sector cannot absorb them all.
The New Indian Express
Migration Changed Khariar Dalits' Lives
KHARIAR: Labour migration from this poverty stricken undivided Kalahandi district has become a part of life for many years now. Unlike other seasonal migration, Bankapur village’s tale is different.
About 110 dalit families of Bankapur have left the village in Khasbahal panchayat of Khariar block of Nuapada district in search of greener pastures across the country for good.
The village wears a deserted look and 30-odd members of 10 families left behind said the dalit families periodically migrated in the last 40 years. In the absence of repair and maintenance, the houses of migrated villagers are crumbling down.
With no land holdings, the dalit families had little option but to leave their village to eke out a living.
The families are now settled in Assam working in tea gardens in Bailadila famed for iron ore deposit, Durg, Bhilai and Raipur in Chattisgarh besides Punjab where they work as agricultural labourers, said the local sarpanch, Dulamani Mahanand.
With the new destinations offering ample livelihood opportunities, they are now leading a decent life far from their village where they had to struggle amidst poverty and hunger for several years.
One dalit Gopal Mahanad managed to bag a government job in Assam, informed Mahanand. He said the State Government should make efforts to bring the migrated families back to their village and rehabilitate them by providing sources of livelihood.
Global Post
This YouTube channel shows what it’s like to be an 'untouchable'
NEW DELHI, India — One talks about being beaten up. Another describes how people humiliate her. Many more speak about rape — a common danger facing women of India's lowest caste.
Meet the dalits, better known in the West as “untouchables” — an Indian caste so denigrated that they suffer explicit discrimination and abuse.
Now, they’re fighting back, taking to the internet to tell their stories.
Welcome to DalitCamera, the YouTube channel for untouchables. It’s one man's initiative to give a voice to the very bottom of Indian society, and to lift them up.
Bathan Ravichandran, 31, founded the project. He was the first dalit from his home region in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu to go to college.
He says a milestone in his life was being beaten by 20 fellow students because of his caste.
He realized how ignored the problems facing his caste-members were, and decided to change that by recording their stories. Starting in 2011, he set off with a camera, and created a channel on YouTube to host the videos.
These days, the initiative has a team of 23 members, most of them volunteers, and four cameras.
Working on a shoestring budget, Ravichandran’s crew of journalist-activists travels in buses tracking down stories that are neglected.
They often buy their own tickets, although sometimes a well-wisher offers to sponsor a story. The channel has steadily gained a dedicated audience. Encouraged by the response, Ravichandran hopes to expand the project into a live web channel.
Today, it boasts more than 75,000 videos, some of which have been viewed more than 100,000 times. Most videos are of low production and technical quality, but for Ravichandran, content is king.
“I was frustrated by the mainstream media’s coverage, or the lack of it, on dalit issues. Most commentators invited to television debates were high caste elites, and if at all a dalit was ever invited, he would get shouted down,” he says. “I started DalitCamera to record their views, as well as the views of oppressed dalit minorities.”
Dalits account for over 16.2 percent of India’s population, and have traditionally been associated with menial jobs like "manual scavenging" when workers remove human waste from toilets that don't have a flushing system. Despite affirmative action that sets aside slots for dalits at universities and in the government, they continue to face discrimination at the hands of upper-caste Indians, particularly in rural India.
In May, the rape and lynching of two teenage dalit girls in Uttar Pradesh underscored the issue of caste-based sexual violence in India yet again. They were found hanging — symbolic of their less-than-nothing status in society.
“If you look at it objectively, there is a sea of difference in the way Indian society reacts to the rape of a low caste woman compared to the rape of an upper caste woman," says Bojja Takaram, a dalit lawyer, in a 9-minute video posted on DalitCamera. "In the case of a dalit-class woman, rape is not seen as rape, it’s a usual event, a dalit woman’s body is there for the taking.”
This focus on sexual violence began after the brutal gang rape and murder of a 23-year old student in New Delhi in December 2012. In the months that followed, DalitCamera conducted a host of interviews with dalits across India about the routine sexual violence against low-caste women in India.
The entire country was up in arms against what was being described as “rape culture” but community activists felt the debate did not include dalit voices even when they are often the victims.
In 2012, more than 1,500 dalit women filed official rape complaints, a number that vastly underestimates the true amount because most don't get reported. Regardless, most went ignored by Indian media and the authorities, say activists.
“I don’t want to undermine that movement [against rape] but to start with, it did overlook the dalit experience," said Ravichandran. "At the same time, it was a historic opportunity for debate, and so we started talking to activists and victims from the dalit community, creating a parallel narrative of sexual violence in India which is so intricately linked to caste.”
News Monitor by Girish Pant
.Arun Khote
On behalf of
Dalits Media Watch Team
(An initiative of “Peoples Media Advocacy & Resource Centre-PMARC”)
Pl visit on FACEBOOK : https://www.facebook.com/
..............................
Peoples Media Advocacy & Resource Centre- PMARC has been initiated with the support from group of senior journalists, social activists, academics and intellectuals from Dalit and civil society to advocate and facilitate Dalits issues in the mainstream media. To create proper & adequate space with the Dalit perspective in the mainstream media national/ International on Dalit issues is primary objective of the PMARC.
On behalf of
Dalits Media Watch Team
(An initiative of “Peoples Media Advocacy & Resource Centre-PMARC”)
Pl visit on FACEBOOK : https://www.facebook.com/
..............................
Peoples Media Advocacy & Resource Centre- PMARC has been initiated with the support from group of senior journalists, social activists, academics and intellectuals from Dalit and civil society to advocate and facilitate Dalits issues in the mainstream media. To create proper & adequate space with the Dalit perspective in the mainstream media national/ International on Dalit issues is primary objective of the PMARC.
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