Priya Das The Untouchables: the forgotten quarter billion.

At this moment, there are a quarter billion people in India who are under a strict, and ruthless slavery regime. These people are called Dalits, or more commonly known as the Untouchable class of lower status Indians. Every day these citizens are exploited beyond belief. Their women are gang raped, paraded naked in the streets, burnt to death, and forced into prostitution. Their men are pushed into slavery, gang violence, and most are beaten to death at a young age. Like any other country with an unforgiving caste system, these 250 million Untouchables are ruled by an iron fist of a mere five per cent of the Indian population, who accrues 90 per cent of Indias countries wealth. The caste system declares that each and every Indian is given a class that they are born into. This cannot be governed after birth, and it cannot be altered. This means that 45 per cent of the Indian population is born with no rights or freedoms at all whatsoever. India holds the highest number of slaves worldwide. These slave castes are treated as less than animals, and are believed to pollute anything that they touch. Dalits are forbidden to drink from the same water stations as other Indians, they are forbidden from shopping in the same markets, riding the same buses or even walking on the same streets as their counterparts from different classes. Dalits are given the filthiest jobs in all of India; not to mention, they are the 77 per cent of the population that gets less than 50 cents per day. Dalits are limited to the jobs of cleaning feces and urine from the streets, and cleaning toilets. These are the modern slaves of the world. India is completely riddled by elitism. The way that Dalits are treated is a true depiction of what human activist Dr. Joseph DSouza calls, the horror of human ego. India needs a cultural revival. There exists an inherent belief that life simply positions us in a better position than others, and that is just the way that life is. We believe that it is not our

responsibility to remedy this situation. However, if this were the case, then the entire Western world would still be riddled with slavery. There is an underlying assumption that western lives are more valuable than non-western lives. Solely because the Dalits live on another continent, they tend to be ignored. Are Dalit lives not worth as much as ours? We are in no way more enlightened in the West than the Dalits in the East. The Indian system is simply not adequately policing the injustice against Dalits. I first heard about the Dalits three years ago. But before that, I had not heard of them. I myself was born in India, raised in an Indian evangelical house, and have always abided by most Indian cultural norms. Despite this, I was still so deeply unaware of the detrimental, and on going injustice that was occurring just a few oceans away. I was so utterly disconnected from my own motherland that I had not heard of the pain of the Dalits, and this to me was a sign of ignorance. Perhaps it was because I was an average Canadian, whose intercultural knowledge barely scraped the surface of true ruthlessness here on Earth. See, Dalits dont get much media coverage. The Untouchables are given no voice to fight the crimes committed against them even though these crimes include child slavery, and being lynched in publicly. Dalits are being stoned to death just because they born into a particular caste. Would we act this way towards people? Of course not, we say, but discriminating this way has sadly become normalized by our society. You are given the class you were born with and thats how it must stay. We do not seek to change this. We see change as hopeless when we ruthlessly pass Dalits on the streets. The only difference in North America is that we do not have religious casting labels given to these Untouchables. That is the sole difference.

So, why are the injustices against Dalits relevant to Canadians? This is because Canada houses its own class of Dalits. They live in the streets and corners of our cities. They live in our neighborhoods. They inhabit all of the same places we do. They are the people we treat poorly, they are the people that we judge, that we steer away from while walking and not wanting to brush against them. They are the people we presumptuously judge by their clothing, the piercings, or their lifestyle choices. The Dalits stand as a true encapsulation of the worlds injustice. How do we sit by and watch 250 million people live in the bygone era of slavery, discrimination and classism? By the same token, we do still let it happen here, right in our hometowns. If we truly immerse ourselves in the truth of the brutalities of the world we live in, we would live in a state of perpetual torture of not being able to come to terms with the worlds injustices. No one single individual can bring forth change on one single day, it takes cooperation, but often times, this notion of working together seems hopeless. Although we may not overtly stone them in the streets, or condemn them in our religious institutions, we condemn them by excluding them from the social realm of acceptance. Perhaps we are scared, petrified even of these brutalities that we subconsciously chose to ignore them. Without thinking twice, we push these truths to the back of our psyche, but doing this makes us by standers. We are by standers holding the power to change the world. Sadly, we chose to keep this power in our pockets, never really putting our blessings to good use. It is not our place to decide who belongs in what caste. We are all born the same way, and with the same amount of intrinsic value, knowledge, and ability. Let us not ignore the wrongs that are occurring around us. Let us use our wealth and freedom to help those who since birth, have been stripped of opportunity. Let us provide equality.

Sources: http://www.dalitsolidarity.org/pdfs/cerd_c_ind_co_19.pdf