Unlike in the rest of the country, casteism is usually a private affair in Kerala. One rarely gets to experience it in public spheres, thanks to the social revolutions the state has gone through. So when it recently raised its ugly head again, there was a furore across Kerala. It reminded us that the scourge still exists in deep layers among all the communities in the state.
The Thiruvananthapuram police had, on April 23, registered a case for the “theft” of 18 grams of gold from a house where a Dalit woman worked as household help. She was summoned to the police station the same evening. There, she claimed, she was not given food or water through the night and was not even allowed to sleep. When she asked for drinking water, she reported she was told to get it from the toilet. The next day, she was released after the complainant informed police that the “stolen gold” had been found misplaced at home. The story shocked Kerala’s psyche. The government suspended the sub-inspector for lapses in taking the woman into custody without a preliminary probe. Two days later, an assistant sub-inspector was also suspended.
In neighbouring Tamil Nadu, the bastion of Dravidian politics, the principal of a school and two other employees in Pollachi were booked this week after a menstruating Dalit schoolgirl was forced to write her annual examination outside the classroom. Around the same time, three Dalit men died at a Tiruppur dyeing factory after inhaling toxic gas while cleaning a sewage tank, an act proscribed by several laws and regulations. These recent cases in the two states stand out in their treatment of the marginalised. That such gross human rights violations are still happening in apparently progressive states like Kerala and Tamil Nadu is a bigger shame. Swift action by the authorities in the Thiruvananthapuram and Pollachi cases is welcome. But action against casteism does not stop there. Caste works in conscious and subconscious ways—and we can address it only when we acknowledge it. Our society, which allows the turpitude to divide communities by turning its face from it, needs to look at it in the eye and stare it down with a steely resolve.