The story of Nandanar, the Tamil Saivite saint, is one etched in the popular memory of Tamil Nadu. Born in a Dalit household, Nandanar’s bhakti towards Lord Shiva was such that he constantly wept to get a glimpse of the deity at the Chidambaram temple.
As Chidambaram was too far away from his grasp, he decided to visit the temple in Tirupunkoor in present-day Nagapattinam. There, he found to his dismay that the deity was not visible from outside the temple as the ‘Nandi’ was blocking the view. He prayed to the Lord with all his emotions, which made the Nandi literally move a few feet from its place, giving him the sight of Shivalokanathar.
Centuries later, father of the Dravidian movement, E V Ramasamy Periyar, commented on this incident, stating that Lord Shiva even made the Nandi move from its place but did not ask the Dalit to enter the temple.
The story of Nandanar could very much be the tale of many Dalits in the Tamil land even today. Political leaders and activists point out that incidents of denial of entry into places of worship, lack of access to common properties and blatant discrimination even in government structures get constantly reported in the media, often with tales of violence perpetrated by the dominant caste in the villages.
The recent incident that caught the limelight was the temple car issue of Sesasamudhram, a village in Villupuram, which is the district with the highest Dalit population in the state. The issue erupted after Dalits of the village were denied permission to pull the temple car along the public road, despite alleged assurances by the dominant community during last year’s local body polls.
Former MLA and member of the Dalit outfit Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (VCK), D Ravi Kumar, says that the issue of temple entry is only a manifestation of a deep rooted bias institutionalised at the village level. Most of the temples where such conspicuous discrimination is practiced are privately managed ones, which are not under the control of government.
“The management of the temple is usually vested with the dominant caste in the village. It is here that the problems are heightened,” he says. Not only places of worship, but all common properties in the village remain difficult to access to members of the Dalit community, who are often landless farm hands wholly dependent on upper caste land owners for livelihood.
In the Kalkeri village in Krishnagiri, Caste Hindus took this denial of temple entry to new levels. After the Dalits acquired the right to worship in two of the temple villages in 2009, members of the dominant community built a new temple. One fine night, the idols from the old temple were usurped and taken to the new one in which the Dalits continue to be excluded.
The more dramatic incident that rocked the state was the “wall of shame” in the Uthapuram village in Madurai. The wall was built right across the village in an attempt to allegedly keep the Dalits off the upper caste territory. While it was demolished after orders by the Chief Minister in 2008, Dalits in the village were denied other rights, including temple worship, till early part of 2012.
Evidence, a Madurai-based NGO, found in its survey in 2008 that in all the 213 villages it sampled in 12 districts, Dalits were discriminated in one form or the other in temple worship.
However, such bias is seen in administration as well. The New Indian Express reported in December 2011 that Dalit children of Kurayur in Madurai were denied admissions to the government school in the village.
Activists say that incidents of clashes are increasing between the Dalits and the Backward Classes in many districts as the former are getting more and more mobilised politically and are asserting their rights.
X Irudayaraj, District Secretary of the Tamil Nadu Untouchability Eradication Front, a wing of the CPI(M), who led the movement in Kalkeri, says that educated youth among the Dalits are now stressing on equality at the village level. “They get educated in the cities owing to the benefits of reservations. When they return back to the villages with both educational as well as economical upliftment, they are unable to bear the status quo that prevails at the ground level,” he says. Many such protests are led by youth wing leaders of Dalit parties that have managed to mobilise their caste members in huge numbers.
However, this mobilisation is highly region centric. While many such protests are reported from the northern and southern districts of Tamil Nadu, where Dalits are in direct confrontation with the Vanniyars, who claim to be the majority caste in the state, and Thevars respectively, the western region, generally called the Kongu land with the domination of Gounders, hardly throw up such incidents.
“The Arunthathiyars, the major Dalit population in this region, continue to be victimised as they are probably the lowest in the hierarchy of Scheduled Castes. This is why, the government allotted a special reservation for them,” says V A Ramesh Nathan, Director of the Social Awareness Society for Youths, which had documented hundreds of such repressive incidents in the last five years. In some cases, questioning by the Dalits have also led to murder and molestation, he recounts.
Ravi Kumar says that such incidents portray an ideological issue that had cropped up with the Dravidian movement. “Leaders of the Dravidian movement stressed the rights of majority castes, arguing that the minority Brahmins had usurped all benefits. The result of this campaign is that everything has become a numbers game in the state. Now the backward classes who have received the benefits hold on to it and minority communities, whether it is religious or caste wise, are facing the brunt of discrimination,” he says.
In fact, at an open hearing conducted by the National Human Rights Commission in Chennai recently, petitions complaining of official apathy in dealing with discrimination flooded the members. “The problem is, many of the officers at the ground level belong to the communities that perpetrate such discrimination. Hence, there is delay in action, and sometimes, inaction,” says A Kathir, Executive Director of Evidence.
Dalit leaders call for a comprehensive and independent monitoring system at the Panchayat levels, where the implementation of the SC/ST Atrocities Act, which provide penal action for apathy and caste crimes, should be ensured.