Fighting caste-based oppression in TN
The only mistake my son had made was to have been born into a Scheduled Caste family,” V Chitra, the widowed mother of Gokulraj, said last week. Seven years after the 22-year-old engineering graduate was abducted, assaulted and murdered, a special court in Madurai convicted 10 people and acquitted five others in the case. As Chitra, who has battled vicious hatred and untold pressures on the journey to justice, summed up, Gokulraj was killed because of his caste.
Specifically, he was killed for being seen as attempting to transgress the artificial but inviolable boundaries of caste. In 2015, the youth was abducted from a temple where he’d been seen talking to a woman belonging to the Gounder community. The next day, his remains were found on a railway track. He had been assaulted and beheaded, his body thrown on the tracks in an attempt to pass off his death as a suicide. The murderers were led by the founder of a caste-outfit determined to enforce caste purity with violence if needed. In an embarrassment to the state police, the main accused, S Yuvaraj spent three months on the run, brazenly releasing media clips and participating in TV interviews and debates.
The Dravidian movement fought to end caste-based discrimination, yet caste-based oppression persists in Tamil society, particularly against Scheduled Castes and Tribes. Caste coexists with patriarchy, and its boundaries are maintained through the oppression of women. As a result, there has been a call for a separate law to deal with such violence, as current legislation is not adequately equipped to provide justice in cases of caste Hindu women facing violence over their choice in partners from another community.
However, more legislation alone will not offer a solution unless the bottlenecks in the system—ranging from hostility/reluctance of police to register cases to vacancies at district courts—are addressed. A study by an NGO showed only 13 convictions and 30 acquittals in 300 cases of murder under the SC/ST Act in a five-year period in TN. A whopping 229 cases were still in court. Justice delayed is as good as denied.