India: The Politics of Prejudice

MOHANDAS GANDHI called them "harijans" (children of God), but most Indians still treat the country's 84 million Untouchables more like his rejects. Nearly 38 years after Gandhi launched his campaign to erase Untouchability, God's children are still locked in bestial poverty and ignorance. "Even after two decades of independence," Prime Minister Indira Gandhi admitted last week at a Congress Party meeting in Dehra Dun, "Untouchability persists." India, she said, must "hang her head in shame."

The problem of the Untouchables is old, but the urgency is new--and openly political. Since she broke with the conservative, big-city bosses of her party last fall, splitting Congress into two feuding factions, Indira and her socialist followers have been under pressure to call elections before long. The long-ignored harijans, numbering about one-seventh of India's 560 million population, loom as a powerful and perhaps pivotal bloc.

As a result, canvassers from every Indian party have been venturing into the country's 565,000 small hamlets and villages in hopes of tapping the Untouchable vote. In West Bengal, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, the Communists have made considerable headway with promises of liberal land handouts. Indira has a trump card of her own: the exception to the image of the hopeless harijan, Food and Agriculture Minister Jag-jivan Ram, an old Gandhi and Untouchable leader who last December became Indira's party president (see box).

Social Sediment. The Untouchables are castoffs from one of the world's most rigid social orders. Around 1500 B.C., according to many scholars, fair-haired Aryan invaders formalized the four-tier Hindu caste system and introduced a color factor.*The tiers soon evolved into economic strata, and by 500 B.C. a fifth level had been established for Atisudras, or Untouchables. The fifth stratum, peopled by the hated and despised children of intercaste marriages and the lowest laborers, became

India's social and economic sediment.

Today the Untouchables remain the most backward group in a still backward land. India's literacy rate of 25% is shocking enough, but it drops to 10% among the Untouchables. More than one-third of the Untouchables are landless farm laborers toiling for 260 a day. Those who have fled to the cities, where they can enjoy urban anonymity, find caste still much in evidence. Though the government is supposed to reserve 12.5% of all its job openings for them, only 2% of New Delhi's top-echelon officials and 3% of its legions of clerks are harijans.

Casual Brutality. The sting of Untouchability has softened somewhat. No longer, for example, are any harijans expected to use earthen spittoons hung round the neck because their spitting on the ground might "pollute" barefoot Brahmans. Until the 1930s, the lowliest Untouchables were virtually "unseeable" as well in some parts of India; caste Hindus believed even an Untouchable's shadow was defiling. Though such attitudes no longer prevail, a special government inquiry commission recently concluded that despite decades of legislation, discrimination is still "virulent all over India."

Untouchables are regular victims of brutality. In remote villages, "uppity" harijan women are sometimes paraded nude through the streets and then raped. A scuffle between an Untouchable laborer and some caste Hindus in Tamil Nadu State on Christmas Day in 1968 led to an arson attack on an Untouchable ghetto: 42 men, women and children were burned alive.

Class Love. Ancient attitudes have kept caste barriers Himalayan in height. So has the fact that, for all the official pronouncements, the government has done little to help. Over the past 15 years, spending on special economic-aid programs for harijans has totaled only $90 million, a meager 1.5% of all development outlays. Of the 115,000 students currently enrolled in Indian universities, only 2,300 are Untouchables. Scores of laws are on the statute books, but enforcing them is something else.

Slowly the bonds of Untouchability have begun to weaken as the Hindu doctrine of karma has come into question. Karma teaches outcastes that their present misery is the result of sin committed in a previous incarnation. For centuries, that doctrine has ensured that the Untouchables would accept their lot. Now growing numbers of them are demanding a better break in this life, not the next one.

Placard-carrying "militant" Untouchables have not yet appeared on the streets of Delhi, but the harijan case is being made more and more vocally by the small harijan bloc in Parliament, by a few enlightened caste Hindus--and by the Communists. As Gandhi warned, if love and legislation do not overcome Untouchability, the only alternative may be bloody revolution.

*Caste was stronger than color, but the desired light skin was most common among Brahmans (priests), who ranked ahead of Ksha-triyas (warriors and administrators), Vaisyas (traders and farmers) and, finally, dark-skinned Sudras (menial laborers of all kinds).

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