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Everyday Dalit Experiences of Living and the Denials
Indian democracy acknowledges the legitimate claims of Dalits and provides for institutional provisions to safeguard them. However, successive governments and society at large deny such claims. Wildly inaccurate descriptive representation of Dalit reality conspicuously rejects most of their genuine claims as citizen.
Constitutional provisions to institutional guarantee of rights for India’s historically marginalised are conspicuously available and democratically acknowledged. The abundance of institutions has not necessarily matched the deliverance of protective rights, and surprisingly, state action in many areas breed opacity and flimsy excuses for procedural misrepresentation. In many cases, state mechanism defeats the chances of the socially marginalised, enforcing claims of human dignity and universal non-derogable rights through legal mechanisms formally available to them.
India’s vibrant democracy has received wide acclaims, but less recognition of the substantial disgust and fervour of the suppressive weight of state mechanism and primordial social structure against the so-called lower caste groups. What to speak of the progressive implementation of non-derogable rights of Dalits by governments over a period of time? Rather they have been wilfully callous and blind. Caste-related violence and exploitations are a reality. But the state’s reluctance to acknowledge their endurance, and the assiduous efforts to silence them, shows the decadence of substantive human rights to lower castes, tribal, women and minority which is comparatively available to fellow humans in the liberal democracies.
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