Caste is great evil of Hindu orthodoxy -Gyanu Adhikari

AUG 27 - In Morang, there’s a village called Karamdanda. The village has about 60 families—less than 10 each of Dalits and indigenous and the rest are ‘upper caste’ Brahmins and Chhetris. A month ago, an incident in Karamdanda shook Dalits and their allies and brought to surface the hidden machinery of caste oppression, that great evil of Hindu orthodoxy, which exists in Nepal and elsewhere.   

One evening in July in Karamdanda a 30-year-old Dalit woman was returning to her house when a man attempted to rape her, cornering her in a silent nook. Screeching and biting, the poor woman, whose husband works as a labourer in Qatar, defended herself. She gathered a few women and together, they went to see Manoj
Biswokarma, a 27-year-old editor of a six-page local weekly, Fight—a Dalit who seems to have realised the power of buying ink by the barrel. He consulted his Brahmin neighbour on what to do and the group decided to go to the police.
The accused, a Brahmin man, was promptly arrested. But he promptly denied the charges, thereby confusing the accuser. Was he really the man? She was not sure. The accuser was incensed. The police saw that communal harmony was strained and sent everyone off.
The retribution started next morning, July 19 at 9am. A mob of about 60 people, comprising of Brahmins and their ‘high-caste’ friends assembled in the courtyard of the Annapurna school. Manoj Biswokarma, the editor, was brought to the scene, as was his brother Anil, to face abuse, physical and verbal.
 “You dangras think you’re big here, don’t you?” [Dangra means an animal corpse in Nepali, a term of abuse for Dalits, some of who work with leather]
“You think you’re big because you’re a journalist? Educated? Riding on a motorcycle? Acting like a politician?”
The beatings were not enough. Someone in the mob suggested smearing black soot, a time-honoured humiliation, over Manoj’s face.
The rape-accuser, Maya Sarki, aka ‘Kanchi sarkini’, was also brought to
the school. The mob turned on her.
She was beaten, her clothes stripped
off and a garland of shoes thrust around her neck. Black smear was forcibly painted on her face.
Two journalists, Chhetris, members of the Federation of Nepalese Journalists, were part of the mob. They filmed the attack that lasted until the police reached the school at noon.
Enter the media. The two journalists uploaded the video on YouTube in a bid to humiliate the editor further and wrote articles suggesting that he was ‘appropriately punished’ for his behaviour. Kathmandu’s newspapers had no clue what had happened until a blog ran the story. Then it spread, generating outraged headlines.
The events have greatly agitated many Dalit minds. Just a month before Karamdanda, a village in Rautahat district had seen the ‘upper-caste’, these time Madhesis, turning on the Dalits for entering a Brahma temple. Add to that the disconcerting news, quietly spreading, that the head of the current government and the Chief Justice, Khil Raj Regmi is himself an ‘anti-Dalit’ (in the words of a Dalit journalist.)
A Dalit civil society leader from Regmi’s village in Palpa, who knows the family, claims that Regmi is a Bahunbadi (observer of the caste system) who is “always in a great hurry” to end his interactions with Dalits. Others go further and say that Regmi considers Dalits ‘untouchable’. At least two newspapers, Jana Astha and Naya Patrika, have reported that soon after Regmi ascended to the throne of executive power in March, Dalits and the indigenous in the Prime Minister’s residence were barred from entering the kitchen there. A source who knows the Dalits and Adivasi cleaners there says there were ‘caste tensions’ in the prime minister’s residence. In another instance, Padam Sundas, who was accompanying members of the National Dalit Commission to a meeting with Regmi, says that Regmi refused to meet them in his chamber, where he holds his regular parleys, preferring instead the waiting room—standard practice among orthodox Brahmins—which the group interpreted as a signal of Regmi’s attitude towards Dalits.
In his defence, the taciturn Regmi has refuted the allegations through his press advisor and the section officer of the Secretariat of the Chairman of Council of Ministers. But the pattern of behaviour, Dalit journalists and researchers are convinced, leaves little room for doubt that Nepal’s sitting Chief Justice and the head of the government harbours caste prejudices.
Looking at the response from the highest public office in the land to the village gatherings, several other aspects of the Karamdanda incident trouble Dalits. The journalists’ association, which can be loud when it wants to, turned a cold shoulder to the Dalit editor brutalised and the attack on Maya Sarki was portrayed in the media as an incidence of violence against women. The communal character of ‘upper castes’ attacking Dalits and threatening the indigenous of the village who were sympathetic to the Dalits was downplayed. The police failed to provide security to the attacked before, during and after the attacks—Maya is currently in a shelter owned by the Women’s Rehabilitation Centre (WOREC), an NGO, in Biratnagar and Manoj, too, has fled to Biratnagar for safety. The police have shown no enthusiasm to arrest everyone implicated in the attacks identified in the video. Those who were arrested have subsequently been released on bail. Finally, instead of pushing for justice, local civil society members, including political party activists, have pressured the victims to sign ‘reconciliation papers’ to take the case off the court.
Dalit researchers say that among the approximately five million Dalits in Nepal, change in social dynamics is on a collision course with entrenched caste-derived attitudes inherited over centuries. As previously marginalised Dalits and indigenous get educated and dignified, they face fierce resistance, and even attacks, from the dominant ‘upper caste’ members of the community (my crime was to get educated, says Manoj). The trend has amplified after the Constituent Assembly was dissolved last year, emboldening the dominant who felt their status was being challenged. The Dalits, whose political sympathies have historically been with the radical communist parties—they joined the Maoist ‘People’s War’ in large numbers, for example—are paying the greatest price for the country’s greatest failure, an inability to write a progressive constitution, and the subsequent resurgence of conservative, right wing politics in Nepal.
source:-ekantipur