COMMUNICATION:
Vipassana is cultish?
OSKAR VON BAHR, STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN

In your Oct.1, 2004 issue, "Vipassana is a fraud", Dr. Ashok Adhav of Pune writes that Dalit Voice is doing a good job by exposing S.N. Goenka since Vipassana is a fraud. Where can I find those articles where Goenka is exposed? I'm interested in the subject because I attended a Vipassana course in Sweden recently but quit after four days since in my view it was too cultish. For instance we had to chant "well said, well said, well said"(sadu, sadu, sadu) in the beginning of each meditation session after Goenka's song. This might seem harmless but it is actually a typical psychology used by cults and salesmen to get the victim to agree to something harmless in the beginning and llater make him/her agree with more and more. We had to listen to Goenka's long and extremely tedious lectures every evening after ten hours of meditation. Its only purpose was to slowly control our mind. All in all, it was a lot of talk before the course but how beautiful this organization was, how non-profit, how detached it was from any kind of religion etc. I just got the sense after a while that this wasn't really the case. They weren't 100% truthfull. I didn't like Goenka either. So, I decided to quit the course. If he is preaching Brahminism which is harmful to the Untouchables, I am very sorry for this. What is his motive? In what way he earned millions? I am interested in literature related to Goenka. (bobbyfischer@spray.se)

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We are bitterest critics of Goenka and his Vipassana, which is nothing but meditation. He has earned billions and is supported by India's ruling class. Our objection to Vipassana is that he is misleading our people, meaning India's Black Untouchables who are victims of Brahminism, which Goenka is preaching in the name of Vipassana — EDITOR.

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COMMUNICATION:
"Caste identity" rocks Kerala meet
RAJU THOMAS, PO BOX - 2296, MADRAS - 600 023

DV has never proved wrong. You have trained me up in such a way that today I am able to evaluate events and individuals. I attended the "National conference on Dalit culture and the politics of resistance" organized by the Dalit Intellectual Collective, New Delhi, sponsored by Vikas Adhyayan Kendra, Bombay, which is an NGO run by Ajit Murickan, a Syrian Catholic hailing from Kerala.

The participants included: Dr. Gopal Guru, Dr. Lakshmanan, Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS), who reads DV regularly but a strong critic of your "caste identity" theory, Christhudas Gandhi, IAS, Madras, G. Aloysius from New Delhi also opposed to your theory. Nalini Rajan, a Brahmin journalist, Prof. D.L. Seth, an upper caste from UP, Somasekharan from Karnataka associated with Ambedkar Foundation. Total 60 participants mostly from Tamil Nadu, one Syrian English Professor, Dr. Sanal Mohan from Gandhi University, Kerala, two from AP.

There were heated debates on your "caste identity" thesis when I raised it. Everybody who opposed to it were given a mouthful by Christudas Gandhi who said that one should feel proud of his identity. Prof. Dayanandan, a relative of our "Black Bishop", was confused on the identity theory but later got convinced and became its staunch advocate.

Educated Dalits hate DV: Somasekharan is not in favour of DV and DSA literature and yet he spoke on Kannada literature. When I asked him the role played by DV and DSA literature in creating awareness among Dalits and the promotion of Dalit literature, he told me that VTR was doing it in his own way. He did not want to give any credit to your sacrifice or missionary work. This is the attitude of most of our "educated" Dalits. They are jealous of you. These are small minds. What to do?

Brahmin participants were not happy over Dalits asserting their identity and they were also not in favour of polarisation of Hindus and Dalits. They speak on universality and universal brotherhood etc. This is a dangerous concept. Some wanted "Dalit unity".

I convinced them that we need not bother about unity. Unity will come out of crisis. Unit is also possible only between the equals. Unity of various Dalit castes is not the issue. The issue is strengthening of the identity of each community which alone will empower them.

Dr. Lakshmanan understood the importance of "caste identity" and its ability to defeat the Hindutva. Some Dalits said that Kanchi Mutt was a Budhist Vihara and it must be either demolished or taken back by the Dalits.

There were a few Dalits who looked very revolutionary. Every participant was well qualified (Ph.Ds). Dr. Sanal Mohan presented a paper on PRDS, Thrivuvalla, which you addressed some years back. Dr. Anand Teltumbde came only on the last day of the seminar but did not say anything about your theory. Our people under the control of marxism, addicted to marxism cannot come out of it. Had they studied Babasheb they could easily reject marxism. You could come out it because intellectually you are honest. That is all. I liked Christudas Gandhi. He spoke like you and his language was also like you. No Govt. servant will speak like him.

Nationality question: I was the one who initiated the debate on "caste identity" because Aloysius spoke on "Tamil identity". He said the "Tamils are a nation" which I challenged. He got angry but later got convinced when I quoted Babasahebs reference to nationality from 8th Volume: "a longing to belong and a longing not to belong etc.". Do the Pariahs though speaking Tamil think that they belong to the Pallars? Do the Pulayas who speak Malayalam think that they belong to the Nairs or Sambavas (equivalent to the Pariahs in TN)? It is not the marxian ideology of language which is the basis for constituting a "nation". We had elaborate discussion on the issue of nation, nationalism and nationality and finally all got convinced.

It was at this point Christudas Gandhi intervened and touched "caste identity". Gandhi spoke at length on "caste identity" and declared that he was proud to be a Pallan. He also supported the different castes and subcastes claiming distinct identity. Caste/community should feel proud of its separate identity and should work for the welfare of its members and there was nothing wrong in it. If any one calls you that you are a casteist or communal without any guilt, you say that you are communal or casteist. Every Brahmin and all other Aryan upper castes are also communal because it was through the "caste identity" they went up the ladder and became the rulers, he said.

The conference, however, did not discuss the most important point as to "who is the Enemy of Dalits" and their friends. Without identifying our enemy how can we go ahead? Some Dalits said they should make use of "good" Brahmins. But where are these "good Brahmins?" Brahmin participants wanted to dictate things to the Dalits.

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Vaidik defends child labour
DR.K. JAMANADAS, "SHALIMAR", MAIN ROAD,CHANDRAPUR -442 402

The Maharashtra Govt. recently searched for and deported some "child labour" from Bombay. On this, there was an article in a Marathi daily,Tarun Bharat (July 31, 2005): "Child labour: a different dimension".

The Brahmin author, Mahesh Joshi, says the problem of forced free labour is artificial,. The quality of the Indian soil is that the children — boys and girls— should be put to work and motivated to develop the skills in some work. As a matter of fact, all countries follow this practice, he says. But when the rulers are foreigners, they conspire to kill the skills of the population under their control.

"Child labour", he says, the phrase itself is deceptive. Childhood ends at five. In India every grown-ups (10-12 years) are included under "child". The govt. which accepts this definition, the author wonders whether it is the alien govt. or our own.

If the definition is correct, free and compulsory elementary education up to the age of 14 itself becomes a "free forced labour". As teachers are paid, they must work for eight hours, but the children also should sit in the class for six to seven hours should be considered as inhuman atrocity. So, in postgraduate level three hours is considered as standard, how is it justifiable to tire the small students for seven to eight hours in study. If the students are tired, he doesn't suggest the games and other extracurricular activities. Surprisingly, he suggests them to work in the fields, as if that is not going to be tiring.

He is worried that because of compulsory education there is a great labour scarcity in farm sector and laments that we are still following this principle and that is our basic educational policy.

He says Amartya Sen call to stop child labour as terrorizing.

Joshi feels it is unfortunate that the govt. should compel all children to go to school and stop school dropouts and direct that no child should work in the fields or outside the house. This makes the children lazy and totally dependent on the govt. and makes them parasites.

His plan is that each school should be provided with a farm land, about 150 to 200 acres, for the school of 250-300 students. The teachers will work for eight hours but the students will come in two batches of four hours each or may be even 3 hours. Agriculture should be organized on the basis of the students and this will sustain the expenses of the education of all the schools.

Joshi, however, does not tell what should be done about his own upper caste children in cities. He wants a different system for the urban areas. Why not their children in cities be employed as municipal sweepers and scavengers. They should practise this first and then apply the scheme to Bahujan students.

After "independence", Chief Minister of Bombay, B.G. Kher, stopped teaching English from the standard 5 and started it from standard 8 thereby depriving the Bahujan children the benefit of English. Recently when the Maharashtra Govt. started teaching English from standard 1there was a hue and cry among the upper castes.

The United Nations says that the elementary education up to the age of 14 is a birthright of every child in the world. Even this idea of the UN and the thoughts of Amartya Sen are not liked by the upper castes.

The Bahujans should take cognizance of such poisonous propaganda and join the issues thereby preventing the calamity that is going to fall on the Bahujans.

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Hitler's prediction comes true
danielleceleste@hotmail.com

Don't be afraid of reading the Mein Kampf written by Adolf Hitler. (DV June 16, 2005 p.11: "Hitler not worst villain of 20th century as painted by zionists").

Believe it or not, it was Hitler who predicted exactly what would happen with the zionist state, it would become a haven, a protected sanctuary for Jews and so it has...

The following quotations from the Mein Kampf will prove him right:

The Jew's domination in the state seems so assured that now not only can he call himself a Jew again but he ruthlessly admits his ultimate national and political designs. A section of his race openly owns itself to be a foreign people, yet even here they lie. For while the zionists try to make the rest of the world believe that the national consciousness of the law finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state, the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb Goyim. It doesn't even enter their heads to build up a Jewish state in Palestine for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organization for their international world swindle, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks. (From chapter 11 of Mein Kampf: English translation courtesy of www.hitler.org, http://www.fpp.co.uk/hitler/meinkampf/palestine_prophesy_dt.html).

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Heard of "Gandhi prostitutes" in Holland ?
GANDHI MOSQUITO

In the city of Amsterdam, Holland, where prostitution is legal, there are over 10,000 Hindu prostitutes who are now called with the derogatory terminology of "Gandhi prostitutes". These unfortunate "Gandhi prostitutes" are brought here by their Hindu pimps, who are commonly known in Amsterdam as "Gandhi pimps". They bring young Hindu women from India with a false promise of lucrative jobs. But once these women come to Amsterdam they are criminally forced into prostitution. These prostitutes work from special prostitute houses, rented by the wicked "Gandhi pimps" for the sole purpose of mass prostitution. These prostitute houses are specially adapted into small cubicles and are now called "Gandhi brothels". Since these prostitutes mostly work illegally and without the prostitute licence whenever they get caught, they get deported back to India.

Embassy collusion: Their earnings are kept by the immigration authorities and are used to purchase the air ticket and to cover other expenditures incurred. We are running a pressure group and a voluntary organization called "Justice for Gandhi prostitutes" at Amsterdam with its branches in most European countries.

Our intention is to get them a suitable amount of compensation before their deportation. We are also demanding the prosecution of the barbaric, evil and cruel "Gandhi pimps" who bring these unfortunate women from India.

Some "Gandhi pimps" tried to threaten us citing their connections with the Hindu embassy in Den Haag, Holland, but it failed to create the desired effects.

Most of these Gandhi pimps have good connections with the high officials in the Hindu embassy in Holland and also in most of the European countries. Here it is worth mentioning that this trade of "Gandhi prostitutes" is confined, not just in Holland but it is spread all over Europe and this is helped by the senior officials of the Hindu embassies in the European capitals.

But in Amsterdam, these "Gandhi prostitutes" are thousands and their number is growing. There are about 60,000 - 70,000 prostitutes in Amsterdam where the city population is 7,00,000.

Flesh trade thriving: There are thousands of Thai prostitutes but they come to enrich themselves. These Thai prostitutes are insultingly called "Thoo prostitutes" which depicts and portrays a spitting gesture while uttering the remark of Thoo.

In Amsterdam, flesh trade is so profitable that a woman can earn thousands of Euros in just 6/8 months if her brothel is located in the center of the city and if she is marketed in the prostitutes industry through experienced pimps. Most of the pimps here are Blacks of Surinam and African origin. They are insultingly called "Monkey pimps", most of them are born in Holland and hold Dutch citizenship and cannot be deported back to their parents country. Surinam is next to Brazil. Among the African pimps, Nigerians are the highest in number (80%).

(gandhi_mosquito@yahoo.com).

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DOCUMENT:
Racism enforced by Jews in Israel & "Jews of India"
S.V. RAJADURAI

One of the cynical ironies of the history is that the Jews, millions of whose members were swallowed up in the anti-Semetic furnaces of nazis, produced from amongst them a reverse racism whose victims are the Arabs particularly the Palestinians whose land the zionists have been forcibly occupying for more than a half a century. The Western powers, especially the US, have no qualms in admitting at least formally the existence of racisms practised against the Blacks, nazi atrocities against the Jews and the White supremacist apartheid policy practised in South America. But in the case of the tragic victims of the zionists, the propaganda from the West has succeeded in portraying the victims as terrorists and the perpetrators as the defenders of the right to a legitimate statehood. It is therefore essential to elaborate on the nature of the Israeli racism.

From its origins in the 19th century, zionism centered on the idea of creating a specifically Jewish state in which Jews would be protected and privileged over non-Jews. Zionist occupation of Palestine was at first meagre, amounting to about 10% of the population by 1900. By 1947, Jews were still only about 30% of the population of Mandate Palestine and owned only 6% of the land. However, by means of the 1947-48 war, Israel took over huge new expanses of land and forcibly expelled about 750,000 Palestinians. This travesty was the basis for the official founding of the Israeli state.

Inside what is called the "Green line" — the unofficial borders of Israel before the 1967 war —there are still about 1 million Palestinians, just under 20% of the total Israeli population. Most Palestinians are Muslims, some are Christian. A small number of non-Palestinian Arabs also live there. From 1948 to 1966, the Palestinians within Israel lived under explicit military rule. They were considered a military threat to the Israeli state, and they were ruled under a completely different set of laws than the Jews.

After 1966, military rule was lifted, but it was replaced by a set of Jim Crow-like laws designed to discriminate against Arabs in Israel. According to Adalah, an Arab rights organization in Israel, today there are at least 20 laws that specifically provide unequal rights and obligations based on what the Israelis call nationality, which in Israel is defined on the basis of religion. Israelis must carry a card, which identifies them as either a Jew, a Muslim or a Christian. All non-Jews are second-class citizens, legally and practically. The Israeli Supreme Court has literally dismissed all cases which dealt with equal rights for Arab citizens. All Israeli citizens, including Palestinians, have the right to vote in elections for members of the Knesset (parliament) and for the prime minister. However, under Israeli law, any political candidate who indicates "a denial of the existence of the State of Israel as a State of the Jewish people" shall be disqualified — anyone who advocates for equal rights or Arabs is thereby ineligible.

Other rights are legally defined as nationality rights and are reserved for Jews only. If one is a Jew, she/he has exclusive use of land, privileged access to private and public employment, special educational loans, home mortgages, preferences for admission to universities, and many other things. Many other special privileges are reserved for those who have served in the Israeli military, which is compulsory for all Jews (male and female) but excludes Palestinians.

According to Adalah, by 1993 over 80% of the land within Israel that was once owned by Palestinians had been confiscated. Today, 93% of Israel's land can only be used by those who are legally defined as Jewish.

Moreover, despite Israel's booming economy, Palestinian unemployment stands about 40% in 1996 twice as many Arab citizens (28.3%) as Jewish citizens (14.4%) lived below the poverty line. Less than 5% of government employees are Arab and only three of 641 managers of government companies are Arab. Eighty percent of all student drop outs are Arab. There are also vast disparities between Arab towns and Jewish towns in government spending on schools, medical systems, roads, electricity, clean water, and social services.

Unlike any other country in the world, Israel does not define itself as a state of its residents, or even a state of its citizens, but as a state of all the Jews in the world. Jews from anywhere in the world can travel to Israel, declare citizenship, and be granted all the privileges of being Jewish that are denied to Palestinians who have lived in the area for hundreds of years. By contrast, there is no chance for a non-Jew to acquire Israeli citizenship, let alone be granted equal rights.

The years of occupation have created, or have allowed to flourish, an incredibly racist vantage point among the majority of Israeli Jews. The majority of Israeli Jews are willing to accept the killing of Palestinians and collective punishment of the Palestinian population as justified state policy.

Not surprisingly, Palestinians inside Israel have historically felt themselves excluded and disempowered by the Israeli government. There has come into being a permanent domination over something that might be called a Palestinian state but what would really amount to a dependent Bantustan. This is essentially the same vision that motivated apartheid South Africa. And there are even more complexities. Within Israel there are really four levels of citizenship; the first three being various levels of Jewish participation in Israeli society, which are thoroughly realized. At the top of the pyramid are the Ashkenazi, the White European Jews. The huge contingent of recent Russian immigrants — now about 20% of Israeli Jews – are being assimilated into this European-Ashkenazi sector, though they are retaining a very distinct cultural identity.

RACISM WITHIN JEWS

The next level down, which is now probably the largest component of the Jewish population, is the Mizrachi or Sephardic Jews, who are from the Arab countries.

At the bottom of the Jewish pyramid are the Ethiopian Jews, who are Black.

One can go into the poorest parts of Jewish West Jerusalem and find that they're predominantly Ethiopian. This social and economic stratification took shape throughout the last 50 years as different groups of Jews from different part of the world came, for very different reasons, to Israel. So while the divisions reflected national origins, they play out in a profoundly racialized way. The Yemeni Jews in particular faced extraordinary discrimination. They were more or less transported involuntarily from Yemen to Israel. On arrival they were held in primitive camps, and many Yemeni babies were stolen from their mothers and given for adoption to Ashkenazi families. In the early 1990s a high-profile campaign began to try to reunite some of those shattered families.

Beneath all these layers of Jews come the Palestinian citizens. A legally defined and highly racialized hierarchy orchestrates Israeli social life.

The most significant difference is in the world's perception of this reality. For the overwhelming majority of the world's population, South Africa was always considered an ostracized state. But Israel is not in that position. Israel is given a pass on the question of racism. Because Jews were subject to the Nazi Holocaust there's a way in which Israeli Jews are assumed to be either incapable of such terrible racialized policies, or that it's somehow understandable.

To sump up: Racism is systematic - it constructs myths and theories of superior and inferior races, and uses scientific and religious arguments to justify its premises. Racism naturalises prejudice and discrimination, makes it appear to be in the nature of things. That is, people who are dark-skinned, by definition, do not deserve to be treated as human beings and may be considered on par with domestic animals. Racism is never a set of ideas, rather it is a system of lies, half-truths and myths that explains, rationalises and renders normal a social and economic system of inequality, discrimination and violence.

Racism produces not merely prejudicial attitudes and opinions but suggests forms of behaviour and action — it encourages discrimination, hatred, fear, anxiety, actively creates ghettos for entire communities.

Racism seeks to establish a permanent group hierarchy based on unbridgeable differences. It creates two societies within one: the ruling race that is superior and the other races that are inferior — often within the so-called inferior races, some are deemed to be superior to others. Racism determines forms of living — it tells societies who should live where, sets the limits for social interaction and punishes those who break these carefully laid-out rules.

In a racist society, the ruling races and the ruled races are infected with its poisonous ideas the ruled too come to subscribe to a purist argument, they believe that races ought not to mix.

In a racist society, women of the ruling race also subscribe to racist ideas. Women of the ruled races are told that they are good for nothing but labour and forced sex. However, in a fundamental sense, racism is anti-women. It is misogynist —in racist societies, the ruling race defines its purity chiefly on the basis of the character of its women —the chastity of the women of the so-called superior race is considered the most significant index of that race's honour, likewise the alleged promiscuity of the women of the so-called inferior races is believed to reflect the inevitable lowness of those races.

Racist societies fear miscegenation — or a mixing of the races through sexual love and marriage. Hence, they lay the onus of preventing miscegenation on women. By the same logic, they allow men to have relationships with women from different races, but women, especially of the so-called superior races, are asked to abjure such relationships in the interest of racial purity.

India is a caste society — groups of people are arranged within a hierarchical system according to what Babasaheb Ambedkar called "a graded inequality", so that every caste considers the caste immediately above it superior to itself and the one below it, inferior. Or as Periyar E.V. Ramaswamy, the great social reformer of South India, put it every member of the Indian society is tainted with casteism and the notion of untouchability in a graded way like the rungs of a ladder. Of course, within any given context, castes relate to each other in several ways —through trade, work, services, festivals and rituals. But in each of these instances, the relative superiority or inferiority of the caste is important.

Is caste like race? After all, some castes are considered impure by birth, just as some races are considered naturally inferior. Casteism like racism is also systematic — it structures unequal social and economic order. Caste society also creates its ghettos — separate living quarters for the so-called Untouchables. Likewise, caste divides society into mutually mistrustful groups. Women in caste society occupy a position similar to women in a racially divided society — their honour is central to a caste's self-definition.

In spite of these similarities, caste operates differently from race. In a racist society, the physical similarity of races, their modes of bodily being, defined along religious, ethnic or linguistic backgrounds, are important. They help to mark off differences between the superior and the inferior.

In caste society, as Babasaheb Ambedkar pointed out no such uniformity can be observed. Brahmins of Punjab and Madras are not physically similar, neither are the so-called Untouchables from these two states. Secondly, racist ideology is open and transparent in its logic of superiority and inferiority, caste ideology is not. It is convoluted, deceptive and cunning — the Brahmins reserve for themselves the right to determine what makes them superior. In a certain context it may be their priestly vocation, in another it may be their so-called gift for computer science. Likewise, other castes too constantly and in keeping with the demands of the times re-invent themselves, pushing themselves closer to the Brahmins or articulating an identity that owes nothing to them.

Thirdly, caste society conceals its essential violence much more successfully than racist societies.

For example, the entire world knew of and commiserated with the conditions of segregation under apartheid in South Africa but very few people applied the same logic when it came to the routine segregation that is practised in several parts of India — against Dalits and other lower castes.

Lastly, caste unlike race does not allow for a horizontal alliance amongst people of different castes. In a racist society, all races considered inferior come together to fight a racist social order.

In caste society, such unity is difficult because of the condition of graded inequality —castes view themselves and each other as inferior and superior or simply unique and only in very exceptional historical circumstances have come together to challenge the caste system. This does not mean that the logic of race does not exist in India —linguistic and religious groups sometimes claim superior status over people who speak other languages and practise different religions. In different ways, this has happened in Assam and Kashmir. For the past ten years and more majoritarian Hindu groups have attempted to proclaim a sort of racial unity of all Hindus against all others, in this case Muslims and Christians. In doing so, they have attempted to tide over the contradictions of caste, arguing that all Hindus, irrespective of caste status, are one, especially against Muslims and Christians.

The endemic underdevelopment that plagues the North-eastern states and Kashmir, the clear violation of human rights by the police and the armed forces in these regions, the systematic violence against Muslims and Christians (in an earlier instance, against the Sikhs) in various parts of the country are matters that the Government of India appears loath to take seriously. The racial-type of discrimination that the sections of the majority Hindu community wants to impose on the minority communities — through false propaganda and planned violence —is often considered a matter of civil rather than political import and seldom attracts legislative action.

Even when it does, as was evident in the findings of the Sri Krishna Commission that investigated the Mumbai riots of the 1990s, political pressures edge out legislative concerns. Most recently —from the first week of March 2002 to almost four months — the BJP led Government in the state of Gujarat in Western India presided over the organised pogroms against the Muslims of the State, in what the Hindu right claimed to be the first laboratory experiment of cleansing India of the anti-patriotic aliens.

As in racist societies, women have been made central to this communal project: Hindu women are warned of the predatory sexual nature of Muslim men, stories are circulated about the hidden immorality of Catholic nuns. On the other hand, Hindu men are told that Muslim and Christian women are not like their women they do not observe those norms of chastity that are dear to Hindu women and, therefore, are fit subjects for assault. During the recent carnage in Gujarat, hundreds of Muslim women were raped, mutilated and burnt alive. The pregnant Muslim women were targeted particularly. Their wombs were slit open, the foetuses removed and thrown into the flames. Tanika Sarkar, the historian gives a chilling description of the ghastly events that targeted the Muslims, especially their women in Gujarat.

Hindu mobs swooped down upon Muslim women and children with multiple but related aims. First to possess and dishonour them and their men, second to taste what is denied to them and what according to their understanding, explains Muslim virility. Third to physically destroy the vagina and the womb and thereby to symbolically destroy the source of pleasure, reproduction and nurture for Muslim men and for Muslim children. Then by beatings, to punish the fertile female body. Then by physically destroying the children to signify an end to Muslim growth. Then by cutting up the foetus and burning it, to achieve a symbolic destruction of future generations of the very future of Muslims themselves.

The burning of men, women and children as the final move served multiple functions: It was to destroy evidence, it was to make Muslims vanish, it was also to desecrate Muslim deaths by denying them an Islamic burial and forcing a Hindu cremation upon them, a kind of a macabre post-mortem forced conversion. There were, thus many layers of signification of symbolic meanings that went into the act that were repeated by different mobs at different locales, but on fairly identical lines.

They can be aligned to sangh teachings, stereotypes and fantasies. This also explains why the same female body was subjected to a series of sexual humiliation, torture, mutilation and obliteration. Conjoined with the bodies of their children, they provided a site where the entire drama of revenge was enacted in its long and complicated sequence.

This motif of hateful revenge has been rendered affective and consensual through a variety of means, chiefly through sustained and intense propaganda and hate talk:

... All the boys in the shakhas are bred on: partition time rapes of Hindu women, rapes of Hindu queens under Muslim rule, abductions of Hindu women all through history by Muslims. There is also the perpetual fear of a more virile Muslim male body that lures away Hindu girls, a kind of penis envy and anxiety about emasculation that can only be overcome by doing violent deeds.

Violence for the sangh is both source and proof of maleness. In the 1990s, when communal violence had intensified, bangles were sent to localities where riots had not taken place, to taunt Hindu men with effeminacy. At Jawaharlal Nehru University, a post-Godhra procession of the ABVP chanted: Jis Hinduon ka khoon na khola, who hindu nahin, woh hijra hain (those Hindus whose blood does not boil, are not Hindus, they are eunuchs).

This identification between killing and masculinity, is a strong and uniquely sangh teaching. In Gujarat, mobs who raped, sometime came dressed in khakhi shorts or in saffron underwear, rape being obviously seen as a religious duty, a sangh duty. In times of violence, Hindu male sexual organs must function as instruments of torture.

The state government of Tamil Nadu presided over by an authoritarian Chief Minister Jayalalitha has recently passed an Act banning religious conversions based amongst other things, coercion and allurements and makes it compulsory for any new convert as well as the proselytiser to report the conversion to the local magistrate.

In several countries in Europe and in the United States, there exist formal provisions in law that penalise racial discrimination. There are also affirmative action laws that enable people from communities that have been historically discriminated against to enter higher education and get worthy jobs. Most recently, in South Africa, where apartheid has been officially dismantled, that country's Constitution has created an exceptional legal framework within which all communities could seek and get equality and rights.

However, in all these countries, including United States and South Africa the structures of racism have not been successfully challenged of transformed.

Racism in America was and is a system that privileges Whites as a whole over people of colour — this extends to education, employment, housing, and access to culture.

Likewise in South Africa, apartheid was not merely a system of legally sanctioned segregation and discrimination. Apartheid existed to provide the big industrial houses of South Africa —run by local and multinational capital —to extract work under extremely cheap and repressive conditions from that country's non-White people, specially people of African origin.

Anti-racist legislation in the United States has not addressed the question of poverty and illiteracy of people of colour, specially of those who are known as Afro-Americans. Likewise, in spite of a fine Constitution, in practical terms, neither justice nor equality is possible in South Africa, because that country's rulers are not interested in challenging the economic basis of apartheid.

Also and especially in South Africa, anti-racist and progressive legislation has not meant benefits for women. In the United States, the general absence of laws that empower and enable poor women both White and women of colour, in an economic sense, has meant that women continue to work hard, raise children with little or no support from the state are the first to be fired in times of crisis, the lost to be hired in good times. Further in South Africa, given the long history of racial hatred and apartheid and the general impact this has had on communities of African origin, there has been an increase in the incidence of rape. This problem continues to haunt post-apartheid South Africa.

As in the USA, India has protective as well as punitive legislation to empower lower castes especially the so-called Untouchables. Untouchability has been declared constitutionally invalid and recognized as a crime against the state. Various sorts of compensatory discrimination, the best known of which is the system of reservations in education and employment in government for the so-called lower of Backward Castes, as they are referred to exist in India. Economic support for castes lower in the hierarchy also exists in the form of subsidies and loans under various welfare schemes.

Yet these laws do not address the economic logic of caste and the fact that caste differences also determine access to education, employment, wealth and social status. Reservations would be effective if the Indian State insisted on compulsory primary and secondary education but in the absence of such laws very few children from the backward and Untouchable communities make it into higher education.

Likewise, if rural poverty was tackled through land reform legislation and laws against exploitative trade and labour practices, economic support in the form of subsidies and loans make sense. Otherwise, they remain measures undertaken by an essentially cynical state that does not wish to challenge the economics of the caste system.

With respect to women, protective legislation is particularly inadequate —the reservations in education and employment do not insist that as many women as men ought to be taken into higher education and jobs. The hidden economic contributions of women from the lower castes are seldom acknowledged by India's economic planners, neither their unpaid housework, nor the work they do in private, unregistered sweatshops and factories.

Further whatever punitive legislation exists to protect the lower castes, especially the Dalits from violence is not effective when it comes to Dalit women, who are routinely assaulted in their places of work.

Let us now return to the Durban conference. In Aug.2001R.K.W. Goonesekere presented his working paper on work and descent-based discrimination to the UN sub-commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights at the fifty third session of the sub commission. Because of time and other constraints, Goonesekere limited the paper's focus to the Asian Countries of India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Japan but stated that further study of African countries in particular was warranted.

The presentation of the paper and the ensuing debate amongst sub commission experts that followed, marked the first time that caste based discrimination was discussed as a major source of human rights violations world-wide by a UN Human Rights body. The sub-commission, while accepting Goonesekere's Working Paper (E/CN.4/sub.2/2001/16) also determined by consensus to extend the study to other regions of the world where work and descent-based discrimination continues to be experienced (the study was to be produced before the next session of the sub commission in 2002). Goonesekere says in his report:

Discrimination based on work and descent is a long-standing practice in many societies throughout the world and affects a large portion of the world's population. Discrimination based descent manifests itself most notably in caste — (or tribe) — based distinctions. These distinctions, determined by birth, result in serious violations across the full spectrum of civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights. Likewise, the nature of a person's work or occupation is often the reason for, or a result of, discrimination against the person. Persons who perform the least desirable jobs in a society are often victims of double discrimination, suffering first from the nature of the work they must perform and suffering again by the denial of their rights because they perform work that is unacceptable. In most cases, a person's descent determines or is intimately connected with the type of work they are afforded in the society. Victims of discrimination based on descent are singled out, not because of a difference in physical appearance or race, but rather by their membership in an endogamous social group that has been isolated socially and occupationally from other groups in the society.

But the Government of India was seen to exert official pressure to prevent Goonesekere from carrying out his task.

The argument the Government of India placed before the UN human rights bodies, including the WCAR was that caste discrimination is not an issue relevant to the evaluation of its performance vis-a-vis the human rights conventions to which it is party. This argument is based on three main premises.

1. Caste is not race: The term "caste" does not denote race or racial grouping and even the term "descent" in Article 1 of the CERD convention refers solely to racial descent. Therefore, does not fall within the ambit of racism, racial discrimination or related intolerance.

2. Only internal mechanisms, not external ones: Numerous laws and government schemes exist already within the country to promote the welfare, rights and socio-economic conditions of the Scheduled Castes. These are adequate to protect the Dalits from discrimination and to promote their socio-economic advancement, therefore, there is no need to utilise international human rights mechanisms and bodies to strengthen these laws.

3. Change takes time: Change is a slow process and respective countries are doing all they can to solve the problem.

Powerful rebuttals to these arguments came from Dalit side, especially the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR) that was in the Facilitation Committee of the NGO Forum that conducted the Parallel Conference in Durban. The major points of its counter-arguments are: Caste may not be race but it is caste discrimination like racism, is a violation of human rights.

The first premise of the Indian Government's argument against inclusion of caste discrimination in the WCAR has already been dealt with and dismissed by the CERD committee.

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S.V. Rajadurai is the co-author of the book, Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium: From Ayothee Thass to Periyar, Samya, Calcutta, 1998.

A portion of the Introduction written by the author to the book, Racism & Casteism (2002), is reproduced to prove that the Hindu religion's most important principle of caste system is nothing but racism. But, says the author, just as the world is ignoring the gory racism enforced against Palestinians by the Jews inside Israel, it is also not taking note of the much more serious racism practised by India's Brahminical rulers, called the "Jews of India".