Whatever happened in Katra Shadat Ganj village in Uttar Pradesh's Badaun district last week has been largely been written-by ,but sadly introspected ,thereby eventually written-off ....as usual ! Due regards to the Indian Psyche...we read...then highlight the plight ..and comfortably ...FORGET..!! Ignore it or deny it ..that's the reality !
Great regards to Indrajeet Hazra who depicts...
" While we take in the contents of these photographs — of the two teenage girls who were raped and then left hanging from a tree last week in Katra Shadat Ganj village in Uttar Pradesh's Badaun district — we also quietly take in a different set of information: so these are dalits in a UP village in 2014 India. Our brain searches and fails to find any distinguishing feature to mark it as a gathering of dalits. So this is how dalits look like, we tell ourselves.
As a pointless, urbane debate goes on about whether such horrifying images should be put out for general consumption, the fact that caste is an indelible marker for game-hunters continues to elude people who don't live under its thrall. What the display in Badaun underlines is caste not just as demographic pie charts or identifiable target groups for social welfare programmes, but also as an all-too-visible bar code for higher castes in vast swathes of our sovereign socialist secular democratic republic to identify prey. Whether we like it or not, this dehumanising tradition thrives in states like Samajwadi Party-ruled UP under active encouragement.
Sexual violence against women is, of course, about inflicting power. But the same way the right motive needs to be ascertained to solve a murder, the prime motive behind the gang rape and murder of the two girls in Badaun needs to be identified and then recognized. The girls were hung up and displayed because they were dalits. The five alleged perpetrators from the Yadav community saw raping and killing their dalit victims as their adhikar, a right.
Unabated cases of violence against dalits — sexual or otherwise, reported, under-reported or unreported — have no real disincentive as they are clubbed, if not in law then in practice, with general acts of violence. The trophy rape and murder in Badaun, and those many other horrific acts of violence against dalits that precede and will follow it, may share many characteristics with equally horrific rape-murders that take place across the nation. But Badaun and countless other cases where dalits are chosen as victims because they are dalits are part of one giant, ongoing serial-killing spree where Manu-given rights have been joined with political protection.
Sitting pretty in urban, deracinated India where 'being casteist' means being vaguely outdated and a bit clannish as if caste was simply about some silly club rules, it is impossible to perceive what the five rapist-murderers sought to achieve by stringing up their two victims.
What they surely did see is something that we have conditioned ourselves to not see: that dalits are not 'like any other village folk'. So instead of flinching, keep looking for clues to how dalits are seen by far too many 'other village folks' in those upsetting photographs until you are horrified enough to do something about it. "
Are we being sensible enough ..?
..If not.... the the saga of Nightmares of Atrocities will continue....
By:
Sandeep N. Shende
sandeepshende.blogspot.com
