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Media Release: Human Rights Watch
21 March 2000
(New York, March 21, 2001) – Marking
the International Day for the Elimination of Racial
Discrimination, Human Rights Watch today called for an end to
caste-based discrimination around the world.
The World Conference Against Racism, Racial
Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance will take
place in South Africa from August 31 to September 7, 2001.
“This conference is a significant
opportunity for the international community to address the
situation of South Asia’s 240 million Dalits, or so-called
untouchables,” said Smita Narula, senior researcher for
Human Rights Watch. “In much of Asia, little regard will be
paid to this conference if it does not effectively address this
problem.”
The rights group decried efforts by the
Indian government to sabotage the efforts of Indian NGOs to raise
awareness of the caste struggle at preparatory meetings in the
lead-up to the conference, including the recently concluded Asian
preparatory meeting in Tehran. The situation of Dalits
stands alone as the only issue to have been systematically cut
out of the conference’s intergovernmental process so far.
“Although South Africa’s apartheid
was effectively challenged by the international community, South
Asia’s ‘hidden apartheid’ continues to condemn
Dalits or “untouchables” to a lifetime of slavery,
segregation, exploitation, and violence,” Narula
added. “Its place in international consciousness is
long overdue.”
India actively supported the anti-apartheid
struggle, has ratified all major human rights conventions, and
has enacted progressive legislation to tackle caste-related
problems of bonded labor, manual scavenging, untouchability, and
other atrocities against Dalit community members. Much of the
legislation, however, remains completely unenforced. Laws
are openly flouted and state complicity in attacks on Dalit
communities has become a well-documented
pattern. Caste-based abuse is also rampant in Nepal, Sri
Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Japan, and parts of Western Africa.
The Indian attorney general and many other
Indian officials have erroneously argued that this is a
conference about racism, and not other forms of discrimination.
The very title of the conference undercuts this argument, as do
conclusions drawn by the Committee on the Elimination of All
Forms of Racial Discrimination that the situation of Dalits
“falls within the scope of the Convention on the Elimination
of All Forms of Racial Discrimination,” and that the term
“descent” contained in Article 1 of the Convention does
not refer solely to race, and encompasses the situation of
Dalits.
The government has also argued that efforts
to raise the caste issue are part of an “external agenda.”
Their position conveniently ignores the efforts of hundreds of
Indian human rights groups who in December 1999 collectively
submitted over 2.5 million signatures to the Indian Prime
Minister A.B. Vajpayee demanding the abolishment of
untouchability and urging U.N. bodies to squarely address the
issue of caste-based abuse and discrimination.
Activists from around the world, including
anti-apartheid activists in South Africa and African-American
activists in the United States, have already begun to support the
Dalit struggle. Given the magnitude and severity of this
problem in Asia, the international monitoring group called on the
international community to ensure that caste-based and similar
discrimination against marginalized populations in Asia be
explicitly addressed in the draft declaration and programme of
action of the WCAR. Dalits, Burakumin in Japan, and other
populations in similar situations, it added, should be explicitly
acknowledged as groups of people who have been subject to
perennial and persistent forms of discrimination and abuse on the
basis of their descent.
Human Rights Watch has also repeatedly
called attention to the pervasive racism and intolerance
afflicting millions of migrants and refugees uprooted by economic
developments and political strife and racial discrimination in
the determination of nationality and citizenship rights. In
the post-apartheid era, de facto rather than de jure
discrimination takes on immense significance. The
discriminatory effect of racist practices in criminal justice,
public policy and administrative practice cannot be ignored.
Posted on 2001-07-16
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