For decades, India championed from afar the anti-apartheid cause and supported America’s civil rights movement. But now India stands poised to block discussion of caste-based discrimination against its own 160 million Dalits — a Hindi word meaning “the oppressed” and which refers to its underclass of “untouchables”— at the UN World Conference against Racism (WCAR) to be held in Durban later this month. Employing the same tactic used by defenders of apartheid and of America’s Jim Crow laws, India’s government argues that “caste is an internal matter.”

The last Indian census based on caste identity, conducted in 1931, found that 20% of India’s population consisted of Dalits — a generic term for people deemed filthy and impure to touch, approach, or merely see in daylight. Current statistics suggest that the proportion of untouchables, known as “scheduled castes” in constitutional jargon, has since declined to 16%, reflecting the fact that many Dalits have embraced Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, or Sikhism. But even as converts to religions that claim to renounce caste discrimination, stigmatization of the Dalits continues. In South India, for example, separate Christian churches exist for Dalits, a practice copied from Hinduism.

Indian officials have been notably Janus-faced about caste discrimination. In January 2000, India’s president, K.R. Narayanan— himself of Dalit origin — conceded that while untouchability has been legally abolished, “shades of it remain in the ingrained attitudes nurtured by the caste system.” Barely four months later, however, India declared unequivocally at the WCAR’s first preparatory meeting that caste discrimination had been relegated to the past.

India’s constitution does, indeed, abolish untouchability. But a lack of political will has rendered formal prohibition little more than a legal fiction. Fifty percent of Dalit children (and 64% of Dalit girls) cannot complete primary education in part due to humiliation by teachers, while poverty remains widespread as land reforms have gone unimplemented. A 1997 survey by Navsarjan, a private research group, found that Dalits legally owned 6000 acres in 250 villages in Gujarat state but did not hold physical possession of any of that land. According to the Indian government’s own data, over 800,000 Dalits are engaged in the dehumanizing practice of manually handling human waste — a caste-based role reinforced by the World Bank’s financial support for construction of dry latrines.

Even more disturbing, untouchables continue to be subject to widespread violence, particularly when they transgress caste traditions. In a case concerning 79 Dalit families that were ostracized for 27 months in the village of Devaliya, India’s National Human Rights Commission concluded:
“When young Dalits assert their right to equal treatment, attempt to protect their dignity and that of their women, or resist the perpetration of atrocities committed against them, they are often branded as ‘extremists,’ falsely implicated in alleged crimes, and killed in staged encounters. When they resist as a group, wholesale killings, arson, mass rape of their women, and parading them naked through the village are regular occurrences.”

A recent study by Human Rights Watch supports this finding of systematic, premeditated brutality when Dalits challenge caste discrimination, with women suffering particularly savage retaliation. During massacres of Dalits in Bihar, a north Indian state, Dalit women were shot in their vaginas. In the South, hundreds of Dalit women are victims of Devdasi, a system of prostitution in the name of religion which upper-caste Hindus are quite happy to exempt from the practice of untouchability.

Employment quotas favoring Dalits have, of course, improved their life prospects — but not by much. Dalits and low-caste Tribals, who together comprise 23% of India’s population, fill only 5% of civil-service jobs. High-caste groups, in contrast, account for 25% of the population, but fill 89% of such posts (as well as most top jobs in politics and business). Yet even this minor curtailment of upper-caste privilege has led to two bloody riots since quotas were introduced, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of Dalits.

Alarmed by the potential embarrassment it faces because of its denial of systematic and violent discrimination against Dalits, India’s government now claims that caste is not race and therefore has no place on the agenda of the UN conference in Durban. Fortunately for India’s Dalits, the UN’s Human Rights Commission rejects this argument, holding that “the situation of scheduled castes falls within the purview of article 1 of the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.”

Dalit leaders contend that if caste discrimination in India violates that Convention it should be included in the Durban conference’s draft declaration under the heading “discrimination based on work and descent,” a formulation introduced by Barbados and Switzerland. But the WCAR’s drafting committee faces strong pressure to reject this demand — and not only from Indian officials. Similar caste-based discrimination, including bonded manual labor, is rife in Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, which applaud India’s bogus hairsplitting.

But the purpose of the UN meeting in Durban is not to haggle over the semantics of caste and race. Its mission is to develop means to combat discrimination based on descent, so that what India’s government — what any government — claims is an internal problem does not become an eternal condition. Having backed the opponents of apartheid and Jim Crow, it is sad that India rejects accountability for the ongoing human rights disaster caused by its entrenched social order.