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| Edited By: |Source: DNA |Updated: May 06, 2016, 08:10 AM IST
The brutal rape and murder of a 30-year-old law student in Kerala’s Ernakulam district has been met with shocked disbelief and anger in the state. Political parties have hit the streets and social media has resounded with a hashtag that has gone viral demanding justice for the woman. The manner in which the woman’s body and genitals were mutilated has evoked memories of the December 16 gang-rape incident. The matter has also been raised in Parliament but the challenge will be to sustain the tempo of the protests. For a while after the December 16 incident, there was renewed and invigorated discourse on gender violence and women’s safety. In Kerala, the organised Left parties have already seized the initiative and launched street protests. But the danger inherent in politicians hijacking the forum is that it inhibits a spontaneous and organic response from women groups and civil society. Along with gender, another issue that is now emerging is the other aspect of the victim’s identity: she was a landless Dalit.
In a state that boasts of impressive developmental indices, the Dalit question has remained largely unaddressed and the CPI(M), Congress and much of civil society, that has woken up to the barbarity inflicted on the woman, are equally at fault for this deliberate neglect. The victim lived on an isolated patch of revenue land, in a hut that did not have a strong door or a toilet, because she could not afford either, and with a mother who suffered from mental ailments. Despite generous state and central government schemes that offer land to landless, homes for homeless, and toilets for those without them, the victim lived outside the social security net. In her life, the issues of women’s safety and social isolation brought about by lower caste status coalesced.
The Dalit disenchantment with mainstream Kerala society had erupted repeatedly in the past decade as land agitations. Once solidly allied with the Left, in the 1990s Dalit groups woke up to the realisation that the Left’s much-hyped land reforms had only benefitted sharecroppers, while the Dalits, who were landless labourers, were left in the lurch. This disillusionment found voice in literature too through novels like Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. From the early years of this millennium, in a desperate attempt to solve their grouse at landlessness, Dalit and Adivasi, groups encroached on forest and revenue land and estates leased to big corporates, to pressure the state government. The alternating CPI(M) and Congress led governments have largely treated these agitations with antipathy and succeeded in sowing dissensions among the agitators with promises of land, which often turned out to be minuscule plots in barren and rocky terrains, that were unfit for cultivation or habitation.
Pointers to the marginalisation of the Dalit community are evident from the 2011 Census, which indicates that the percentage of Dalits in the total population fell from 9.8 per cent in 2001 to 9.1 per cent in 2011. In absolute numbers, their population declined from 31.2 lakh in 2001 to 30.4 lakh in 2011, even as the state’s population grew by 4.9 per cent in this period. Just 18 per cent of Kerala Dalits are matriculates and only two per cent are graduates. Only 1.7 per cent Dalits are cultivators, while 33 per cent are agricultural labourers, 2.8 per cent are household workers, while an 61 per cent are engaged in casual and unskilled labour. An overwhelming 81 per cent of Kerala’s Dalits live in rural areas, which along with lower socio-economic indices, has throttled their visibility in the state’s highly urbanised social life. With Kerala in the grip of elections, political parties have rushed to commiserate with the victim’s family. But none of them are talking about the vulnerabilities of the community she hails from, and therein lies a pattern of chronic systemic apathy.
