(a)
On
a muggy monsoon evening in a tiny village in Haryana,
16-year-old Manju,
her voice steady and clear, recounts the story of the day she was raped.
It is a story that in its horrifying essentials can be heard in villages
across the state, across, for that matter, the country. On 6 August
2012, Manju, a Dalit from Kalsi village in Karnal district, was waylaid
on her way to school. Two men, Ajay and Krishen, from the upper-caste
Rod community, allegedly forced her into their car and took turns
to rape her. Warning her to hold her tongue, they dumped her near her
school.
It
took Manju two weeks to admit to her mother that she had been raped. Her
mother already knew. A neighbour implicated in the crime allegedly gloated
about her role in the rape, gloated about Manju’s lost honour. Manju’s
mother was steadfast in her support for her daughter. Accounts differ
about who said what but the upshot is that less than a month after the
gangrape, Manju’s mother disappeared.
On
3 September, her body was found in a ditch next to a small canal that runs
by the village. Like her daughter, she too had been gangraped. Her murderers, allegedly her daughter’s rapists, had thrown acid on her and strangled
her with her own chunni.
(b)
Employment
of Manual
Scavengers
and Construction of Dry. Latrines (Prohibition) Act,
1993.
The
aim of this Act is to ensure that no
person shall-
(a)
engage in or employ for or permit to be engaged in or employed for
any other person for manually carrying human excreta; or
(b)
construct or maintain a dry latrine.
But
the Act leaves the implementation up to individual states and leaves
all kinds of loopholes by virtue of which this inhuman practice
continues today – with the Indian railways being one of the biggest offenders.
(c)
The
Supreme Court on Tuesday expressed serious concern at the inordinate
delay in Parliament passing the Prohibition of Employment as Manual
Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Bill. A Bench of Justices H.L.
Datu and Ranjan Gogoi shared the concern of counsel Santosh Paul and
counsel Meera Mathew, appearing for A. Narayanan, and told
Attorney-General G.E. Vahanvati:
“We are very much concerned about this issue.”
The
Bench said: “they [manual scavengers] are marginalised and
Parliament needs to take adequate steps to pass the Bill. It had been
over a year and half that the Additional Solicitor-General has been
promising to do something. We need a proper reply.”
- The Hindu
January 8, 2013, New Delhi
And
yet....
`Manhole'
deaths never seem to end
A
civic sanitary worker, Gangadhar, died inside a sewer line, after
getting into it through a manhole on Tilak Road here on Friday.
Though
the exact cause of death will be known once the post mortem report is
out, initial indications are that that he died of suffocation as he
inhaled poisonous gases inside the sewer line. The police and civic
workers retrieved the body after strenuous efforts for over an hour.
- The
Hindu, June 22, 2013, Thirupathi,
Our
collective crime and shame is that it is always the Dalits whom our people
subject to the special violence/indignities such as (a)-(c).
No comments:
Post a Comment