In the Hathras incident, if the police didn’t actively rob a Dalit girl’s dignity in life, they certainly did so in death. After she passed away in Delhi’s Safdarjung Hospital after weeks of fighting for her life, the police refused to hand over her body to her family and cremated her body in the dead of the night before anyone could find out. In a case as closely monitored as this, the rushed cremation of a Dalit girl, snatched from her family even in death, justifiably caused outrage, online and in real life. The police and the state machinery responded by imposing Section 144 (to prevent large gatherings) and actively stopped any Dalit and opposition leaders, reporters or supporters from meeting the family by filing FIRs against them.
However, neither the police (likely the same officers who had prevented the Valmiki family from performing the last rites on their deceased daughter) nor the state stopped men from the Thakur and other dominant castes along with leaders from right-wing outfits like the Bajrang Dal, Karni Sen and All India Kshatriya Mahasabha to openly gather and protest to demand justice. Not for the Dalit girl who had been brutalised and was now dead, but instead for the rapists who they believe were ‘wrongfully accused’ of the crime.
Dalits, especially ‘Bhangis’, who dare to move out of their segregated spaces and share land with dominant caste neighbours are often blamed for spreading garbage, spilling dirty drain water and contaminating the area. Often, even the local municipal bodies will choose the areas near their houses to place an open sewage drain, since they are assumed to be habituated to filth, muck and smells of sewage. Dalit women often end up paying the highest price for it as the tax on disrupting the caste order that confirms the superiority of dominant castes is often levied on their bodies, either verbally, emotionally or physically.
by Yashica Dutt
15/03/2023