{"id":91259,"date":"2019-07-11T14:04:11","date_gmt":"2019-07-11T21:04:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=91259"},"modified":"2019-07-12T12:01:56","modified_gmt":"2019-07-12T19:01:56","slug":"endless-tales-of-torture-in-indian-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2019\/07\/11\/endless-tales-of-torture-in-indian-society\/","title":{"rendered":"ENDLESS TALES OF TORTURE IN INDIAN SOCIETY"},"content":{"rendered":"

ALI SUKHANVER<\/strong><\/span><\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n

Hatred\non the basis of caste and creed or race and religion is considered the most\nheinous social crime in all civilized societies. Presence of hatred on all such\nbasis proves moral bankruptcy and ethical barrenness of a society. \u2018The Hindu\u2019\nhas recently reported from Madhya Pradesh, India that the family members of a 21-year-old\ntribal woman assaulted her with sticks for allegedly eloping with a Dalit man.\nThe woman was a resident of Gatbori village, about 90 km from Dhar in Madhya\nPradesh. According to the paper, the family members were unhappy over her\naffair with the man with whom she had eloped recently but later returned home.\nOn her return she was forced to marry a man of her own caste but she refused.\nSomeone present there on the scene made a video of the incident which later\ngone viral on social media. Four accused have yet been arrested while the other\nthree are still on the run. For the Dalits living in the Indian society, facing\nsuch brutalities is simply a routine matter; they know that they cannot change\ntheir caste and they know that the upper-caste Hindus would never accept them\nas human beings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every\nday, the papers are replete with the news of maltreatment with the low-caste\nHindus, commonly known as the Dalits or the \u2018Untouchables\u2019. Not only in Madhya\nPradesh but everywhere in India, the Dalits have to face the same insult,\ndisrespect and rudeness. Last year in June, the BBC reported that three Dalit\nboys were stripped, beaten and paraded naked by villagers in the western state\nof Maharashtra for swimming in a well that belonged to an upper-caste family.\nIn that incident too, the video of the \u2018activity\u2019 was posted online which\nshowed the Dalit boys covering themselves with leaves as a man hits them with a\nstick and a belt. In another incident of the same kind in the western state of\nGujarat a 13-year-old Dalit boy Mahesh Rathod was brutally beaten for wearing a\npair of leather shoes \u2018mojris.\u2019 This type of shoes is traditionally worn by\nupper-caste Hindus in some parts of India. The details of this brutality with\nthe innocent boy are more heart-rending. According to the local media, the boy was\napproached by a group of men who asked him which caste he belonged to. When he\nsaid he was a Dalit, they started abusing and beating him for posing as an\nupper-caste member by wearing jeans, mojris and a gold chain. Unfortunately this\nmaltreatment is not limited only to the Dalits; the extremist Hindus treat all\nminorities including the Muslims and the Christians and the Sikhs in the same\nway; the Muslims are no doubt the worst victim to this maltreatment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On\n8th<\/sup> of this July, in Madhya Pradesh’s Khandwa district more than\nhundred local Hindu villagers made twenty-five Muslim men hostage and tied them\nto a rope for transporting cows to Maharashtra. The helpless cattle\ntransporters were forced to chant \u2018gau mata ki jai\u2019 while doing sit-ups and\nholding their ears. Same situation had to face a Muslim trader Shaukat Ali just\na few days before the recent elections. The BBC’s Rajini Vaidyanathan said in a\nreport on the sorry-plight of Shaukat Ali, With an increase in hate crimes\nagainst Muslims in India in recent years, some fear the world’s largest\ndemocracy is becoming dangerously intolerant under the Hindu nationalist\nBharatiya Janata Party.\u201d According to the details provided by the media Shaukat\nAli, a Muslim trader in the north-eastern state of Assam, was returning from\nhis work when a mob of extremist Hindus detained him on the way. The mob forced\nhim to kneel down in a pool of mud and started beating him. Someone among the\nattackers shouted on him, Why do you sell beef here?\u201d Another yelled, Are you\nBangladeshi?\u201d Shaukat Ali told the BBC reporter showing him the injuries to his\nrib cage and his head, They beat me with a stick and they kicked me in the\nface.\u201d He further said, I wasn’t just injured physically – I was stripped of\nmy dignity. The mob compelled me, a devout Muslim, to eat pork, forced me to\nchew it and then gulp it down.\u201d This type of maltreatment is not limited only\nto beef-sellers like Shaukat Ali; this is the fate of all Muslims whose\npopulation in India is more than 172 million. A report from Human Rights Watch published\nin February 2019 said that between May 2015 and December 2018, at least 44 people\nbelonging to minorities were killed across 12 Indian states; around 36 of them were\nthe Muslims. As far as the Muslims in India are concerned, they expect more\nbrutality, more hostility and more cruelty at the hands of Hindu extremists\nunder BJP government as the government is headed by Mr. Narendra Modi whose own\nhands are  blood stained in Gujarat\nanti-Muslims riots. He is the same person who was declared as a terrorist by\nInternational media just a few years back and was not allowed to enter many\nWestern states over his gross misconducts. In presence of such a \u2018hostile\u2019\nleader like Mr. Modi, how could things go smooth for the minorities\nparticularly for the Muslims in India?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ALI SUKHANVER Hatred on the basis of caste and creed or race and religion is considered the most heinous social crime in all civilized societies. Presence of hatred on all such basis proves moral bankruptcy and ethical barrenness of a society. \u2018The Hindu\u2019 has recently reported from Madhya Pradesh, India that the family members of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-91259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ali-sukhanver"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91259"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91259\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}