INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
KATHMANDU, JUNE 17
Ever since the death of a young Dalit man killed along with five friends, in what activists called a &caste-based
massacre&, Nepalis have been taking to the streets to demand an end to a form of discrimination that remains rife years after it was
outlawed.
The protesters have not turned out in large numbers & a strict coronavirus lockdown has deterred all but the most determined.
But
campaigners say their persistence is a sign of the outrage felt among people from Nepallowest caste over a failure to tackle widespread
violence and discrimination, echoing the Black Lives Matter protests around the world
The head of the Kathmandu-based Dalit NGO Federation said the killing of Nabaraj Bika, 21, who was chased into a river with his friends as
he prepared to elope with a 17-year-old girl from a higher-caste family, was a failure of governance
&The state has failed to maintain law and order and prevent such illegal and inhuman acts,&
Bhakta Bishwakarma told the Thomson Reuters
Foundation.
&We are living in terror and urge the government to deliver justice to victims by punishing the perpetrators of the
crime.&
Nepalgovernment said it was committed to ensuring such &grave criminal& incidents were not repeated and to providing justice for the
Dalits, formerly known as untouchables, are at the bottom of the ancient caste hierarchy linked to the Hindu faith and form more than 13% of
Nepalpopulation.
Nepal passed a law against caste based discrimination and untouchability in 2011, yet Dalits face routine segregation and
abuse and ancient biases against lower-caste groups make it harder for them to access education, jobs and homes.
They are frequently barred
from public places including temples and water wells used by higher-caste Hindus, and restricted to work that is considered dirty or
dangerous such as manual scavenging and disposing of animal carcasses.
There have been 33 cases of discrimination or violence against Dalits
in 2020, according to Nepal Monitor, a Kathmandu-based human rights organisation
Last year, it recorded 84 such incidents.
Bikaparents have said the girlfamily threw stones at the men and beat them with bamboo sticks in
The bodies of the men, four of whom were Dalit, were later found in a river
The killings have triggered near-daily protests in Kathmandu and elsewhere in Nepal
Most have been peaceful, though police said five protesters and seven police sustained minor injuries in clashes on Monday outside the
hospital where the postmortems were conducted.
United Nations and European Union have spoken out on the latest deaths and one former prime
minister, Baburam Bhattarai, has joined the protests, calling on people to adopt a Dalit surname in a country where names are markers of
caste.
But Tek Tamrakar, who advises UN on human rights issues in Nepal, said few non-Dalits were engaging with the issue, unlike in the
United States, where white people have joined Black Lives Matter protests.
&Even white people are participating in the Black Lives Matter
protests because they consider it as a human rights issue
They don&t consider this as an issue concerning black people only,& he said.
He added, &But in Nepal this is not the case
The issue is considered to be related to the Dalits only
The society, the state, and even the courts do not consider it as a human rights issue.&
He said there was a &complete lack of
accountability& in Nepal, where the police routinely refused to register crimes against Dalits or dismissed them as accidents.
The outrage
over Bikacase has prompted the parliament to set up a panel to investigate the killings and police have detained 29 people including the
family of the victimgirlfriend.
On the same day he and his friends were attacked, body of a 12-year-old Dalit girl was found hanging from a
tree in southern Nepal after she was forced to marry a higher-caste man, who had raped her.
Dalit rights activist Durga Sob urged people
from all castes to come out and protest against discrimination in the same way white people have in the United States.
&What they have in
America is racism & the white discriminating against the black,& said Sob
&But in Nepal the discrimination is against people of the same race, colour, culture and religion.&
A version of this article appears in
e-paper on June 18, 2020, of The Himalayan Times.
The post Dalit killings in Rukum village spark outrage over caste discrimination appeared
first on The Himalayan Times.
