Words: 1130
His natural rights are the foundation of all his civil liberties. – Thomas Paine 1. Human Rights grow out of the feeling of injustice which human beings experience in their life when their humanity is abused and denied. Human Rights are generally defined as the rights every human being is entitled to enjoy and to have protected by the state. In a broader connotation, Human Rights introduce the idea of justice in the natural order Of the world thereby giving human existence a higher sense of purpose. 2.
Although there are differences in race, sex, language and color, yet these differences do not change the said rights. There 2 ay be a difference in property, social origin, political ideas and religious beliefs but everyone is born with human rights regardless of who he is and to which community he belongs. Every one has a right to be protected by the State and People. 3. Human rights are integral to every human being and is the basis for human life and its development and thus incorporated in the constitutions of every civilized state.
In view of this a major breakthrough was achieved by the adoption of the universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations on 10th December 1948. . The Declaration states that human beings are “born free and have equal dignity and rights” and are therefore entitled to all the rights and freedom, set for in the declaration without distinction of any kind such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other states. The declaration concludes that everyone is entitled to social and international order in which these rights and freedom may be fully realized. 3 5. Today, the world commemorates fifty years of Universal Declaration of Human Rights which reaffirms faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the individual and in the equal rights of men and women. They also express a determination to promote social progress and better standard of life in the larger freedom.
Although the right to liberty and security of person is universally recognized, an estimated 120 million people have been killed in this century both in peacetime and in armed conflict. The toll of economic injustice and deprivation is no less horrendous. Poverty and iniquity become threats to human rights by restricting human development. Slavery is banned in international law. Yet some 200 million people are held in conditions amounting to slavery, including some 1 00 million children existing through back-breaking labor, prostitution and begging as well as adult bonded laborers. . The visible scenario gets further complicated in India, for apart from the violation listed above, citizens continue with their age old mode of discrimination based on identities defined and derived out at birth. We have large incidents of cases where dalais 4 4 are not provided access to public places, forced into bonded labor, paraded eked for refusing to do traditional occupations, dalai women forced to become prostitutes for upper caste landlords and village priests, in spite of stringent laws. 7.
Violence against “untouchables” growing says Human Rights Watch report, New York, released on April 14, 1999. The report “Broken People: Caste Violence Against Indian’s Untouchables” indicts the Indian Government for its failure to prevent massacres, rapes and exploitation. Intractability remains abolished in Indian’s Constitution yet dalais still continue to suffer discrimination, harassment and visitation. It does not matter whether a dalai is a professor or bureaucrat, official in a private firm or a clerk, a scavenger or a sweeper, he or she is a victim of a “hidden apartheid”.
While in the rural areas dalais cannot enter the higher caste sections Of villages, visit the same temples, drink water or tea in the same cups or glasses, in urban centers caste operates in more subtle ways in recruitment for jobs, promotions and career advancements and there is little evidence of root, bet and aviary across the caste rubicund. 5 8. The tragedy of the evolution of what we call “Dalai consciousness”, is the act that the quantum of quality of discrimination has changed over the years but the inherent philosophy of discrimination remains despite scores of legislation over the same period.
The political compulsion behind the legislation is more than apparent but a need to find it socially-culturally compulsory is conspicuously missing. 6 CHAPTER II METHODOLOGY Statement of the Problem 9. This paper seeks to examine the various forms of discrimination against dalais in contemporary India, which constitute violation of human rights and to indicate some possible directions of action to eliminate these. Justification of the Study 10.
When we speak of human rights, we overlook ancient inhuman wrongs so common and customary that it hardly hurts our sensitive soul. The serfdom, intractability, inapplicability, illiteracy and other torture some disabilities, because they have been of ancient vintage, seemed natural except for humanists with a rare feel for the indwelling divinity in everyone. 1 1 . The Constitution, as Embarked desiderated, remains a teasing illusion and promise of unreality.
We live in an era of universal human rights but Covenants, Constitution and Declarations count for naught if remedies do not mom forth when violation of rights takes place. Politics, divorced from morality, and elective 7 7 dictatorship, masquerading as democracy, has usurped from the people, from the dalai miserable, the awareness of their power and injected a fear that it is their fate forever to suffer. As Cassias put it to Brutes: “The fault, dear Brutes, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings”. 12.
With each passing day, the penetrate vision of social justice is becoming dimmer, the skull daggers adopted by the elite establishment being limping legislations couched in awesome punishments never meant to e implemented, cosmetic projects, which rarely take off except on the day a minister flags off. Even ;reservations’ are often arithmetical jugglery and lapped up by a creamy layer, the pariah ever remaining pariah and the bonded labor drudging as serf families for ever, law not withstanding. “Slavery has been abolished. Rome has abolished it. America has abolished it.
Russia has abolished it – on paper” (India has also abolished it, albeit on paper). 2 8 13. Today, social injustice is market-friendly. The new tourism and yuppie affluent are a sly enemy of dalais whose women are raped, girls sold, infants ailed and youth and old people, ready to work hard in farms and build towns and cities as construction workers, are turned off into unemployment leaving, as their fate, blood, sweat, toil and tears! They are non-persons. The dalais of India need to unite and organize for they have nothing to lose except their chains but may yet win a dalai order of justice.