Orissa temple purified after low caste woman minister visit

Orissa temple purified after low caste minister visit

Fri Jan 16, 2009 12:16pm IST

BHUBANESWAR, India (Reuters) - Hindu priests in Orissa are under investigation for conducting a purification ritual soon after a minister belonging to a lower caste visited a famous temple, officials said on Friday.

Minutes after Pramila Mallick, a minister in Orissa, prayed at the temple this week, Hindu priests shut the doors and threw away holy offerings, washed the floors and changed the idol's clothes, one official said.

"Some priests opposed the minister's entry into the interior chamber of the temple," Upendra Mallik, a senior government official told Reuters. "We are investigating."

In India, millions of people formerly known as "untouchables" remain oppressed at the bottom of the ancient Hindu caste system.

The minister said the purification ritual, at the Akhandalamani temple in Orissa's Bhadrak district, could have been conducted at the behest of her political rivals.

"I have been visiting the temple for years now. Some politically motivated people want to create controversy," she said.

In spite of India's secular constitution banning caste discrimination, Dalits -- those at the bottom of the caste system -- are still commonly beaten or killed for using a well or worshipping at a temple reserved for upper castes.

More than 16 percent of India's 1.1-billion population are Dalits, occupying the lowest rank in a 3,000-year-old Hindu caste system.  source: Reuters India

will the caste system be destroyed?

How will the caste system be destroyed?
Justice Markandey Katju, a Judge of the Supreme Court of India, writes:

To my mind, the caste system will be destroyed (and is in fact being destroyed) in India by the advance of technology, through people’s struggles, and inter-caste marriages.

As regards the advance of technology, it has been pointed out above that in a modern industrial society the division of labour cannot be on the basis of one’s birth but on the basis of technical skills. Hence industrialisation destroys the caste system. In fact, the caste system has become weak in a State such as West Bengal, which was partially industrialised before most other States.

As regards people’s struggles, these are in fact going on everywhere in view of the harsh economic conditions in India (marked by price rise, unemployment, and so on). People in India are realising that united they stand and divided they fall, and that caste is certainly a dividing force.

As regards inter-caste marriages, I have stated in my judgment in Lata Singh vs. State of U.P. [2006(5) SCC 475, JT 2006(6) SC 173], that they are in the national interest and hence should be encouraged.

REad it all from the Hindu

Caste and Sri Lankan Politics by Izeth Hussain

I must mention some of the salient features of the Sinhalese caste system so as to bring out the essential contrasts with the Indian one. The top caste in the former is the Goyigama, the single biggest caste to which almost fifty percent of the Sinhalese belong. In his book on the Rise of the Karawa Elite, Michael Roberts writes that the numerical weight of the Goyigama caste, its control of the land and its resources, the positions of authority of its notables which continued under the early colonial regimes, and the backing given to the Goyigama by the coercive power of the monarchy, amounted to a very powerful system which prevented anything like social revolution. The Navandanna, Wahumpura, Berava, and other service castes were enmeshed in that system as inferiors with no prospect of change (p 238).

The challenge to the traditional caste system came from the three so-called low-country castes, namely the Karawa, the Salagama, and the Durawe, most of whose members are said to have come to Sri Lanka after 1505. They could not be absorbed as service castes in the traditional ritual order, and the upward economic mobility made possible under Western colonialism meant that they could improve their status and come to question the pre-eminent position of the Goyigama. However - according to Roberts again - the Portuguese and the Sinhalese kings channeled the KSD migrants into new areas of economic activity, establishing a tradition of exploitative labour services which was continued under the Dutch and the British. The areas were in weaving cloth, cinnamon peeling, toddy tapping, coir and rope production, fishing and the transport of goods. Some of these tasks were rigorous and dangerous, many were demeaning, and all were distasteful in the eyes of the established residents (Roberts - 232). So it would be correct to say that despite the challenges posed by the KSD the Goyigama managed to retain their pre-eminent position during the entirety of the colonial period. read it all

Clash over wall preventing the entry of Dalits at Uthapuram village in Madurai

Groups clash in Uthapuram

Staff Reporter, The Hindu , October 2, 2008

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Trouble erupts over painting of wall adjacent to temple

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MADURAI: Two groups belonging to different castes clashed at Uthapuram village in Madurai district, hurling stones and country bombs at each other. Trouble erupted when the members of one group painted the wall adjacent to the Muthalamman Temple despite objections from the other group. Police resorted to a mild lathi charge and opened three rounds of teargas shells to disperse the mob.

The situation is now under control, said Inspector-General of Police (South Zone) Sanjeev Kumar. Adequate police strength, led by the Deputy-Inspector General of Police S.S. Krishnamoorthy, had been deployed at the village, he told The Hindu.

Superintendent of Police M. Manohar said that they were on the lookout for some suspects behind the incident. Security had been strengthened and combing operation was on, he added. The village had been witness to animosity between these two groups over the construction of a wall preventing the entry of Dalits. A portion of the wall was later demolished on the initiative of the State government.  read 

Will Racial Integration Cause Violence Among Prisoners?

Inmates' Threat: No Segregation, No Peace
Some Fear Court-Ordered Integration May Trigger Racial Violence Among Inmates
By ALEX STONE
July 1, 2008



When an inmate who is not black enters Will Williams' cell for the first time at San Quentin State Prison in Northern California, one of the last forms of legalized segregation will come to an end.
San Quentin
In a case that went as high as the United States Supreme Court, California's prisons must begin... Expand
In a case that went as high as the United States Supreme Court, California's prisons must begin racially integrating their cells this month. Integration goes against an unwritten code of conduct among inmates inside San Quentin. That code says they must never communicate with other races. Collapse
(Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

In a case that went as high as the U.S. Supreme Court, California's prisons must begin racially integrating their cells this month. Integration goes against an unwritten code of conduct among San Quentin inmates, which says they must never communicate with other races.

Click here to listen to a radio report by ABC News' Alex Stone about the San Quentin integration.

Inmates and guards admit they are nervous about the changes because so much of the violence inside the walls of the prison, which sits on the rocky shore of the San Francisco Bay, is caused by racial tensions.

"I just don't think it's going to really work because everybody is so against it," said Williams, who has been locked up at San Quentin for 35 years on a kidnapping and robbery conviction. "The whites are saying they don't want blacks, and the blacks are saying they don't want whites."


Until now, most California prisons, including San Quentin, have been segregated in order to keep the peace. Guards say nearly every inmate in the prison is in a gang. The gangs only recruit their own races, and when the races meet it can often result in deadly violence.

It is hard for outsiders to understand the gang lifestyle inside the prisons.

"We have the whites and they're not even allowed to talk to blacks," said Officer Jamie Allejos, who watches over inmates in San Quentin's B Block. "We've got guys who get beat up just for talking to another race or sharing food with another inmate."

The integration is the result of a 1995 lawsuit filed by a black inmate in California who claimed being segregated infringed upon his rights. The case eventually made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which handed it down to a federal mediation court. Both sides agreed to integrate the cells.

Allejos made it very clear that he believes integrating the cells will lead to increased violence.

"The guys who are making these decisions don't know nothing about prison. I think the people who are making these decisions should come here for six months and find out the conditions in here," Allejos said.

Racism Not Always Black and White: Indian style

Racism Not Always Black and White
Experts Say Immigration Rancor Fuels Hatred
By SUSAN DONALDSON JAMES
June 25, 2008



Sparkle Reid Rai's 6-month-old daughter probably heard the commotion when a man and two women pretending to deliver a package showed up at their Union City, Ga., apartment in 2000.

There, say prosecutors in the high-profile murder trial, the 300-pound man allegedly choked and repeatedly stabbed Rai — a newlywed, whose only apparent crime was being black.

Today, a Fulton County jury began deliberating whether India-born businessman Chiman Rai ordered hit men to murder his daughter-in-law. Prosecutors contend Rai, 68, feared the mixed marriage would smear the family name in a caste-conscious Indian society.

Prosecutors established with black and white non-family witnesses that Rai had never told them his son "Ricky" had married a black woman and that they had a daughter. Sparkle Rai was killed a month after they wed. They are seeking the death penalty.

This case, which turned from a simple murder investigation into an alleged hate crime across two communities of color, highlights the complexity of race relations in a country that has often framed its prejudice in black and white.

But racial intolerance, sometimes in the form of violence, is increasingly more inclusive. Experts say that such bias is nothing new, although the national immigration debate has fueled that hate, giving bigots of all complexions more excuses to act on their ignorance.

Donna Lowry, who married Sparkle Reid's father and is now raising the victim's daughter, said, "It was such a shock to us when we found out a few years ago and we were floored.

"We had no idea it would go in this direction," she told ABCNEWS.com today en route to the trial. "It's mind-boggling. We are raising her biracial child and there is so much hatred on the other side of the family."

Rai's lawyer, Don Samuel, told ABCNEWS.com, "I'm arguing that my client is not guilty. There is no racial issue involved at all."

A dozen witnesses of all colors who had known Rai -- once a professor at two historically black colleges -- said he was not a racist. But Rai's former cellmate, a convicted forger, testified this week that the accused had made bigoted remarks while in jail, according to reports in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

American-born Amardeep Singh, director of the national Sikh Coalition, which defends the civil and legal rights of Sikhs, admits that his own ethnic group is capable of bigotry.

"You don't come to American to learn to be a bigot," Singh said. "There is bigotry in India. The caste system is deeply ingrained and South Asians in the U.S. still practice caste exclusion."

And he, too, has been a victim.

Racial Slurs Against Sikhs

The 37-year-old is routinely a victim of racial slurs because he wears a beard and a turban. Just recently, while walking home from a Starbucks in culturally diverse Hoboken, N.J., a passerby shouted, "You've got to take that sh-- off your head, you look like a terrorist."

And not just by rednecks. "To be honest, I've been called a terrorist by every single racial category — white, Latino or black," Singh said.

Last month, during a fire drill at Hightstown High School in New Jersey, for instance, an African-American teenager set fire to a Sikh student's turban, singeing the boy's hair.

The incident at this diverse public school with a significant number of blacks, Latinos and Asians enraged New Jersey's large Sikh community

"The fact that something like this could have happened is beyond comprehension, especially in this day and age," the victim's mother told the New Jersey Star-Ledger.