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Friday, December 8, 2006

Moralistic Terror and the Apparetus of Suppression of dalits' human rights


I come across article by P.Sainath in The Hindu on the medias' new trend to print stories related to massive dalit protests, in subtle ways that seek to further alienate the underprevileged from the cool, 'peace-loving' middle class, who are already by and large insensitive to the horrendous atrocities routinely perpetuated against working class, dalits, muslims and women, viz; the subjects of class-caste-religion-gender regime.
The city dwellers who would otherwise lead their selfish, petty and worthless lives, without the traffic being interrupted by poeople thronging from the distant villages or the gettos of city, are suddenly reminded of the dangers of assertions by the poor and the dispossessed.
Carefully organized traffic jams, roadblocks and periodic hate-campaigns in the name of religious festivals unfailingly get nice police escorts and patronising coverage in media; they pass off as 'normal events' of city life, though many a citzen grumbles in his private conversations about this kind of menaces( as though it were neither wise nor fair to have spoken in public).

After the gruesome gang rape of two women and the killing of four members of a dalit family in Khairlanji(Maharashtra) on 29-09-06 apparently festively and ritualistically by the entire village community of people of the higher caste, the media have played all sorts of dirty tricks to underplay the real nature of the crime.

To a certain extent, it also seems to be true that without a case of deviant sexual behaviour invented against the victim(s) / their relatives, public acquiescence would not have been there to such a macabre excersise in "teaching them a lesson". The connivance of the authorities in attempts to cover up, fabrication of post mortum report and many other things are already brought to light.

Here one can clearly see a scenario in which the prejudices against the right of the dalits to exist is coupled with motives to rob of their honour,property and everything.

Moralistic terror seems to have been organised and presided over by the instruments of state here. The fundamental element of moralistic terror could be seen as a kind of universalistic and compulsary adherence to the monogamus- heterosexual-patriarchal mode. Defiance of this is considered a crime, deserving extreme forms of 'punishment' involving worst kinds of rituals. Parading the victims naked, gang raping, mutilating corpses, even terrorising the fellow folks and women who may voice protests etc. are part of it, typically recurring all over the country.

The willingness to play the role of benefactors of the perpetrators, or the hopelessly dismissive attitude toward such gross voilations of human rights , at least betrayed by a section of the custodians of law and order is derived from a passive, half- acquiescing approach to this casteist, sexist or communal forms of administration of "justice"by the lynching mobs out side reach of law and constitution.
This tendency is further aggravated by the cover up/or telling half-truths excercises by the media . In this aspect, the systematic interplay of moralistic terror with the other prominent instruments of suppression like caste etc. needs to be examined.

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