Longitude

To recap from my last post ‘Pin Drop Silence:’ In India, the higher castes have built their power and authority on the subjugation of the lower castes, especially the Dalit. Who does the menial labor necessary for higher caste life to exist? The Dalit. Who cleans up the rivers of human effluence with bare hands so the higher castes do not have to? The Dalit. Who lives in the fields of smoldering garbage so the higher castes can have pristine gardens to enjoy at leisure? The Dalit. Who farms the fields and labors to fill the bellies of the higher castes, while rarely being able to provide their families with a handful of rice a day? The Dalit.

This brings us to…

Uncaste India. This is a powerful concept. This is revolutionary. This is a ridiculously difficult task. Change the minds and intentions of 1.2 billion people, as well as thousands of years of religious and cultural heritage.

The idea to Uncaste India, was developed by Ravi and Longitude as a natural extension of the work we have already been doing. To Uncaste India we have to assure three major tenets: Survival, Empowerment and Equality.

Ravi’s organization of 280+ local Indian volunteers, ARV, has been doing a phenomenal job at securing the survival of many Dalit in the state of Andhra Pradesh. Once Longitude teamed up with ARV, we moved from access to food and medical aid to the construction of safe and permanent homes for many Dalit families. This all constitutes the Survival phase.

During my visit to India, I had the great opportunity to meet with the leaders of ARV at their headquarters in Machillipatnam. I threw together a quick powerpoint presentation on ARV’s new laptop I brought with me, and used the projector, both purchased with the help of our kind donors, to illustrate to ARV the Uncaste India Campaign. They have been focusing on the first phase, and Ravi asked me to sell them on the idea of the other two phases.

The easiest to do was the Empowerment phase. We have already begun one step of this phase with the education program started in Gummallapadu Village.

For a room full of Dalit who have themselves risen slightly above the lot cast for them within the caste system, the idea of Equality was still a hard one to imagine. Here was a group of Dalit empowered through their own actions to improve their own lives and then to divert much of their energies to effect real change for their fellow Dalit.

For the Equality phase we face many, albeit surmountable, challenges. For one, as an ARV volunteer pointed out, we cannot simply roll into a village and say, ‘ hey, here’s some food and a house, you’re free, you’re equal to the great landlord down the road.’ We have to address the survival needs for sure, and then move on to the empowerment gradually. The higher castes would work to stop our support if they knew if meant losing any amount of their power. For now we have to bide our time providing survival necessities and equipping the Dalit with tools to work towards their own empowerment, as in education and job-skills, and then to ultimately push for equality.

I told the ARV members that we may not actually realize equality for all Indians in our lifetimes, however, our work will certainly lay the foundations for future generations to work towards equality. This was hard for me to say, because I am a very impatient person, but I realized that the task to Uncaste India is bigger than any one person or small group of people can accomplish on their own in a relatively short period.

We can Uncaste India only with substantive support and a definite willingness to change on the part of the entire Indian community in conjunction with broader international collaboration.

While it may take some time for our programs to unfold in India, we can work on all three tenets simultaneously outside India. If you are interested in helping the cause, we can always use volunteers to build houses and donors to fund our food and medical programs. However, we also need to address the Equality phase from an international perspective. We need to lobby our own governments to put pressure on India to reform. We can petition Indian communities in our countries to put pressure on their fellow citizens back home.

We could simply treat the symptoms of caste based discrimination (forever) by providing food, medicine and shelter for the Dalit. While this is a necessary step for the time being, it will and must lead to a stable situation for the Dalit in which we can move on to the empowerment step. This in turn leads to the opportunity to work towards equality.

As Ravi said, we could provide some resources to a few hundred Dalit at a certain expense indefinitely, or we could focus those resources on substantive efforts for change at a national policy level. This will have a generational effect, benefiting millions of Dalit over future generations.

There is a lot to do, and we need your help.

Please contact Longitude (Shawn: info@golongitude.org, or Rick: volunteer@golongitude.org) to get involved.

Together, we can Uncaste India.

Rick Mickelson
Longitude Director of International Volunteering
April 2009 Trip to India