The late Mahatma Gandhi once said that if he were to be reborn, he wanted to come back as one of the untouchables — the long-despised outsiders of the Hindu caste system — “so that I may share their sorrows, sufferings and the affronts levelled at them”. Gandhi might have been astonished to learn that almost 70 years after his death the same “affronts” are stirring revolt — not just in the villages of India but also on the streets of Birmingham, Leicester, Bedford and other British cities with large immigrant Asian populations.
Members of Britain’s Dalit community — as the former untouchables are now widely known — have long claimed that the discrimination against them is entrenched among some members of the country’s 800,000-strong Hindu population.
There have been allegations of British-based Dalits being taunted in schools, abused in shops and humiliated at work by colleagues who refuse to drink out of the same tap or share kitchen utensils with a group previously regarded by higher castes as “polluting” or “dirty”.
The campaign to outlaw caste discrimination in Britain won the support last week of Sir Anish Kapoor, the Mumbai-born British sculptor, who has become one of the most prominent figures in the Indian community to intervene in an increasingly bitter debate over the practice of Hinduism in Britain.
“It is outlawed in India, so why not in Britain?” Kapoor told The Sunday Times. “It is discrimination at the most vile level. The government introduced laws against slavery, so why can they not act on this?”
Yet proposals for a government ban have exposed disagreements over whether the caste system exists in Britain at all and whether any attempt to regulate alleged discrimination would amount to what some Hindu leaders have characterised as an attack on their religion.
A six-month-long public consultation on a proposed ban on caste-based discrimination ends tomorrow, but it has already been overshadowed by accusations that Theresa May is worried about harming post-Brexit trade with India, where right-wing Hindu nationalism has become a potent force under Narendra Modi, the prime minister.
There are also claims that future UK party political donations by wealthy Hindu businessmen may depend on how May and the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn address the caste issue. Corbyn has been accused by the UK National Council of Hindu Temples of being “determined to foist caste labels upon British Hindus”.
Yet members of the British Dalit community, estimated at more than 50,000 people, complain of an alarming array of discriminatory practices that they claim have accompanied Indian migration to Britain.
“Caste discrimination has affected my entire life,” said Reena Kumari, 37, from Coventry. Born in Britain to Dalit parents, she recalled that at secondary school she had been asked by other children about her Dalit surname and her parents’ home village in India. “The children would say [about me]: don’t touch her, you will catch something.”
When she worked as an adult in a local shop “there was a customer from the [highest-ranking] Brahmin caste and she would not take money from my hand”, she said. “She was a very nice lady, but her views were ingrained. People don’t want to speak out because it’s taboo. People are embarrassed by it.”
Sudesh Rani, 43, a welfare officer from Bedford, said she went to the police after she was abused by two women in a Tesco supermarket about being a member of the Ravidassia community, members of which are viewed as lower caste.
“They were shouting, ‘You are dirty and low caste.’ I felt sick. They were saying, ‘We’re going to rip you apart.’ I told the police but they said there is no such thing as caste. They didn’t know what to do.”
The problem is not confined to the Hindu community and Ram Lakha, 68, a Sikh from a Dalit family, claimed to have encountered discrimination frequently in a local political career that in 2005 made him lord mayor of Coventry.
“There is a glass ceiling,” said Lakha, who has been a councillor for 28 years.
“There is a silent struggle going on and we have learnt to live with it. There is not one Dalit who has become an MP or a peer in this country.”
In 2015 Permila Tirkey, a woman from the Adivasi tribal group in India — traditionally considered the “servant” caste — won £184,000 in compensation at an employment tribunal after a claim based in part on caste discrimination.
The woman had been kept in domestic servitude for 4½ years by her employers Ajay and Pooja Chandhok, both originally Hindus, in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire. She had worked 18 hours a day, seven days a week, and had been paid 11p an hour.
The origins of the Asian caste system remain hotly debated by historians, but its four primary castes are linked to Brahma, the four-faced Hindu deity. The purest Brahmin caste traditionally includes spiritual leaders and teachers. Gandhi, who referred to the untouchables as harijan (children of God), belonged to the second-ranked Kshatriya caste of administrators and warriors.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/past-six...riminated-against-by-british-hindus-c92nsxx0l
