Gujarat govt wants industries dept to handle pleas to appoint manual scavengers as temple priests

In what should appear as a weird development, the Gujarat government wants the state industries department to handle applications with pleas for appointing the lowest category of Dalits, Valmikis, involved in manual scavenging, as priests in temples. This has come to light in a letter from the chief minister’s office (CMO) to senior Dalit rights activist Rajesh Solanki, who wanted Gujarat chief minister Anandiben Patel to make the important change. Solanki had pleaded that Valmiki Dalits should be appointed priests in major Gujarat temples.
Revealing this, the CMO says, all pleas on priesthood to Valmiki Dalits should go to the state industries department directly. A copy of the letter, addressed to Solanki, has been forwarded to additional chief secretary, industries, Gujarat government, D Jagatheesa Pandian, with the the instruction to “handle” the plea for priesthood to Valimiki Dalits. Solanki wanted the Gujarat chief minister to come up with two Cabinet resolutions on this.
Solanki said, the first Cabinet decision related to appointing Valmiki Dalits as priests (pujari) in five prominent temples of Gujarat -- Ambaji, Chotila, Bahucharaji, Dwarka and Somnath. The second one was regarding stone laying foundation ceremony (bhumi poojan), with a minor Valmiki Dalit girl formally asked to conduct play the key role. “On July 25, 2014 CMO replied telling me that my both the letters had been forwarded to additional principal secretary, industries and mines”.
Solanki told Counterview, “I reminded Anandiben in my written plea that she had washed the feet of Valmiki veterans at two places, Patan and Ahmedabad, ahead of Lok Sabha elections, saying her effort was a sort of repentance about what the upper caste people had done to them for ages. I also said, now time had come that, as the chief minister Gujarat, she put her agenda of social harmony into practice. And the best way to do this was to adopt Cabinet resolutions giving special status to Valmiki Dalits in religious orders and ceremonies.”
Solanki expressed surprise that instead of taking any decision in the Cabinet, “her office sent my letters to the industries and mines department, which has nothing to do with the subject.” What is particularly “shocking”, Solanki added, is the fact that the industries and mines department was asked to take care of all plea “as per the rules.” This, he added, prompted him to write yet another letter to the Gujarat chief minister, reminding her of why priesthood to the Valmiki Dalits was so important to end untouchability practices.
The letter said, Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad and Dr BR Ambedkar had demanded abolition of hereditary priesthood among Hindus, but no political party had so far dared to do this. “For decades, the BJP accused the Congress of playing vote bank politics. The Congress had its own Harijan cell. The BJP formed Anusuchit Jati Morcha. But, the BJP is not different than the Congress. BJP is not able to push social reforms among the Hindus. The BJP is interested only in instigating the Dalits against the Muslims”, Solanki said.
The move by Solanki -- who represents the Dalit Hakk Rakshak Manch (DHRM), a Dalit rights NGO in Ahmedabad -- comes more than a year after the state government under Narendra Modi came up with what was then described as “unique idea” of training manual scavengers in Hindu religious rituals. The Valmikis were learn Vedic rituals at institutions like Sola Bhagvat Vidyapith and Somnath Sanskrit University. Even Rs 22.50 lakh was aside for this in the budget for 2013-14. Critics said, such priesthood meant little to abolish caste-based manual scavenging.

Comments

Ahmedabad's civic chaos: Drainage woes, waterlogging, and the illusion of Olympic dreams

In response to my blog on overflowing gutter lines at several spots in Ahmedabad's Vejalpur, a heavily populated area, a close acquaintance informed me that it's not just the middle-class housing societies that are affected by the nuisance. Preeti Das, who lives in a posh locality in what is fashionably called the SoBo area, tells me, "Things are worse in our society, Applewood."

RP Gupta a scapegoat to help Govt of India manage fallout of Adani case in US court?

RP Gupta, a retired 1987-batch IAS officer from the Gujarat cadre, has found himself at the center of a growing controversy. During my tenure as the Times of India correspondent in Gandhinagar (1997–2012), I often interacted with him. He struck me as a straightforward officer, though I never quite understood why he was never appointed to what are supposed to be top-tier departments like industries, energy and petrochemicals, finance, or revenue.

PharmEasy: The only online medical store which revises prices upwards after confirming the order

For senior citizens — especially those without a family support system — ordering medicines online can be a great relief. Shruti and I have been doing this for the last couple of years, and with considerable success. We upload a prescription, receive a verification call from a doctor, and within two or three days, the medicines are delivered to our doorstep.

Powering pollution, heating homes: Why are Delhi residents opposing incineration-based waste management

While going through the 50-odd-page report Burning Waste, Warming Cities? Waste-to-Energy (WTE) Incineration and Urban Heat in Delhi , authored by Chythenyen Devika Kulasekaran of the well-known advocacy group Centre for Financial Accountability, I came across a reference to Sukhdev Vihar — a place where I lived for almost a decade before moving to Moscow in 1986 as the foreign correspondent of the daily Patriot and weekly Link .

Environmental report raises alarm: Sabarmati one of four rivers with nonylphenol contamination

A new report by Toxics Link , an Indian environmental research and advocacy organisation based in New Delhi, in collaboration with the Environmental Defense Fund , a global non-profit headquartered in New York, has raised the alarm that Sabarmati is one of five rivers across India found to contain unacceptable levels of nonylphenol (NP), a chemical linked to "exposure to carcinogenic outcomes, including prostate cancer in men and breast cancer in women."

Dalit rights and political tensions: Why is Mevani at odds with Congress leadership?

While I have known Jignesh Mevani, one of the dozen-odd Congress MLAs from Gujarat, ever since my Gandhinagar days—when he was a young activist aligned with well-known human rights lawyer Mukul Sinha’s organisation, Jan Sangharsh Manch—he became famous following the July 2016 Una Dalit atrocity, in which seven members of a family were brutally assaulted by self-proclaimed cow vigilantes while skinning a dead cow, a traditional occupation among Dalits.

Tracking a lost link: Soviet-era legacy of Gujarati translator Atul Sawani

The other day, I received a message from a well-known activist, Raju Dipti, who runs an NGO called Jeevan Teerth in Koba village, near Gujarat’s capital, Gandhinagar. He was seeking the contact information of Atul Sawani, a translator of Russian books—mainly political and economic—into Gujarati for Progress Publishers during the Soviet era. He wanted to collect and hand over scanned soft copies, or if possible, hard copies, of Soviet books translated into Gujarati to Arvind Gupta, who currently lives in Pune and is undertaking the herculean task of collecting and making public soft copies of Soviet books that are no longer available in the market, both in English and Indian languages.

Boeing 787 under scrutiny again after Ahmedabad crash: Whistleblower warnings resurface

A heart-wrenching tragedy has taken place in Ahmedabad. As widely reported, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner plane crashed shortly after taking off from the city’s airport, currently operated by India’s top tycoon, Gautam Adani. The aircraft was carrying 230 passengers and 12 crew members. As expected, the crash has led to an outpouring of grief across the country. At the same time, there have been demands for the resignation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, and Civil Aviation Minister Venkaiah Naidu. The most striking comment came from BJP MP Subramanian Swamy, who stated : "When a train derailed in the 1950s, Lal Bahadur Shastri resigned. On the same morality, I demand PM Modi, HM Amit Shah, and Civil Aviation Minister Naidu resign so that a free and fair inquiry can be held. All that Modi and his associates have been doing so far is gallivanting, which must stop." Amidst widespread mourning, some fringe elements sought to communalize the tragedy. One post ...

Revisiting Gijubhai: Pioneer of child-centric education and the caste debate

It was Krishna Kumar, the well-known educationist, who I believe first introduced me to the name — Gijubhai Badheka (1885–1939). Hailing from Bhavnagar, known as the cultural capital of the Saurashtra region of Gujarat, Gijubhai, Kumar told me during my student days, made significant contributions to the field of pedagogy — something that hasn't received much attention from India's education mandarins. At that time, Kumar was my tutorial teacher at Kirorimal College, Delhi University.

Search This Blog