Cops offload 45 Gujarat Dalits at Jhansi rly station for taking 125-kg soap to protest UP CM's "anti-Dalit" behaviour

Cops surround Dalits at Jhansi railway station

By A Representative

About 45 Gujarat Dalits, carrying 125 kg soap, with imprint of Gautam Budhha on it, have been offloaded at Jhanshi railway station. Travelling by Sabarmati Express, which they boarded with the soap on Saturday evening, the Dalits had planned to take the soap and deliver it to Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath, telling him to “clean up” his views on Dalits.
“The yellow coloured soap is a replica of the type used by ordinary Dalits in Gujarat to take their bath. We had planned to deliver it to Adityanath in protest against his government’s despicable behaviour of giving soap and shampoo to Dalits, asking them to come clean before he met them at Kushanagar in UP this May”, said one of the Dalits on board with the soap.

A cop taking photo of 125 kg soap for Yogi

“The cops were following us ever since we boarded Sabarmati Express in Ahmedabad on Saturday evening. They first checked each one’s identity card and then took is to boarded us to sit in separate compartments. At Jhansi, we found, there was a big police contingent waiting for us. It forcibly asked to get down from the train along with the soap”, the participant added.
Soon after the Dalits were offloaded, they first sat on dharna, refusing to go with the cops. However, after an hour, they were all taken outside the railway station to a government guest house in Jhansi, where the police officials told them that there was a “threat” of a possible attack on them, hence they were asked to get down from the train.

Outside Jhansi Railway Police station

Well-known social activist Martin Macwan, founder of Gujarat’s biggest Dalit rights NGO, Navsarjan Trust, displayed the 125 kg soap in Ahmedabad on June 8, saying, “We want to tell Adityanath that he has insulted Dalits. It is an insult to the memory of Gautam Buddha, too, who 2500 years ago accepted a manual scavenger, Sumit, as his follower, thus becoming the first person in India to reject untouchability.”
“And it is an insult to Kushanagar, where the Buddha acquired Nirvana”, Macwan, who is winner of the prestigious Robert F Kennedy Human Rights Award in 2000 for his fight for Dalit rights in Gujarat, had further said.

Huge police contingent at Jhansi to stop 25 Gujarat Dalits

Two academics, Pravin Mishra and Suman Kaur, engraved Gautam Buddha’s image on the soap as a reminder to Yogi that he needs to cleanse himself from within instead of asking Dalits to “come clean” to meet him. The soap’s weight equals the 125th birth anniversary of Dalit icon Dr BR Ambedkar, who fought untouchability all his life.

A second soap taken to be delivered to the UP chief minister was a smaller one with Gautam Buddha engraved on it by Ramesh Sarvaiya, one of the four young Dalits who was severely flogged by hand of cow vigilantes in Una on July 11 last year on suspicion of cow slaughter, though they were skinning a dead cow, a hereditary occupation.
The soap was being taken to Lucknow under the banner of Dr Ambedkar Vechan Pratibandh Samiti, or Stop Selling Dr Ambedkar Committee, which ran a fortnight-long programme across Gujarat towns in June demonstrating against elected Dalit representatives of BJP and Congress, seeking answer on what they had done for their welfare.

Comments

Urgent need to study cause of large number of natural deaths in Gulf countries

By Venkatesh Nayak* According to data tabled in Parliament in April 2018, there are 87.76 lakh (8.77 million) Indians in six Gulf countries, namely Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). While replying to an Unstarred Question (#6091) raised in the Lok Sabha, the Union Minister of State for External Affairs said, during the first half of this financial year alone (between April-September 2018), blue-collared Indian workers in these countries had remitted USD 33.47 Billion back home. Not much is known about the human cost of such earnings which swell up the country’s forex reserves quietly. My recent RTI intervention and research of proceedings in Parliament has revealed that between 2012 and mid-2018 more than 24,570 Indian Workers died in these Gulf countries. This works out to an average of more than 10 deaths per day. For every US$ 1 Billion they remitted to India during the same period there were at least 117 deaths of Indian Workers in Gulf ...

A comrade in culture and controversy: Yao Wenyuan’s revolutionary legacy

By Harsh Thakor* This year marks two important anniversaries in Chinese revolutionary history—the 20th death anniversary of Yao Wenyuan, and the 50th anniversary of his seminal essay "On the Social Basis of the Lin Biao Anti-Party Clique". These milestones invite reflection on the man whose pen ignited the first sparks of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and whose sharp ideological interventions left an indelible imprint on the political and cultural landscape of socialist China.

India's health workers have no legal right for their protection, regrets NGO network

Counterview Desk In a letter to Union labour and employment minister Santosh Gangwar, the civil rights group Occupational and Environmental Health Network of India (OEHNI), writing against the backdrop of strike by Bhabha hospital heath care workers, has insisted that they should be given “clear legal right for their protection”.

Uttarakhand tunnel disaster: 'Question mark' on rescue plan, appraisal, construction

By Bhim Singh Rawat* As many as 40 workers were trapped inside Barkot-Silkyara tunnel in Uttarkashi after a portion of the 4.5 km long, supposedly completed portion of the tunnel, collapsed early morning on Sunday, Nov 12, 2023. The incident has once again raised several questions over negligence in planning, appraisal and construction, absence of emergency rescue plan, violations of labour laws and environmental norms resulting in this avoidable accident.

History, culture and literature of Fatehpur, UP, from where Maulana Hasrat Mohani hailed

By Vidya Bhushan Rawat* Maulana Hasrat Mohani was a member of the Constituent Assembly and an extremely important leader of our freedom movement. Born in Unnao district of Uttar Pradesh, Hasrat Mohani's relationship with nearby district of Fatehpur is interesting and not explored much by biographers and historians. Dr Mohammad Ismail Azad Fatehpuri has written a book on Maulana Hasrat Mohani and Fatehpur. The book is in Urdu. He has just come out with another important book, 'Hindi kee Pratham Rachna: Chandayan' authored by Mulla Daud Dalmai.' During my recent visit to Fatehpur town, I had an opportunity to meet Dr Mohammad Ismail Azad Fatehpuri and recorded a conversation with him on issues of history, culture and literature of Fatehpur. Sharing this conversation here with you. Kindly click this link. --- *Human rights defender. Facebook https://www.facebook.com/vbrawat , X @freetohumanity, Skype @vbrawat

Job opportunities decreasing, wages remain low: Delhi construction workers' plight

By Bharat Dogra* It was about 32 years back that a hut colony in posh Prashant Vihar area of Delhi was demolished. It was after a great struggle that the people evicted from here could get alternative plots that were not too far away from their earlier colony. Nirmana, an organization of construction workers, played an important role in helping the evicted people to get this alternative land. At that time it was a big relief to get this alternative land, even though the plots given to them were very small ones of 10X8 feet size. The people worked hard to construct new houses, often constructing two floors so that the family could be accommodated in the small plots. However a recent visit revealed that people are rather disheartened now by a number of adverse factors. They have not been given the proper allotment papers yet. There is still no sewer system here. They have to use public toilets constructed some distance away which can sometimes be quite messy. There is still no...

Women's rights leaders told to negotiate with Muslimness, as India's donor agencies shun the word Muslim

By A Representative Former vice-president Hamid Ansari has sharply criticized donor agencies engaged in nongovernmental development work, saying that they seek to "help out" marginalizes communities with their funds, but shy away from naming Muslims as the target group, something, he insisted, needs to change. Speaking at a book release function in Delhi, he said, since large sections of Muslims are poor, they need political as also social outreach.

Warning bells for India: Tribal exploitation by powerful corporate interests may turn into international issue

By Ashok Shrimali* Warning bells are ringing for India. Even as news drops in from Odisha that Adivasi villages, one after another, are rejecting the top UK-based MNC Vedanta's plea for mining, a recent move by two senior scholars Felix Padel and Samarendra Das suggests the way tribals are being exploited in India by powerful international and national business interests may become an international issue. In fact, one has only to count days when things may be taken up at the United Nations level, with India being pushed to the corner. Padel, it may be recalled, is a major British authority on indigenous peoples across the world, with several scholarly books to his credit.

Gujarat Bitcoin scam worth Rs 5,000 crore "linked" with BJP leaders: Need for Supreme Court monitored probe

By Shaktisinh Gohil* BJP hit a jackpot in the form of demonetisation, which it used as an alibi to convert black money into white in Gujarat. Even as party scrambles for answers of how the Ahmedabad District Cooperative Bank (ADCB), whose director is BJP president Amit Shah, received old currency worth Rs 745.58 crore in just five days, and how Rs 3118.51 crore was deposited in 11 district cooperative banks linked with Gujarat BJP leaders, a new mega Bitcoin scam, worth more than Rs 5,000 crore has been unraveled.

Counterview

Search This Blog