Touch me not

Fri, Oct 30 04:50 AM

This could have made news 60 years ago. And even then, it would have been shocking. For the fact of Dalits entering a temple to make headlines in the 21st century only goes to show that untouchability is far from a bygone evil.

The injustice is so stark, the story makes easy telling. When a group of Dalits had previously tried to enter the Ekambareshwarar temple in Tamil Nadu's Nagapattinam district, they found it locked by the temple management. After many rounds of negotiations with the village panchayat, a group of Dalits reattempted entry — this time under police escort — only to have stones hurled, and the situation spiralled out of control. This is a scandal, an insult to our Constitution and the enlightenment that it embodies. Not only is there a specific proscription against untouchability in the Indian Constitution, but temple entry for Dalits had also galvanised our early social reformers in much the same way school desegregation galvanised the American civil rights movement. It is, in these extremely imperfect and regrettable circumstances, a relief that on Tuesday a group of 80 Dalits, under full police escort and accompanied by district officials, finally entered the temple and prayed.

But prayers are not enough, if the government wants to prevent a repeat incident. The law is not the problem. As it is, many of the caste Hindus in the village apparently piped down after they were told that their actions were illegal and merited consequences — an example of how the law can be made to work. The initiative then must lie with the government, especially the district administration. The message they send out must be loud and clear: preventing Dalits from entering temples is a crime, and those who prevent them from doing so will be made to pay.

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