INDIA'S CASTE SYSTEM IS STILL ALIVE AND WELL

The young Indian woman of the following story, and her new son

India has one of the fastest growing economies, but the centuries old caste system still rules.

I have a story to tell that shows how the caste system in India, which is rooted in centuries of Hindu scriptures, is still alive and well.  The basis of the Indian caste system is that a person’s identity is defined at birth, and today it is still inappropriate for individuals from different castes to inter marry.

In this particular case, a young woman who was born in what is known as a rich, upper level caste, that unfortunately for her at age 21 she fell in love with a man from the lowest caste that is called “Dalit”, or one of the “untouchables”.

In India today, a recent study showed that only 5.8% of all Indian marriages are between people of different castes.  This percentage hasn't changed for the last four decades.

These results surprised the researchers who had expected to see “more intermingling of the different castes,” said Tridip Ray, a statistician and the leading author.  “Unfortunately, that’s not happening,” he said.

In India, going beyond such boundaries sometimes causes violence. Since this June, killings of men and women who married outside their caste have been reported in the India states of: Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh.  The daughter of a politician from India’s ruling party recently posted a video on social media seeking protection from her father after she married a Dalit man against her family’s wishes. 

Such violent reprisals are “passed off in the name of tradition and honor,” said Uma Chakravarti, a renowned historian and expert on India castes and gender.  But the motives go far deeper, she said. If a woman can choose whom she wants to marry, including a Dalit man, it totally “destabilizes the entire caste system” and that then supports a perceived level of inequality.

The young woman I am referring to grew up just a short distance from a very large, high-end building owned by her father, a wealthy real estate developer in this small city of only 100,000.  The city is surrounded by rice mills and is in the India state of Telangana.

The Dalits, who make up almost 17% of India’s total population of more than 1.3 billion, are at the bottom of India’s caste hierarchy.  (That's approximately 2.2 million Dalits.)  After centuries of being at the bottom of India’s society, they have made major inroads into higher education, business and politics, mainly through the nation’s long-time affirmative action programs. 

When this young 21 year old woman’s father found out about the romance between these two, he beat her for the first of a number of times.  He also took away her mobile phone and laptop and moved her to a different school.  Over the next six years, the two lovers would see each other only briefly on a handful of occasions.

When the young woman first started high school, her parents had told her not to make friends with girls from lower castes, particularly Dalits, who as I said, are officially referred to as, “untouchables”.  The woman’s family are called Arya Vysya, and this is a group that is part of the Komati caste, traditionally a high end trading caste.

For the woman’s father, the marriage of his only daughter was an obsession. “I can even marry you to a beggar who belongs to an upper caste,” the woman remembers her father telling her. “But I don’t want you to marry from a lower caste, whoever it is.”

When the two individuals were in college, the Dalit man was pursuing an engineering degree and the woman was studying fashion.  She then became frightened that her parents were maneuvering to marry her off to someone else.  She got word to her lover that she wanted to elope. 

In 2018, when her mother went to take a noon-time nap, the young woman picked up a backpack she had prepared.  It contained a dress she had received for her birthday, and it also held her school certificates and her identity card.  She went down the stairs to the street, where the Dalit man was waiting, just as he had promised.

The couple was very afraid, but they had a plan. They submitted their applications for passports and studied for an English proficiency test.  They planned to go to Australia and perhaps realize the young man’s dream of starting a business. 

The couple decided to marry in the presence of only a few friends at a temple run by the Arya Samaj.  This is a Hindu reformist group known for its openness to inter-caste unions.  About five months later, the woman discovered she was pregnant, so they postponed the idea of leaving for Australia. They also decided to organize a reception to celebrate their marriage.

Hundreds of their friends attended the festivities, but the woman’s parents were obviously absent.  At this point, her father, had already begun to plot his daughters new husband’s murder, according to court documents. The month before he had already  agreed to pay $150,000 to have his new son-in-law killed, and he actually used a local political leader as the middle-man.  The father, 57, even passed along a photo of the pair from their reception invitation to make it easier for the killer to identify the new husband, the court documents allege.

On one bright afternoon, less than a month later, the couple left a doctor’s appointment in this small southern Indian city where they grew up.  A man came up behind them carrying a large butcher knife. He hacked the man twice on the head and neck, killing him instantly.

On that day, the young couple and the husband’s mother had been leaving the local hospital after an appointment with young woman’s obstetrician.  In video captured by a closed-circuit camera, the couple looked very relaxed as they chatted and strolled toward the street.  It was then that the killer walked up behind them and struck the two blows. The video shows the woman raising her hands to her head in shock and confusion, then running and crying, back to the hospital for help.  She immediately called her father saying. “Somebody attacked my husband,” what did you do?”  Then she fainted.

The young pregnant bride’s father had become so enraged that he had hired these killers to murder his son-in-law, and this is all now part of the court’s documents.

While yes, Indian society is changing, it is not changing rapidly enough for couples like these two, whose marriage defied an age-old system of hierarchy.  Even as India has lifted millions out of poverty, increased education rates and built one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, the influence of the caste system still remains very strong.

As it turns out, the bride’s father was just around the corner from the killer’s attack at a small, local cafe.  The father actually sat down briefly with a reporter at the cafe, but he declined to speak on the record, citing legal advice from his lawyer.  The father’s lawyer has so far declined to comment.  But in the 56-page charging document, police cite overwhelming evidence linking the father to the murder and this evidence says he has actually confessed to the crime.

The superintendent of police for the district said the politician who acted as a middleman between the father and the killers, had inadvertently activated the automatic call-recording feature on his Android phone.  Such recordings will be “quite helpful” in the up-coming court proceedings.

The murdered man’s father, at 53, said the family wants to see the bride’s father severely punished to deter future such killings.  As he spoke, he was cradling his baby grandson in the crook of his arm, holding the baby’s chin with one hand to better plant an affectionate kiss on his cheek.  The murdered man’s father can be seen in a video using the exact same gesture for his son.  It was a video taken during his son’s wedding reception. 

When it came time to deliver the couple’s baby, the family had decided that for safety reasons, it would be better to go to a hospital in a major city three hours away. 

But when the family sought a temporary apartment there, the murdered man’s father said, several landlords declined to rent to them after learning they were Dalits.  Caste discrimination is something “we face regularly,” he said.

The young woman and child are now living with her murdered husband’s parents.  The young mother says that her husband’s parents “are now like my own”. 

She also says, “My father was the reason for my husband’s death,” she said. “But my husband’s parents know how much we loved each other.” 

Unfortunately, there will obviously be more stories from India like this.

Copyright G. Ater  2019