oppression of pakistani dalits

On a visit to Sindh, in southern Pakistan, some years ago, I met up with a remarkably brave social activist who has spent years seeking to mobilize poverty-stricken landless labourers for their rights in this lawless, violence-wrecked province of Pakistan, self-styled ‘land of the pure’—which is what the word ‘Pakistan’ literally means. The vast majority of them are Hindu Scheduled Castes or Dalits. Unbeknown to the world, there are more than two million Hindu Dalits in Pakistan, and my friend is one of the few social activists in that country working among them. With him I travelled to various parts of Sindh, where I saw for myself the pathetic conditions in which these hapless people barely managed to eke an existence, laboring under multiple forms of discrimination that are buttressed by custom, religion and law.

I recounted some of my impressions about the Dalits of Pakistan in my recently-released book, Beyond the Border: An Indian in Pakistan, but my interactions with the Pakistani Dalits I met hardly sufficed for a detailed study the enormity of the oppression that they face. Searching for published literature on the subject in Pakistan proved disappointingly elusive. Barring a slim pamphlet, I could procure little else. The status of social science research in Pakistan is dismal, to put it politely, being heavily ideologically driven by Islam. Almost no Pakistani social scientist, it seemed, had cared to study the country’s most heavily oppressed religious minority. But a detailed report that I recently procured provides graphic details of the dismal conditions of these hapless people.

Appropriately titled ‘Long Behind Schedule: A Study on the Plight of Scheduled Caste Hindus in Pakistan’ and authored by Sindhi social activist Zulifqar Shah, the report is the outcome of a detailed research project involving the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research and the Thardeep Rural Development Programme, a major Sindh-based NGO. It covers several hundred Dalit households in parts of Sindh and southern Pakistani Punjab where Dalits live in sizeable numbers. The report unravels alarming forms of discrimination that Pakistan’s Dalits continue to face. They are denied access to barbers and eateries run by others; often, doctors refuse to treat them or else use separate instruments while doing so for fear of being ‘polluted’; and they may even be denied seats on buses. They continue to be treated as untouchables not just by the overwhelmingly numerous Muslims, but even by ‘upper’ caste Hindus, who still refuse them entry into their temples and organizations.

The vast majority of Pakistani Dalits, the report reveals, are illiterate—over 75% of the sample used in this study, with only 4% having passed the matriculation level. In the Thar Parker district bordering India, where almost half of Pakistan’s Dalits live, the overall literacy rate for all communities, including Dalits, is a dismal 18%, and that of Dalits much lower. Few, if any, Dalit localities have schools. Since they are pathetically poor, expensive private schools are well beyond their reach, and so they have to send their children, if they can afford to do without their labour, to low-grade government schools instead. The curriculum of such schools is vociferously anti-Hindu. Hindus are described in government-prescribed texts as ‘enemies’ of Islam, Muslims and Pakistan. Such hatred in the name of religion plays havoc with the self-esteem of non-Muslim students, including Dalits, says the report. The school texts are based heavily on Islamic teachings, and studying the Quran and other Islamic books is compulsory for all students, including non-Muslims. This, the report says, is ‘the most disturbing aspect of the curriculum’, being in complete violation of international norms and even of Pakistani Constitutional provisions, which, in theory, provide for religious freedom for all communities. The intention in forcing non-Muslim students to study Islam in school might be to goad them to convert to Islam, but, the report stresses, it has only succeeded in alienating non-Muslims even further and ‘at a grave cost’ to national integration.

According to the report, ‘In some parts of the lessons, students are motivated to take part in jihad […] Most of the textbooks carry stories of Islamic heroes in a way that demoralizes students from religious minorities, particularly Hindu students.’ Dalit students ‘complain that their fellow students and teachers, while presenting these stories, taunt them.’ Teachers and students subject Dalit students to additional forms of humiliation. They are forced to sit at the back of the classrooms, compelled to clean the school buildings, and, so the report reveals, routinely humiliated with corporal punishment and derogatory language, referred to by teachers and students by their caste names rather than their proper names. Other students refuse to share the same benches with them or to touch their food, considering them polluting on account of their being Hindu ‘infidels’, and of ‘low’ caste at that. There appears to be no effort, the report laments, on the part of the state to remove such anti-Dalit discrimination in the educational system. Such discriminatory practices are apparently a major reason why many Dalits parents refuse to send their children to school, and this reinforces their illiteracy and vulnerability.

The report reveals that Dalits are among the most pathetically poor sections of Pakistani society. Almost 90% of Pakistani Dalits live in villages, concentrated in some of the most poverty-stricken parts of Pakistan, which is among the world’s poorest and violent countries. Of the estimated 1.7 million bonded labourers, living in slavery-like conditions, in Sindh, the vast majority are Dalits. Despite some efforts by civil society organizations and the state, the report notes that there has been ‘hardly any impact on the size and intensity of the nature of bondage’. The report accuses the Pakistani state of taking no serious efforts to implement laws it has enacted to abolish bonded labour, and also points out that a major portion of the money allocated for the Bonded Labour Fund, set up in 2002 ostensibly for the welfare of the children of released bonded labourers, most of who are Dalits, remains unused.

Muslim Landlords prefer to employ Dalits, rather than poor, ‘low’ caste Muslims, as labourers since, being non-Muslims, they are more docile and amenable to control and dare not protest their oppression. They are forced to work, generation after generation, for brutal landlords and owners of brick kilns, in return for a pittance, which is just about enough to survive. Wages are generally paid in the form of a share of the crop, with the landlord retaining three-fourths of it while the bonded labourer has to cough up the input costs as well. Dalit bonded labourers are often subjected to physical violence by landlords and are also forced into begar or unpaid work. In parts of Sindh where powerful Hindu Rajput landlords still live, Dalit labourers are subjected to no less demeaning forms of exploitation.

Dalit women bonded labourers are often sexually abused by landlords and their henchmen, the report reveals. They cannot protest, for, being pathetically poor and non-Muslim, they live in dread of the wrath of their masters, who enjoy powerful political influence. Being despised non-Muslims, the police and other Muslim officials, who are generally in league with the landlords, rarely, if ever, give them a sympathetic hearing.  Moreover, they simply cannot afford the cost of instituting legal proceedings against their tormentors. Dalit women, the report highlights, are routinely abducted by Muslim men, forcibly converted to Islam, and then married off, sometimes being sold like cattle from one man to another till they find themselves on the streets. Having converted, even though often forcibly, to Islam, they cannot go back to their parents or revert back to their ancestral faith or else they might be killed for apostasy. Parents of such girls who seek to rescue them are told that they girls are no longer theirs since they have turned Muslim. The state continues to turn a blind eye, the report says, to such kidnappings and forcible conversions.

Most Pakistani Dalits own no land at all, not even the little plots on which they have built their miserable huts, and many do not even own their diminutive hovels. Hence, most work as landless labourers or else are engaged in what are considered menial occupations, such as snake-charming, scavenging, driving and cleaning. The monthly income of most Dalit workers ranges between 500 and 3000 Pakistani rupees, which is 35% less than the national minimum wage of an unskilled worker. Most Dalit respondents interviewed for the survey reported that they earned less than Muslims and ‘upper’ caste Hindus for the same sort of work. The report found that almost 85% of the Dalits were wholly landless, and that the rest owned only tiny bits of land. In drought-prone Thar Parker, where almost half of Pakistani Dalits live, the land they possess is largely desert and non-irrigated, forcing many to migrate elsewhere in search of low-paid employment. Although the state has taken over massive chunks of land in the area that belonged to ‘upper’ caste Hindus who migrated to India, it has refused to redistribute it to the poor, including the Dalits, despite repeated demands.

In terms of other social indices, too, Dalits are at the bottom of Pakistani society, the report narrates. Their extreme poverty conduces to widespread malnutrition and vulnerability to various diseases. Sanitary conditions in their localities, which are typically set up outside the village or in slums in towns for fear of their supposedly polluting presence, are woeful, but yet they posses hardly any government health facilities or even access to potable water.

Not surprisingly, the report discovered hardly any Dalits in any senior positions in government services or in the formal private sector. The lucky few who have struggled to reach such posts are subjected to various forms of discrimination, owing principally to their ‘low’ caste and their being non-Muslim. The report cites the tragic case of a Dalit woman who managed to earn a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from Karachi and secured a job in a well-known teaching institution in the city. When her Muslim colleagues somehow discovered her caste and religion, she was subjected to taunts and jibes, and even insults about her parents and sexual advances. Disgusted and pained, she was forced to quit her job and return to her family. Such cases are apparently common across Pakistan, and the state does nothing at all to intervene.

Being a signatory to various international human rights agreements, it is incumbent on the Pakistani state to take effective measures to address the pathetic conditions of Pakistan’s Dalits, the country’s most vulnerable minority, the report insists. But, as the report illustrates, the Pakistani state has done nothing of the kind, and, instead, has actively worked to further disempower its Dalit citizens. More on that in the next, concluding,

In the previous part of this article I had summarized some of the findings of probably the first-ever in-depth study about Pakistan’s Dalits, the country’s most dispossessed and vulnerable religious minority. Zulfiqar Shah’s alarming report, titled ‘Long Behind Schedule: A Study on the Plight of Scheduled Caste Hindus in Pakistan’, strikingly summarises the harrowing conditions of Hindu Dalits in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. If caste and religious prejudice account in large measure for their harrowing plight, Shah argues that the attitude of the Pakistani state towards the Dalits is no less responsible.

Shah notes that the Pakistani state continues to refuse to recognize the very existence of caste and caste-based discrimination, which makes it virtually impossible to compel it to address the specific problems of Dalits. Ironically, he argues, caste is alive and thriving in Pakistan, even among the country’s overwhelming majority Muslims. Most Pakistani Muslims, he says, belong to and identify with one or the other caste and are acutely conscious of caste differences and hierarchies among them. Often, even entirely Muslim localities are specific to a particular caste group. The vast majority of poor Muslims in Pakistan belong to ‘low’ caste groups, and it is rare, almost impossible, he says, to find ‘high’ caste Muslims among the poorest of the poor. Yet, the reality of caste and caste-based discrimination, even among the country’s Muslims, are denied by the Pakistani state by regularly invoking the claim that caste is un-Islamic, and that, therefore, it simply does not exist in Islamic Pakistan, which, it rhetorically insists, is a society based on ‘Islamic values’. Consequently, the Pakistani state has made no legal provisions to empower the oppressed ‘low’ castes, whether Muslim or Hindu or to criminalise caste-based discrimination and untouchability, that remain widespread, the report says, across Pakistan.

Being Hindu and ‘low’ caste, Pakistan’s Dalits have been most badly hit by this denial by the state of caste. Since caste-based discrimination is not recognized by the state, the report says, there is no legislation against it. Nor is it possible to take legal proceedings against discrimination based on caste. ‘And, as a consequence’, the report adds, ‘impunity is widespread. Abuse of Dalits, from forced labour to rape, is considered a free-for-all.’

Being pathetically poor and illiterate, relatively small in number, divided into various castes, and, moreover, non-Muslim, the report explains that the Dalits of Pakistan are politically powerless. They have almost no presence in the country’s parliament or state legislatures. In any case, their acute poverty rules out the possibility of Dalit candidates standing for elections, which is expensive business in Pakistan, as in India. Additionally, it is unlikely that political parties would offer tickets to non-Muslim candidates, especially Dalits, for that is a sure way to lose elections. Since political parties rely heavily on the support of powerful landlords, mostly Muslims but also, in some places ‘upper’ caste Hindus, whom they cannot dare displease, and most Dalits work as landless labourers for such landlords, they are reluctant to address Dalit issues, many of which have to do with the oppression that they are subjected to by their masters. Addressing Dalit concerns such as forcible conversions to Islam is also politically risky for political parties who fear a violent backlash from mullahs and their supporters.

Pakistan’s Dalits have no effective organizations to lobby for their rights. Political parties do not take them seriously, and their minority wings are dominated by Christians and ‘upper’ caste Hindus. Hindu organizations in the country are dominated by rich ‘upper’ castes, who are indifferent, if not hostile, to Dalit advancement, and so Hindu political representatives rarely, if ever, take up Dalit concerns. Another reason for their political marginalization is that the population of the country’s Dalits, so the report says, has been grossly under-estimated in the census records, which put their numerical strength under 400,000 while their actual population may be more than two million. Hence, the report argues, nine-tenths of Pakistan’s Dalits have either been ignored in the census or else wrongly marked as ‘upper’ caste Hindus or put into other categories, thus further marginalizing them in a system where access to development schemes and political power is determined by a community’s population. This deliberate downplaying of their numbers, the report says, owes, in part, to discriminatory attitudes of Muslim and ‘upper’ caste Hindu census enumerators who wish to underestimate Dalit numbers. Additionally, due to neglect or deliberately, vast numbers of Dalits are denied voter identity-cards, and so elected representatives simply ignore them. This also leaves them unable to access the few government-funded development projects that exist.

The extreme political disempowerment of Pakistan’s Dalits, added to deep-rooted prejudices against Hindus, account, in large measure, for the virtual absence of any state-sponsored development programmes for Dalits, the report contends. Unlike in India, there are no specific development schemes for ‘low’ castes (whether Muslim or Hindu) in Pakistan, nor is a share of government jobs reserved for them. The Pakistani state, the report laments, has undertaken no affirmative action measure to address the pathetic lives of the Dalits, the country’s most vulnerable minority. Indeed, it alleges, Dalits are ‘being discriminated against in [the] government’s development policies.’ Money given to elected representatives to spend on development activities in their constituencies rarely, if ever, reaches the Dalits. This neglect is also replicated in international donor-sponsored poverty-alleviation schemes in the country. The report notes that in various parts of southern Pakistan, where the bulk of the country’s Dalits live, Dalits, far from gaining at all from the development process, have turned into victims of development schemes, being displaced from their lands as a result of mega projects.

Like other religious minorities in the Islamic Republic, Pakistan’s Dalits, who are additionally discriminated against on account of their extreme poverty and ‘low’ caste status, suffer the pangs of being non-Muslim. The country’s Constitution itself discriminates against all non-Muslims, as it does against women, the report stresses. The Constitution, the report contends, provides no protection to minorities in general, and to Dalits in particular. Basic rights, including protection of minorities and the promotion of social and economic well-being of citizens, are included in the non-binding ‘principles of policy’, rather than the legally enforceable section on fundamental rights, and, moreover, are overshadowed by religious provisions that call for all laws to be in conformity with Islam. The Federal Shariat or Islamic Law Court has the right to turn down any law it considers repugnant to Islam. This, the report says, ‘has further weakened chances of seeking justice against any discrimination’, particularly if the victims are non-Muslims. All these discriminatory provisions, the report insists, are a complete violation of various international human rights agreements to which Pakistan is a signatory.

Like other non-Muslim minorities in Pakistan, Dalits are sometimes targeted  by Muslims under the country’s draconian blasphemy laws, being falsely accused of traducing Islam and its prophet (an act punishable with death or life imprisonment) in order to settle personal scores, the report reveals. Even trivial acts, leave alone major forms of defiance or protest, can lead to hapless Dalits being hounded under these laws. The report cites some such cases, including one involving a Dalit man who was threatened with trial under the blasphemy law if he did not beg an apology from the entire village for having slept with his feet pointed westwards, in the direction of the Muslim holy city of Mecca!

Although many of the forms of dispossession and discrimination that Pakistani Dalits suffer from are similar to those faced by their brethren in India, there are no legal mechanisms in Pakistan to address them. Thus, untouchability is not regarded as a punishable offence, and there is no legislation at the provincial level to protect the rights of Dalits who are routinely denied entry to public places, and access to water sources or common utensils in eateries on account of their caste and religion, which remains a pervasive practice.   

The report concludes with a long list of recommendations, directed particularly at the Pakistani state, to act on to address the manifold problems of its Dalit citizens. These include proper and accurate enumeration of the country’s Dalit population; recording data broken down by caste and other relevant categories gathered by the government; criminalising caste-based discrimination through a law that allows prosecution of perpetrators and banning untouchability by law; instituting programmes to economically empower Dalits, including through a quota system in jobs and educational institutions; providing Dalits legal possession of their homes and arranging interest-free loans for them; distributing state land to landless Dalits; providing scholarships and other forms of assistance to Dalit students; ensuring that all political parties involve Dalits in decision-making, possibly through a law making representation of Dalits mandatory; reserving seats in all levels of government, including the judiciary and law enforcement departments, for Dalits; eliminating all religious biases from school textbooks; implementing the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act and ensuring immediate rehabilitation of released bonded labourers; instituting a commission to investigate incidents of rape, kidnapping and forced conversion to Islam of Dalits and punishing their perpetrators, including Islamic clerics who abet such cases; ratifying relevant international human rights treaties, complying with reporting obligations and inviting international rapperteurs; and taking effective measures to stop targeting Dalits as ‘Indian agents’.

In all, an impressive list of what seem absolutely necessary demands, but given ground-level realities in the ‘Land of the Pure’, we may be sure that this well-meaning report and the recommendations that it proffers will meet with deafeningly loud silence, if not thunderous opposition.