In Modi’s Gujarat, officials openly support casteism against Dalit

Is the government machinery in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home State of Gujarat openly supporting casteism by validating the economic boycott of a Dalit by ‘upper caste’ villagers?

Hyderabad: Is the government machinery in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home State of Gujarat openly supporting casteism by validating the economic boycott of a Dalit by ‘upper caste’ villagers?

An incident in Kanosan village, which interestingly was given the ‘Samras’ status as part of the State government’s Samras Scheme which declares ‘social harmony’, indicates that the official machinery was supporting a casteist move in the village.

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According to reports from Ahmedabad, the Patan district collector has directed that all the 436 ration card holders belonging to Kanosan village in the district’s Saraswati tehsil can now buy ration from neighbouring village Edla and will not have to purchase the same from a fair price shop (FPS) run by a Dalit in their village.

The report says Collector Arvind Vijayan transferred ration cards of the 436 households in Kanosan to the FPS in Edla in an order dated September 12. The order was after a majority of ration card holders in Kanosan, which is dominated by the Thakor community, had stopped buying their monthly ration since the last 18 months from the FPS run by Kanti Parmar, a Dalit.

The report quotes Kanti saying the conflict began around two years ago when he denied ration to a Thakor.

“They justify the boycott saying that I have filed false complaints against them under the SC/ST atrocity Act. This is not true. I have been running this shop for the last 30 years, but they have found faults with me only in the last two-three years,” he is quoted as saying.

The incident has led to questions being raised on social media on how the district collector could pass such orders, which in fact validate the Thakor community’s boycotting of Kanti’s shop. The State is ‘openly appeasing casteism’ by validating this economic boycott, said one X user, adding that the collector should be transferred immediately and all the ration cards of the village should be cancelled.

In fact, atrocities against Dalits and members of SC/ST communities are recording an alarming rise in Modi’s Gujarat, with the same Patan district seeing in a June a group of people assaulting a Dalit man and chopping off his thumb after his nephew picked up a cricket ball from a school playground.

According to reports quoting details obtained under the Right To Information (RTI) Act, Ahmedabad city reported 189 cases of atrocities against the Scheduled Caste (SC) people in 2022, with the State recording 1,425 such cases that year. The RTI response was provided to activist Kaushik Parmar. This was followed by Kutch-Gandhidham with 78 cases and Banaskantha with 72 cases. In 2021, Gujarat witnessed 1,298 cases of atrocities against SCs, while in 2020, it was 1,370 and in 2019, it was 1,495.