Panjankulam villagers say they have been facing discrimination for two years, well before a recent video on untouchability surfaced.
For representational purposes only. (Supplied)
Inba Tamizhan, a 22-year-old Dalit, was returning home to a colony in the Panjankulam village of Tamil Nadu — a colony that the state government had built for them some 30 years ago. He works at an Ayurveda clinic in Sankarankoil, in the Tenkasi district.
Though rushing home from work, he spared a few minutes to tell South First about his ordeal, hoping that his community’s plight would end if it was highlighted on a national platform.
Tamizhan was eager to speak because some schoolgoing children from his community — Parayars, a sub-caste of Dalits — faced untouchability in the village a few days ago.
On 16 September, the Sankarankoil police arrested Maheswaran, a 40-year-old shopkeeper belonging to the Konar caste — one of the higher castes — in the same village, for practising untouchability by refusing to sell candy to Dalit students.
South First reached out to the Dalits of the village to better understand the problem, even as the issue garnered attention across the state.
“Every time they see us on the bus, they scold us using casteist slurs. They never allow us to sit on the bus and travel,” Tamizhan told South First.
A conversation with a few Dalits of this village brought forward the grim picture of what they had to go through after the caste fight that happened two years ago.
As many as 30 Dalit families live in the Panjankulam village, while 25 families reside in the colony outside the village.
They are primarily daily wage labourers at construction sites, like masons and painters. The women are employed in maintaining the lands of the dominant caste.
And their ordeal started two years ago, “when a group of dominant-caste people attacked us while we were consuming alcohol in the village, which became a huge issue later,” Tamizhan told South First.
A clash broke out between the two communities, following which the dominant-caste people decided to sideline the Dalits, having stayed together thus far.
Days after the incident, the communities played a cricket match in which the dominant caste decided to play its team with members from their community.
However, a 22-year-old named Ramachandra Moorthy from the dominant caste allegedly hurled casteist slurs at 34-year-old Rathina Raj, a Dalit and Tamizhan’s elder brother.
Tamizhan said a clash broke out after that, and the police booked Moorthy under the Atrocities Act, acting on a complaint by Dalits.
The dominant-caste community pulled the Dalits into the ring again after a year.
When Rathina Raj, a Dalit engineer who takes up government contracts, was walking in the village, a group of dominant-caste people allegedly hit him from behind. When Raj asked them who they were using local slang (Aelay), they again hit him for using such a word. He sustained injuries on his leg and neck.
“Aelay is something related to ‘hey’, and that is our slang. But the dominant-caste people didn’t like us addressing them that way. It offended them, and they hit my brother. He fell on the roadside to escape from them, but got his neck and leg injured badly,” Tamizhan said.
Madasamy, the 60-year-old chief of the village and the Parayar community, told South First that the untouchability they experienced elicited public condemnation only after the recent video of the shopkeeper denying candies to schoolchildren. However, the issue had been festering for two years, he added.
“I’m a 60-year-old man, and I can not stand on the bus. But when dominant-caste people board the bus, I have to stand. If I sit, they throw me out using casteist slurs,” he said.
At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic and before the lockdown, the dominant-caste people defamed Dalits on the bus.
“They used to tell us we must all obey them, and we should not come to their streets,” Madasamy told South First.
He added that he used to advise his community’s youngsters not to get involved in caste-based fights, and that their focus should only be on education. He added that he also instructed his community’s youths to use the bus to access education.
Most Dalits who attend college and higher-secondary schools use the bus for their daily commute.
One Dalit youth who didn’t want to be named told South First that whenever the bus gets crowded, the dominant-caste members ask the Dalits to get down, saying that if they touch them, it is blasphemy.
The villagers also alleged that the dominant-caste members do not allow them to practise their rituals.
“We stopped performing our rituals at the Karuppa Samy temple for five years as the dominant-caste members didn’t allow us. Our tradition is to beat drums, shower flowers, dance on the road, and burst crackers. But the dominant-caste people didn’t like that and stopped us from performing our traditional ways. We had to stop praying at the temple after that”, Madasamy said.
The issue reached a new peak when the dominant-caste community decided to boycott the Dalits socio-economically.
But what made them resort to such a move after two years has become a big question.
Local police officers told South First that the dominant-caste members decided to boycott the Dalits after the latter refused to take back the aforementioned case against Moorthy.
Moorthy had apparently asked the Dalits to take back the case against him because he wanted to join the Indian Army, and the case was a hindrance.
The Dalits, however, asked him to take back cases filed against them during the clash, which Moorthy refused to do.
He allegedly hurled casteist slurs at Tamizhan’s 54-year-old mother Mariammal, and warned the Dalits that they would face severe hardships if they refused to take back the case against him.
Tamizhan said the Dalits stood firm and refused to acquiesce to his demands.
He added that a few days before the aforementioned video, the dominant-caste members attacked two Dalits.
“We came to know that they decided to boycott us socio-economically after the viral video, but even before that, they assaulted two members of our community,” he said.
As the 30-seconds video of the shopkeeper went viral, the parents of two children in the video began to fear for their safety.
Ponnuthayi, a 38-year-old mother of the two kids — Pradheep and Praveen — seen in the video, told South First that she was scared for her children.
“Only through the video did I come to know about the incident. It is so painful to see our kids go through this. Now that the video is viral, who assures the safety of my kids whenever they go to school? The school is a kilometre away. What if these dominant-caste people do something to them?” she asked.
She works as a labourer in a factory that produces firecrackers. Her husband, 43-year-old Savariyaar, however, works as a daily wager in Coimbatore at a private manufacturing company.
“Even my husband told me not to create any scene about it as it would affect our kids’ education. He, too, was worried after seeing the video,” she said.
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