Are There Caste Atrocities in India? What the Data Can and Cannot Tell Us

Jalki, Dunkin; Pathan, Sufiya

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-38761-1_3

Cited by 7 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Some scholars like Sharma (2012Sharma ( , 2015 have suggested that these crimes are counted only when the offenders belong "to a non-SC/ST group". Bros and Couttenier (2010) and Jalki and Pathan (2017), on the other hand, believe that they "were collected irrespective of the perpetrators" or that "the caste of the perpetrator of the crime is not taken into consideration" while counting the crimes. Resolving this is important because it can lead to an implication in the calculation of the crime rates as well as their comparability with the rates of crimes in the overall population.…”

Section: A Clarification On Offendersmentioning

confidence: 99%

The enigma of caste atrocities

Sashittal¹

2023

Oñati Socio-Legal Series

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The dominant narrative on caste today asserts that the people belonging to the Scheduled Castes or “Dalits” and Scheduled Tribes or “Tribals” face pervasive and disproportionately more violence. The situation is considered further accentuated by the alleged “caste bias” against these communities in the police and the judiciary. The stringent legal provisions passed by the Indian Parliament, specifically to address crimes against these communities, have been presented as ineffectual or insufficient in curbing this violence. The official crime statistics are often cited as supporting these claims. However, a closer look at this data on crimes against SCs and STs, including the rates of crimes, court convictions and pendency, shows that these popular claims are not based on the evidence that the data provides. Further, a scrutiny of the claims itself reveals serious conceptual problems, fallacies, and errors. This article, while analyzing the currently available data on crimes against SCs and STs, also traces the source of the problems that have marred their understanding and interpretation. We specifically look at the evolution of the word ‘atrocity’ in the context of caste, how the term acquired a strange definition, how it came to mediate the understanding of caste violence and the collection of crime statistics, and how its usage is incredibly loaded to prove the point that there is excessive violence against SCs and STs.

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Section: A Clarification On Offendersmentioning

confidence: 99%

The enigma of caste atrocities

Sashittal¹

2023

Oñati Socio-Legal Series

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“…Gopal's desire to erase her own Brahminess, and that of others, continued to be expressed in subsequent tweets. Sure enough, Brahmins have been the group most targeted for verbal (and often physical) assault, although as Jalki and Pathan (2017) have shown, they are remarkable for their absence as perpetrators in caste atrocity reports. The Ambedkar International Centre's application to file an amicus curiae brief in Cisco, signed by a number of academics and NGOs, says the following ("John Doe" being the anonymized name of the former Cisco employee):…”

Section: Imagining Victims and Perpetratorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In an earlier contribution, Jalki and Pathan (2017) questioned the claim that the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in India face greater violence. The expenditure for "compensation" under the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 had risen fourfold within a decade, which would lend credence to the cry often heard from academics and activists that crimes against these groups must have been rising.…”

Section: Rethinking the Caste Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Caste studies today

Shah

2023

Oñati Socio-Legal Series

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Starting with an individual report in a leading British periodical of higher education, this article fans outwards to show how the contemporary field of caste studies reflects the degeneracy of its methods and claims. Rather than producing knowledge about India and the so-called caste system, caste studies has worked itself into a corner by creating a set of imagined victims and perpetrators of caste oppression, atrocities, violence and discrimination, and by making unsustainable claims on legal systems and other institutions. The manifold and insurmountable problems of contemporary caste studies include its basis in the European framework for the study of India founded upon Christian theological claims, the carry-over of this account into the secularised humanities and social sciences, and its engagement in corrupted academic practices of the kind that typify grievance studies today. That an alternative account exists in the form of the research programme of SN Balagangadhara, which inspires the articles in this special issue, is good reason for rethinking and revision of the field.

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“…According to the Oxford English dictionary, "Atrocities are the physical disclosers of violence, crime, and such 'Wantonly cruel acts' against the persons and/or property which are illegal before the law. Evidence are available of conflicts between the members of the upper castes and also between members of the lower castes, but such intra-caste tensions are not fierce, nor do they strictly qualify as atrocities (Jalki& Pathan, 2017). The principles of untouchability and "purity and pollution" dictum also tell that they could not be mixed with upper castes (Mandal, 2010;Mosse & Nagappan, 2021).…”

Section: Caste Atrocities and Exclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Integration and Caste in India: An Analytical Study

Kumar

2022

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Indian society is known as multi-lingual, multi-religious, multi-castes, and multi-cultural in nature. Indian constitution gives equal rights to everyone regardless of gender, caste, class, community, language, and religious beliefs but it has been observed that caste plays an ascriptive role in Indian society since it divides society in a stratified manner which designates and promotes the hierarchical dogmatism and a sense of superiority to its lower caste. This creates discontent and disharmony in the society which becomes a crucial factor to nourish the disintegration in the society. The current study aimed to describe the impact of the divisive nature of caste on social integration in India. This empirical study included 216 respondents. The descriptive and explorative methodology was applied to achieve the results. To find out the principal factors that determine social disintegration due to caste impression in India, the data were analyzed by the SPSS version 26. The finding of the study provided that the divisive nature of the caste really hurts the societal integration power of India.

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Are There Caste Atrocities in India? What the Data Can and Cannot Tell Us

Cited by 7 publications

References 11 publications

The enigma of caste atrocities

The enigma of caste atrocities

Caste studies today

Social Integration and Caste in India: An Analytical Study

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