Sapna Pillai Week 1



                                                                Weekly Summary – Week 1  


                                                                                                    
                                                                                                                     Sapna Indu Pillai 
                                                                                                                     BALLB Sec – C 
                                                                                                                     2016111


The piece I will be responding to is Arundanti Roy’s introduction to Annihilation of Caste by B.R Amedkar. She starts the piece of with a story in which a Dalit women called Sureka Bhotamange was a victim to caste based violence and her whole family was raped and lynched and killed due to the blatant caste discrimination that exists in our country and how the courts refused to look into the matter under Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes Atrocities Act. This shows the horrific yet true nature of our legal systems and courts in which they ignore or don’t acknowledge caste based discrimination as caste based violence and put these offences under other criminal statutes.  This could be because of the glaring upper caste presence in our judicial systems. More often than not most judges are upper caste and hence in order to protect their caste or to not recognise the privilege and hatred their caste propagates they often don’t engage or reject caste violence. This coupled with an international ignorance of caste based violence and hatred undermines Dalit movements as there is no platform legally nor internationally for Dalit narratives and experiences to be heard. It also becomes imperative to understand that even though there are laws in place like the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes Atrocities Act, it is still futile if many violent acts which are obviously caste driven are not looked upon as caste based violence. 

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