WUNRN
Women News Network - WNN
July 17, 2009
PUNITA RIMAL with
“On March 20, Kumari was accused of
practicing witchcraft by the villagers, and was mercilessly beaten up and
forced to eat her own excreta in public,” said the Asian Human Rights
Commission in an urgent April 2009 appeal letter to Nepal’s leading
legislators. During the incident the local police did not come to Kumari’s
aide. She was victimized by a teacher from
Dalit women are denied not once but three
times in
“Over 20 percent of
My Reality – My
As a journalist, a Nepali, a woman and
mother, I sympathize deeply with the ongoing difficult conditions of Dalit
women. The sympathy is not because of their need for education, for human
rights, women’s rights or social margin, but because it’s very common to see
Dalit women in poor health with no access to medicine or a doctor’s advice.
It’s because of their bitter hardship, their political degeneration and severe
exploitation in
In a dizzying array of 101 known castes and
sub-castes in
Limited access to clean drinking water in
Dalit homes has resulted in high rates of gastro-intestinal disease among
Dalits as they are forced to live in deteriorated structures with sewage
seeping into their water sources. Today the cost to the public healthcare
system in
Social and Religious Exclusion
Banned from sitting together within sight
of upper-castes in temples, from fetching water at public water fountains and
public sources, or even from sitting in certain teahouses or Kathmandu
restaurants; Dalit women in the city remain invisible as they work in the
shadows of the bustle of Kathmandu.
While they are tolerated by business owners
as steady hard-working, reliable workers, women laborers, like those who are
hired to paint or plaster family homes, are kept as far away as possible from
the ‘respectable’ families they serve. This is strictly because they are
‘untouchable.’ The separation can be so severe that Dalit workers are not
allowed inside a home for any reason.
Most of the stubborn traditionalists of
“The Prime Minister (of Nepal) announced
the prohibition of any kind of social discrimination based on caste, making
prohibition of entry into public places including places of worship or the
practice of untouchability a crime punishable by law,” stated the UN WCAR –
United Nations World Conference against Racism, held in Durban, South Africa in
2001.
Some improvements have been made, but many
things in
Cheap Labor an Economic Boost?
Does cheap Dalit labor actually boost the
economy of
With the largest number of world brothels
in neighboring
Nepal’s Educational Wall
With only half the literacy rate of Dalit
men, many Dalit women are told they can never catch up, especially when
compared with upper-caste Nepali women. It’s sobering that a among two million
Dalit women there are only fifteen today who have graduate or postgraduate
degrees. This speaks volumes to the vulnerability in the life of Dalit women.
So what’s the solution?
The obvious answer is to provide free and
easily available education to all parts of
Public school in
In 1996, Bishnu Maya Pariyar, a Dalit woman
from the Gorkha Province of Western Nepal, decided to do something to help. “I
never got an opportunity to get to a higher level,” said Pariyar. “People in
the West don’t know how terrible the caste system is in
From the age of ten she had dreamed of a
better life. She collected rice and millet left in the fields after harvest to
help pay for an early education her father couldn’t afford. Later after many
struggles, Pariyar started a program based on the microfinance concepts of
Mohammad Yunus and the Grameen Foundation, in an effort to help Dalit women
educate themselves and their children.
“Women are learning to read and write. They
are learning sexual and reproductive health. They are learning that they are
not worthless and that they are human beings worthy of living,” said Bishnu
recently in an interview for ODE magazine.
By combining seed money from two
American women, Paniyar formed a small micro-financed group of women known
today as EDWON – Empower Dalit Women of Nepal. EDWON encouraged women to meet,
even against their husbands’ wishes, six days a week, two hours a day, over a
six month period to learn banking, family and business management and literacy.
Soon other groups began. Each group developed their own banking fund and hired
a literacy teacher to teach them, as they pooled their money to buy pens,
pencils and paper.
A few years later, in 1999, an American
photographer, Eva Kasell, found out about Bishnu’s program and offered to
sponsor her to attend college inside the
“At the moment, (public) education in
But the question is: How much of this money
will help Dalit children? And will the larger Nepali society allow Dalit
children to fully participate?
Climbing a Long Political Ladder
The new Nepali constitution, which now
reserves a mandatory 33% seats on the national parliament for women, had a
recent victory when it elected 250 women in April 2008 to the new 601-member
Constituent Assembly. Of these, 2.8% made up seven elected Dalit women. This
proves the tide of acceptance for Dalits in
“Racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia
and all kinds of related intolerance have not gone away,” said former UN High
Commissioner Mary Robinson with Nelson Mandela during the 2001 UN-WCAR
conference. “We recognize that they persist in the new century and that their
persistence is rooted in fear: fear of what is different, fear of the other,
fear of the loss of personal security.”
‘Untouchability’ is now a legal punishable
crime in
As human beings, can we think what it must
be like to force a woman to eat her own excreta? It goes without saying. Mary
Robinson and Nelson Mandela may have it right, “While we recognize that human
fear is in itself ineradicable, we maintain that its consequences are not
ineradicable.”
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VIDEO - Click to Website Link & Scroll Down to Video Segment
http://womennewsnetwork.net:80/
A very young Dalit
girl crushes stone in a stone quarry in
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