Question

What were the similarities between the situation of dalits in india and African Americans in the USA

Answer 1

Assuming America means the US, in my experience, India and the US are depressingly similar when it comes to racism. Both have a long shameful history of deliberately disenfranchising specific groups of people, who are then socially shunned, economically decimated, and culturally sidelined, of course after the dominant groups appropriate whatever they like or want. As well, this history is much longer in India, the group in question the Dalit, formerly called Untouchables. In the US, it's blacks and Native Americans. Process is also depressingly similar, the marginalized are deliberately segregated geographically, economically, educationally. In both countries, widespread protest movements galvanized change with governments enacting laws attempting to empower and enfranchise, through a variety of Affirmative action programs. However, ensuing changes are often cosmetic and cultures stubbornly hold on to the disenfranchising status quo. After all, easier for the privileged to view their accomplishments as merit-based rather than feasting off the banquet of generational entitlement, easier to dismiss the deliberately, systematically downtrodden groups as deserving of their lowlier fates. Difference is India retains a more visible and persistent feudal structure that exacerbates caste and class divides.

My earliest memory of bigotry is from my own family. With India still stubbornly feudal, everyone worth their salt has servants, now euphemistically called domestic workers. Change in name, not dignity. We had a couple, wife for house work, husband the gardener. I was around 3 or 4 years old. Living with us, my widowed paternal grandmother, conservative, rigid and very casteist. She'd wash her own clothes and hang them out to dry in the back yard. That day, as she used her long bamboo stick to hang it out on the back yard clothes line, Katayan, the gardener, accidentally brushed against her washed saree while weeding a garden patch. I'll never forget the Tamil cry that burst out from her lips, 'Dushta, dushta', i.e. wicked, wicked. Striking him once on the shoulder with her stick, she then agitatedly set to pulling her saree off the clothesline and ran off with it to wash it again, his body's accidental brushing apparently enough to 'pollute' it.

Of course, this was decades back and India has come a long way from such decrepit and utterly repulsive ideas or so the elite would have us believe but nothing could be further from the truth. By many measurable metrics, access to education, literacy rates, per capita income, Dalits remain marginalized and disenfranchised, entirely by design and not by accident. Sure, the Indian media often touts tremendous individual Dalit success stories but the reality is similar to the US. After all, one Obama in the White House doesn't mean blacks are suddenly equal to whites in terms of access to opportunities, wealth and power, and protection under the law, does it? And, lacking even the fig leaf of an Obama, Native Americans are left out of the conversation altogether.

Years later, a conference room at the US NIH fills up as people stream in for a meeting or presentation. Walk in on the tail end of some desultory conversation about a topical news issue, obviously about blacks. Shockingly, a senior white researcher, a famous name in fact, says of course, it's well known that among blacks it's the stupid ones that got caught in the first place. I'd never heard of such a flagrantly odious and self-serving theory to explain black enslavement. To hear it at all was shocking, to hear it stated by someone so highly educated even more so. That it was said at all in that room only emphasizes how spaces deemed to represent power in US society continue to systematically exclude blacks. Of course, that room was filling up with white Americans and immigrants deemed deserving, no blacks.

My own experience of racism in the US was less overt, often expressed as persistent suspicion. For e.g., being asked for my

Answer 2

Explanation:

The dalit leaders sought a political solution to the problems faced by the depressed classes. They organised themselves and demanded reservation of seats in educational institutions so that they could be a part of the decision-making process.