The Tamil Nadu government, which has been publicising its efforts to help Dalits enter temples, appears to have no plan in place to deal with the vicious backlash from dominant castes that invariably follows such efforts. A ground report by TNM has found that the Dalits who become targets of such hate crimes rarely receive the protection they need from the government. The police, though bound by law to register cases under the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, have been reluctant to file even a basic FIR in most cases.
Thenmudiyanur village in Tiruvannamalai district, around 200 km from Chennai, offers a classic example of the government’s failure to offer protection to Dalits who challenged an 80-year-old boycott and entered the Muthumariamman temple on January 30. The temple entry was facilitated by District Collector B Murugesh, Superintendent of Police (SP) K Karthikeyan, and Revenue Divisional Officer (RDO) Mandhagini among others, who were projected as heroes by the media. Within a few days, however, caste Hindus unleashed a wave of violence and imposed an economic boycott on Dalits. Neither the ‘hero’ officials nor their sizable media entourage have intervened to protect the Dalits.
The caste Hindus in the village have cut off water supply to the small farmlands owned by Dalits. Standing crops are withering by the hour in the intensifying summer heat, but there has been no effort from the government to address this emergency. Dalit labourers in the village have been removed from their jobs, a social and economic boycott imposed on them, forcing them to travel to nearby villages to earn a livelihood or even buy provisions. Even the parai (traditional drum) artistes from the Paraiyar community have been banned from performing at village functions such as weddings, funerals, and initiation ceremonies.
On February 7 morning, a petty shop owned by Indra (44), a Dalit single woman, was burned to ashes on the Edathanoor Junction road, just 1 km away from Thenmudiyanur. “I live alone here. The lock wasn’t broken and nothing had been stolen,” she says. The vandals did not loot the shop is a clear sign that this was a crime inspired by hate, and not greed.
But the police chose to overlook the glaring caste animosity, and the SC/ST Atrocities Act was not invoked. “The Inspector came and checked my shop, but we haven’t received any update from the police station after that,” Indra says.
Karl Marx Siddharthar, advocate and author of the book Uncaste, says the police should have actually invoked SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act Section 3(2)(iii) in the case. The section pertains to any “mischief by fire or explosive substance, intending to cause or knowing it to be likely that he will thereby cause damage to any property, belonging to a member of a Scheduled Caste or a Scheduled Tribe”. The offence is punishable with jail for a term of six months to seven years and a fine. “The police should have listened to what the complainants wanted to say instead of rushing them out hurriedly,” he says.
Indra's petty shop (TNM Image)
Indra was among the 12 Dalits who participated in a peace committee meeting organised by RDO Mandhagini on January 25, just ahead of the temple entry. She says that when she initially approached the Thandarampattu police with a complaint about her shop, they were very reluctant to register her case. They later filed an FIR under Section 435 (mischief committed by fire or any explosive substance) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).
She suspects the involvement of Raja, who belongs to the dominant Udayar caste. He is the husband of Thenmudiyanur panchayat vice-president Valli. Indra alleges that Raja had threatened her many times ever since the temple entry.
Thandarampattu Inspector Dhanalakshmi says an investigation is underway, but she refuses to acknowledge any spike in the instances of caste discrimination in the village after the temple entry. “Everything is going well here,” she insists.
Retaliation by caste Hindus, however, has been far from limited to this one visible act of violence.
A few days after the temple entry, as 25-year-old Santhosh was waiting at a bus stop in the village to collect a courier, more than 20 men gathered around and began to hurl casteist abuses at him. “They wanted me to leave. They might have gotten even more aggressive if the policemen deployed there hadn’t intervened,” he says. A resident of Ambedkar Colony at Thenmudiyanur, Santhosh says that Dalits now feel unsafe to walk alone on their own streets at night. “This is the case for those living in Pudhu, Pazhaya colonies as well.”
Prakash, a Dalit farmer who owns a small piece of land where he grows sugarcane in Thenmudiyanur, says the dominant caste man who owns the surrounding lands has blocked his farm’s access to water. “We used to have an unsigned pact with dominant caste people. They gave us water from their wells, and after cultivation, we paid the money for the water. But my crops are dying now and no one is doing anything about it,” he laments.
Before the temple entry, dominant caste men used to collect milk from him and other Dalit farmers for dairy companies including Aavin and Hatsun. They do not do that anymore. He was forced to discard the milk he procured from his cow for an entire week, Prakash says.
Dalits in the village have also been banned from travelling in shared auto-rickshaws, making it difficult for them to access the bus stop. “Farm labourers working for caste Hindus have also been told not to come to work anymore,” says C Murugan, a Thenmudiyanur native who currently resides in Chennai. He was among the hundreds of Dalits who entered the Muthumariamman temple on January 30.
There had been such instances even before the temple entry, says Murugan. “They had set ablaze a two-wheeler owned by Ayyasamy, a Dalit man, while he was busy milking a cow,” he recalls.
Ayyasamy's bike burnt down - Image : Special Arrangement
With a population of about 2,500, Dalits are the majority in Thenmudiyanur village, where around 7,000 people of more than 10 caste groups reside. It is at the Muthumariamman temple that caste Hindus in Thenmudiyanur celebrate the 12-day Pongal festival, which Dalits in the village had for long sought to partake in. The temple has been under the control of the Tamil Nadu government’s Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Department (HR&CE) for the past three decades.
Though entry to the temple had been a long-pending demand of Dalits, caste Hindus have stood steadfastly against it, denying them their right to worship, claiming that the temple would become ‘impure’ if they entered the compound. The Dalit villagers eventually petitioned the HR&CE Department to take the initiative to let them enter the temple after the caste Hindus once again refused to allow their participation. It was based on this petition that the RDO organised a peace committee meeting between select representatives of the village’s various caste groups.
When the meeting was held on January 25, the caste Hindus had agreed to the proposal that Dalits can enter the temple from January 30.
Most Dalit villagers, including children, were giddy with excitement that day. Many bought new clothes to wear on the special occasion. Young girls sported jasmine flowers on their hair. “All my life, my mother used to warn me that I should not even dream about stepping inside the temple. When our school friends from other castes offered prayers there, we were made to wait outside. On January 30, we finally made it happen,” a 14-year-old Dalit girl from the village tells TNM.
On the scheduled date, however, people of Udayar, Agamudaiyar, Reddy, Naidu, Chettiyar, and Vanniyar castes reneged on their earlier commitment and picketed the temple in protest. It was only after the district administration and the police intervened that the Dalits were able to enter the temple and offer their prayers.
The joy, however, was still short-lived. On the very same day, officials of the HR&CE department shut down the temple and took the keys.
Even when TNM visited the village on the day of Maha Shivaratri, February 19, the temple was desolate. Police personnel had been deployed at the closed temple to avoid potential conflicts. Barricades were erected at many spots, including bus stops, Dalit colonies, and even the entrance to the village.
Grocery shops at the entrance of the Ambedkar Colony have been closed for almost 20 days. To shut down these shops means revenue loss for the dominant caste families who own them, but the oor kattuppaadu (social restrictions) on Dalits clearly takes priority.
Shops owned by people of Udayar caste shut down (TNM Photo)
Gubendran, who runs a tea shop nearby, says these shops have been closed only because they are located just a foot away from a Dalit residential area. The 53-year-old is the president of Dr BR Ambedkar Samooga Ezhuchi Padai, a social organisation that took up the issue of temple entry with the district administration last year. “I went to Bengaluru after Class 8. I worked there for 25 years before returning to my hometown. That exposure gave me the opportunity to see my village and its caste system in a new light,” he says.
Even people of the Irular Scheduled Tribe (ST) from other parts of the district are allowed to enter the Muthumariamman temple, Gubendran points out. “But Dalits from our own village are prohibited. How is this fair?” he asks.
Sathyaseelan, another Dalit resident of Thenmudiyanur, has more such instances to share. “There have always been restrictions on us entering restaurants run by caste Hindus, but they had so far at least allowed us to get food packed from these outlets. But from the day we entered the temple, they have simply refused to sell us food,” he tells TNM. He specifically mentions the name of two outlets — Ponnusamy Hotel and Selvam Tiffin Centre — as guilty of this.
Dalit villagers also allege that the government ration shops were deliberately providing rations on separate days to Dalits and people of dominant castes. When TNM visited the shop, they refuted the allegation and said that they have only asked people to come to the shop as per numeric order. “We do not practise any partiality here,” the shopkeeper says.
But according to Indra, such divisions are visible even in other government programmes. She had decided to stop working with dominant caste women several years ago after they refused to clean the Dalit burial ground in the village — a work assigned to them as part of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. “We cleaned the dominant caste burial ground, but they simply refused to touch the Dalit burial ground right next to it,” she says.
There have also been allegations that the village still follows the double tumbler system, a widely practised form of caste discrimination that doesn’t allow Dalits to drink from the tumblers used by people of dominant castes. If they approach a tea shop owned by a caste Hindu, they are apparently redirected to shops located in Dalit colonies. In the Thenmudiyanur Primary School, where a large number of Dalit children study, the post of the school management committee leader has never been assigned to a Dalit parent.
Many Dalits are also not happy with the way their panchayat president Logeshwari Ezhumalai, a Dalit woman, is treated by dominant caste villagers. “Logeshwari is not even allowed to sit on the elected representative’s chair when she is in office. Her husband Ezhumalai supports all decisions made by dominant caste leaders,” says a Dalit resident in the village.
Logeshwari is one of the few Dalits who didn't visit the temple on January 30. She thinks the temple entry was a bad idea.
When TNM visited her at her residence, she was getting ready to take her cattle for grazing. “For generations, this has been the custom that we are following. Why do we need to create a ruckus to disappoint the dominant castes?” she asks. When asked about the new, harsher social restrictions that caste Hindus have now imposed on Dalits, she has no answer.
Later in the day, when TNM visited the panchayat office building, it was filled with dominant caste people managing the affairs of the office. The elected representative was not in her chair.
Tiruvannamalai SP Karthikeyan tells TNM that the district administration is looking for long-term solutions to resolve the issue. He has held a brief discussion with the district collector and RDO. The plan is to form another peace committee, which they expect would help bring together Dalits and people from dominant castes and usher in social harmony.
When asked why no SC/ST Act was invoked in Indra’s case, he says the perpetrator could be anyone. “There are two factions even among the Dalits — one supports temple entry and the other is against it. The police are yet to identify the offender. If we find anyone culpable for the crime and that person is not Dalit, then we will change the sections and the accused will be booked under SC/ST Act,” he says.
The SP says that he personally went to the shops accused of boycotting Dalits, but found little evidence to back these allegations. He claims that a few people from “both sides” want to instigate communities. “Our sources are trying to identify them,” he says.
Incidentally, Karthikeyan was transferred to Tiruvannamalai after a custodial death in Chennai.
The office of Adi Dravidar Welfare Department Minister N Kayalvizhi Selvaraj says they are not aware of any backlash against Dalit villagers after the temple entry. “If there is an issue, ask the people to send us a petition. We will give directions to the District Collector accordingly,” an official says.
We tried to contact District Collector Murugesh and RDO Mandhagini, but neither were available for comment.
Specific dates alloted to different caste groups to celebrate pongal at Muthumariamman temple
Thenmudiyanur’s Muthumariamman temple is only one among the several rural temples to which Dalits in Tamil Nadu had attempted entry for the first time in the past 45 days. The Ayyanar temple in Vengavayal village was opened for Dalits on December 27 last year, in a bid to unite the people of Agamudayar, Mutharaiyar, and Dalit communities in the region. A ‘Samathuva Pongal’ (pongal celebration that unites people regardless of their communities and castes) was celebrated at the temple, which was seen as significant against the backdrop of the inhumane caste crime in which an overhead potable water tank used by Dalits in the village was found to have been contaminated by human excreta.
Though the entry to this temple too was facilitated by the state government, led by Pudukkottai District Collector Kavitha Ramu and Superintendent of Police (SP) Vandita Pandey, the Dalit villagers were once again left to their own devices when it came to dealing with the ‘repercussions’ that manifested in the form of further discrimination. In fact, ever since they entered the temple, people of Mutharaiyar and Agamudayar castes have allegedly stopped visiting the temple. Even during the Samathuva Pongal, Mutharaiyar and Agamudayar women had refused to step inside the temple. The few dominant caste people who participated in the event had also refused to eat the cooked pongal.
“We used to have casual conversations with people of dominant castes earlier. But after the faeces incident led to remedial steps such as the temple entry, they have stopped speaking to us,” says Murugan, a resident of Vengavayal.
He, however, remains unperturbed. “This generation of Dalits are breaking the shackles of caste. We are no longer reliant on dominant caste people for our livelihood. Our kids studied well. They are working and earning a decent income. Why do we need to go to the areas where people from the dominant caste live? We don't even drink tea from their shops. Our education has saved us,” he says, adding that it was not even necessary for Dalits to go to that temple anymore. “We don't want to go to places where we don't feel welcome.”
Watch: Dalits enter Tiruvannamalai temple after 80 years