'Members of the upper-caste Jat community smeared cow dung on the face of a Dalit family residing in Mujadpur village in Haryana’s Hisar district on Sunday. Cow dung was forcibly stuffed inside the mouth of the head of the Dalit family, Ramdhari, who along with his daughter were also beaten in the melee. Tension gripped the village following the incident. The provocation was over a statue of Bhim Rao Ambedkar that the Dalit family had installed at their house.
'A 40-year-old man who was witness to the alleged murder of his nephew was found hanging on Friday at his home in Hisar in Haryana, a state which is battling outrage over the death of Dalits, including two young siblings, in the past few days, reported Press Trust of India. Badan Singh, who also belonged to the Dalit or underprivileged caste, had alleged harassment by the police because he was leading protests against them for not taking action in the alleged killing of his nephew Gurbachan Singh. Two policemen have been suspended.
'A young Dalit writer was attacked by a group of men for his writings against the caste system perceived to be “anti-Hindu”, at Davanagere in Central Karnataka early on Thursday... According to the complaint filed by 23-year-old Huchangi Prasad, a journalism student at Davanagere University who had published a ‘controversial’ book a year ago, an unidentified man came to the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe hostel at the university in the early hours, claiming that Mr. Prasad’s mother had been hospitalised following a heart attack.
'Union Minister and former Army Chief General (retired) V.K. Singh found himself in the midst of yet another controversy, this time over the killing of the two Dalit children (one an infant of 11 months) in Faridabad, Haryana two days ago. The two children were burnt to death, and their mother is struggling for her life in hospital. Asked about the atrocity in Haryana, Gen. Singh said the Central government could not be associated with every incident, and the local administration had to be blamed for it.
'In an incident of caste violence in Sunped village of Faridabad district of Haryana, two children of a Dalit family were burnt alive early in the morning on Tuesday. Their parents sustained serious burns. The offenders are believed to be Rajputs of the same village. The situation in the Sunped village is tense following the incident and police have been deployed in large numbers.
The house of a Dalit family was set on fire by upper caste men. Two children were burnt alive.
'A Dalit man and wife were reportedly stripped by the police in Greater Noida in Gautam Budh Nagar on Thursday after they insisted on registering an FIR for alleged robbery. According to a report, Sunil Gautam was robbed by miscreants on Wednesday night near Atta in Noida. He went to Dankaur police station in Greater Noida on Thursday to register an FIR along with his wife and baby. The police, however, refused to file a complaint. The couple then staged a protest outside the police station alleging inaction on part of the men in khaki.
In the run up to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the UK, four of UK’s foremost Dalit organisations have written to Narendra Modi, expressing their dismay about the recent revelations by investigative news portal Cobrapost. Their letter notes that senior BJP politicians were involved in the massacres of some 144 Dalit men, women and children in Bihar and that Mr Modi has so far neither spoken out against the self-confessed killers and their accomplices nor taken any action against them.
'Two brothers in a village in the Pratapgarh district of Uttar Pradesh were stoned, just one incident in a series of attacks on them. Their crime? They are Dalits, and had passed the examinations for the Indian Institute of Technology. This was not acceptable to the upper-caste villagers.
'In a shocking incident, a minor Dalit girl was allegedly thrashed by higher caste women in Ganeshpura village here after the victim’s shadow fell on a muscleman belonging to their family, police said today. According to the complaint lodged by the girl’s father, the problem began when his daughter was fetching water from a village hand pump and her shadow fell on muscle-man Puran Yadav (belonging to a higher caste) when he happened to pass from there, the ASP said.
'It is hard to say what left a bigger scar on the Dalit residents of Rajendra Nagar locality in Sonepat recently: a violent attack on them by Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh men that injured over a dozen people, or the compromise they were driven to sign promising not to seek any legal remedy against their assailants. Though the episode occurred not far from Delhi’s border with Haryana, it has failed to attract national media attention.
