Am I not Human? Blog Campaign: The Untouchables in India

Although this story is about one of the most aggregious forms of human-against-human abuse ingrained into a long-established social system, it also brings one of the most moving triumphs over such oppression.

Oppression and discrimination are almost set in stone, it seems, for the lowest group in the Hindu caste system in India, the Untouchables. Considered as if less than human, even though such caste discrimination is now illegal in India (per the Untouchability Act of 1955), their plight is unimaginable in every way. From simple things like being able to obtain water from a well - they are considered to "unclean" and cannot touch the pump, but must wait until a higher caste woman takes pity on them to pump water for them - to social punishment for success - such as happened to a leatherworker whose business and financial success led to his family being beaten, his home burned down, and tractor stolen by a gang from a higher caste for "rising above" - it is really the human soul and dignity that they aim to destroy. The reality of this caste system is so horrific as to be almost unfathomable.

To be born a Hindu in India is to enter the caste system, one of the world's longest surviving forms of social stratification. Embedded in Indian culture for the past 1,500 years, the caste system follows a basic precept: All men are created unequal. The ranks in Hindu society come from a legend in which the main groupings, or varnas, emerge from a primordial being. From the mouth come the Brahmans—the priests and teachers. From the arms come the Kshatriyas—the rulers and soldiers. From the thighs come the Vaisyas—merchants and traders. From the feet come the Sudras—laborers. Each varna in turn contains hundreds of hereditary castes and subcastes with their own pecking orders.

A fifth group describes the people who are achuta, or untouchable. The primordial being does not claim them. Untouchables are outcasts—people considered too impure, too polluted, to rank as worthy beings. Prejudice defines their lives, particularly in the rural areas, where nearly three-quarters of India's people live. Untouchables are shunned, insulted, banned from temples and higher caste homes, made to eat and drink from separate utensils in public places, and, in extreme but not uncommon cases, are raped, burned, lynched, and gunned down.

They are also called "Dalit":

Dalit, a term that has become synonymous with Untouchable, is the name that many Untouchables, especially politically aware individuals, have chosen for themselves. The name means "oppressed" and highlights the persecution and discrimination India's 160 million Untouchables face regularly. First used in the context of caste oppression in the 19th century, it was popularized in the 1970s by Untouchable writers and members of the revolutionary Dalit Panthers (the name was inspired by the Black Panthers of the United States). Dalit has largely come to replace Harijan, the name given to Untouchables by Gandhi, much like the Black Power movement in the United States led to the replacement of the labels colored and Negro with black. For some activists, Dalit is used to refer to all of India's oppressed peoples whether Hindus, Muslims, Christians, tribal minorities, or women.

In 1997, K.R. Narayanan, an Untouchable, was sworn in as President of India, marking progress in the banning of discrimination against Dalits. In cities, that is. But in the rural areas, that prejudice is being largely practiced, due to ignorance and poverty.

One of the most inspiring stories about conquering that discrimination, which shows a path toward fighting oppression and ignorance in the most effective and miraculous way possible - using, of all things, health care - is here - in the story of Untouchable women selected by a group called Jamkhed to be health workers for their respective communities in rural India. Their transformation from outcasts to respected community leaders, performing most of the functions of doctors and to some extent city (or should I say village) planners, from "stones without a soul" to vibrant, life-saving and heroic human beings and role models is truly amazing.

This excerpt lets the miracle-workers speak for themselves:

The real benefits, the women say, cannot be measured in rupees. "When I started, I had no support from anyone, no education, no money," said Sathe. "I was like a stone with no soul. When I came here they gave me shape, life. I learned courage and boldness. I became a human being."
In 2005 Babai Sathe, Untouchable, was elected the sarpanch—village leader—of Jawalke.

(Jawalke is her village.) Even the most heart-rending tragedies can have a transformative, compassionate, uplifting ending - if we work together on it. If India can conquer their long-standing institutionalized oppression, certainly the rest of the world can learn from that, too. But there is much left to be done in India, too, of course. At least this is a start.

War On Terror is Not What It Thinks It Is

Responding to the horrific attacks in Mumbai is not as simple as incorporating it into the general Global War on Terror. In fact, the GWOT is not really accomplishing what its proponents say - or wish - it was. Arundhati Roy's great article, "9 Is Not 11", examines the Mumbai attacks and the West's response to them,

We've forfeited the rights to our own tragedies. As the carnage in Mumbai raged on, day after horrible day, our 24-hour news channels informed us that we were watching "India's 9/11." And like actors in a Bollywood rip-off of an old Hollywood film, we're expected to play our parts and say our lines, even though we know it's all been said and done before.

As tension in the region builds, U.S. Senator John McCain has warned Pakistan that, if it didn't act fast to arrest the "bad guys," he had personal information that India would launch air strikes on "terrorist camps" in Pakistan and that Washington could do nothing because Mumbai was India's 9/11.

But November isn't September, 2008 isn't 2001, Pakistan isn't Afghanistan, and India isn't America. So perhaps we should reclaim our tragedy and pick through the debris with our own brains and our own broken hearts so that we can arrive at our own conclusions.

Her examination of the issues is heartrending and brutally, refreshingly honest.

The war on terror is not the Savior advertised in fear-mongering, simplistic propaganda. India is a showcase of how off-the-mark the GWOT is and how it merely creates more of the same - war and violence.

Almost always, when these stories unspool, they reveal a complicated global network of foot soldiers, trainers, recruiters, middlemen, and undercover intelligence and counter-intelligence operatives working not just on both sides of the India-Pakistan border, but in several countries simultaneously.

In today's world, trying to pin down the provenance of a terrorist strike and isolate it within the borders of a single nation state, is very much like trying to pin down the provenance of corporate money. It's almost impossible.

In circumstances like these, air strikes to "take out" terrorist camps may take out the camps, but certainly will not "take out" the terrorists. And neither will war.

It is not simply a "mistake" to overlook "cultural complexities" or to paint ideological fantasies over totally different realities on the ground, as Bushco has done. It is the sort of turn of events that creates unstoppable monsters.

Thanks largely to the part it was forced to play as America's ally, first in its war in support of the Afghan Islamists and then in its war against them, Pakistan, whose territory is reeling under these contradictions, is careening toward civil war.

As recruiting agents for America's jihad against the Soviet Union, it was the job of the Pakistani Army and the ISI to nurture and channel funds to Islamic fundamentalist organizations. Having wired up these Frankensteins and released them into the world, the U.S. expected it could rein them in like pet mastiffs whenever it wanted to. Certainly it did not expect them to come calling in the heart of the homeland on September 11. So once again, Afghanistan had to be violently remade.

Now the debris of a re-ravaged Afghanistan has washed up on Pakistan's borders.

Nobody, least of all the Pakistani government, denies that it is presiding over a country that is threatening to implode. The terrorist training camps, the fire-breathing mullahs, and the maniacs who believe that Islam will, or should, rule the world are mostly the detritus of two Afghan wars. Their ire rains down on the Pakistani government and Pakistani civilians as much, if not more, than it does on India.

If, at this point, India decides to go to war, perhaps the descent of the whole region into chaos will be complete. The debris of a bankrupt, destroyed Pakistan will wash up on India's shores, endangering us as never before.

And the worst way to deal with these dangers is to launch a Global War on Terror. It requires a particular mindset, one familiar to empires who have to make other people's decisions for them without knowing what the hell is going on.

It's hard to understand why those who steer India's ship are so keen to replicate Pakistan's mistakes and call damnation upon this country by inviting the United States to further meddle clumsily and dangerously in our extremely complicated affairs. A superpower never has allies. It only has agents.

Look at the history of the Indian subcontinent, when the last Superpower, Great Britain, partitioned India arbitrarily on ethnic/religious/cultural lines. Where's their democratic ideal here? Ah, the whims of the powerful, and their consequences...

The Radcliffe Line, which separated India and Pakistan and tore through states, districts, villages, fields, communities, water systems, homes, and families, was drawn virtually overnight. It was Britain's final, parting kick to us.

Partition triggered the massacre of more than a million people and the largest migration of a human population in contemporary history. Eight million people, Hindus fleeing the new Pakistan, Muslims fleeing the new kind of India, left their homes with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

Each of those people carries, and passes down, a story of unimaginable pain, hate, horror, but yearning too. That wound, those torn but still unsevered muscles, that blood and those splintered bones still lock us together in a close embrace of hatred, terrifying familiarity, but also love. It has left Kashmir trapped in a nightmare from which it can't seem to emerge, a nightmare that has claimed more than 60,000 lives.

Pakistan, the Land of the Pure, became an Islamic Republic, and then very quickly a corrupt, violent military state, openly intolerant of other faiths.

But it's not so simple. There's the same exact intolerance and militancy coming rom the Hindu side, back in "democratic, open" India.

Babu Bajrangi of Ahmedabad, India, of the Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party, BJP, and a perpetrator of the genocide at Gujarat, said:

"We didn't spare a single Muslim shop, we set everything on fire… we hacked, burned, set on fire… we believe in setting them on fire because these bastards don't want to be cremated, they're afraid of it… I have just one last wish… let me be sentenced to death… I don't care if I'm hanged... just give me two days before my hanging and I will go and have a field day in Juhapura where seven or eight lakhs [seven or eight hundred thousand] of these people stay... I will finish them off… let a few more of them die... at least twenty-five thousand to fifty thousand should die."

Their playbook is taken from Mussolini, their racism and hatred open and violent. Yet, unlike the Muslim terrorists, these are re-elected to public office, condoned, and encouraged as "partners" in the War on Terror.

The GWOT has taken the stance that all real terrorism is either local, or Islamic. Once terrorism is labeled "Islamic", it immediately becomes "global", drawn into the GWOT, where there is a no-holds-barred scorched-earth policy of bringing in every force available against the "Universal Foe". This creates reactions, complications, and worse, feeds into the very thing it supposedly is trying to fight.

The War on Terror has become a global industry. It has its own product - war - and the attendant arms industry that feeds off the mass distribution of that product. It has its own advertising sector - the largest ad firm being, of course, the U.S. government. But other governments, such as that of, say, Britain, are working hard there, too. It has millions of employees, from the US Department of Defense and all that entails - and it entails a hell of a lot - to Blackwater and all those mercenaries, to all those who want to cash in on this lucrative business in nations around the world. It has, of course, a megaladon of a distribution network, of which the intelligence industry in Western nations is often a part. And it has, like the Mafia, enforcers. The enforcers are those who serve the vast prison industry in the U.S., from Gitmo to the lesser-known terror prisons, to those country who do the GWOT's dirty work through "extraordinary rendition".

With this industry dominating the world economy, it has left many people without a sense of the value of their own lives, let alone the lives of others. They or their relatives were treated or perceived themselves as being treated, as pawns, as "collateral damage". In a sense, it's a huge ego-blowout. It's not about the reality of their stated goals at all. It's not about Islam, or Hinduism, or, in the case of Israel, the Jews. It's about pride. It's about saying to the world - a world which one day destroyed their very pride and sense of value as human beings - or rather, declaring loudly to the world, "We ARE HERE! You can't get rid of us! We have value! We are something which you have to deal with!"

And the only voice they seem to find satisfying to get that message across is violence, oppression, destruction of things "the world" finds valuable - especially human life. They choose a specific target, an enemy, and seek to humiliate it.

For example, with the Mumbai attacks,

If the men were indeed members of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, why didn't it matter to them that a large number of their victims were Muslim, or that their action was likely to result in a severe backlash against the Muslim community in India whose rights they claim to be fighting for?

Same question is asked of Osama bin Laden. What the hell was he thinking? His own son popped that question. We still await the answer.

Terrorism is a heartless ideology, and like most ideologies that have their eye on the Big Picture, individuals don't figure in their calculations except as collateral damage.

But the War on Terror itself does the same thing. The "Big Picture" is an exceptionally vague idea of "democracy" and "freedom" which, translated by war, meanings the diametrical opposite. It means, in application by war, the destruction of freedom, of peace, of any hope of individual participation or voice. War loves dictators, not representative government.

It has always been a part of, and often even the aim of, terrorist strategy to exacerbate a bad situation in order to expose hidden fault lines. The blood of "martyrs" irrigates terrorism. Hindu terrorists need dead Hindus, Communist terrorists need dead proletarians, Islamist terrorists need dead Muslims. The dead become the demonstration, the proof of victimhood, which is central to the project.

And then there's the backlash, like GW Bush's Republican backlash:

Though one chapter of horror in Mumbai has ended, another might have just begun. Day after day, a powerful, vociferous section of the Indian elite, goaded by marauding TV anchors who make Fox News look almost radical and left-wing, have taken to mindlessly attacking politicians, all politicians, glorifying the police and the army, and virtually asking for a police state.

It isn't surprising that those who have grown plump on the pickings of democracy (such as it is) should now be calling for a police state. The era of "pickings" is long gone. We're now in the era of Grabbing by Force, and democracy has a terrible habit of getting in the way.

And this is the worst of all possible attitudes. India needs to get a grip. We all need to get a grip.

There are those who point out that U.S. strategy has been successful inasmuch as the United States has not suffered a major attack on its home ground since 9/11. However, some would say that what America is suffering now is far worse.

If the idea behind the 9/11 terror attacks was to goad America into showing its true colors, what greater success could the terrorists have asked for? The U.S. military is bogged down in two unwinnable wars, which have made the United States the most hated country in the world. Those wars have contributed greatly to the unraveling of the American economy and who knows, perhaps eventually the American empire.

(Could it be that battered, bombed Afghanistan, the graveyard of the Soviet Union, will be the undoing of this one too?)

The answer to this question is more powerful than we like to think. It's time for a decision, no doubt. Will Obama or the US Congress be up to it?

Terrorists like those who attacked Mumbai are hardly likely to be deterred by the prospect of being refused bail or being sentenced to death. It's what they want.

What we're experiencing now is blowback, the cumulative result of decades of quick fixes and dirty deeds. The carpet's squelching under our feet.

The only way to contain -- it would be naïve to say end -- terrorism is to look at the monster in the mirror. We're standing at a fork in the road. One sign says "Justice," the other "Civil War." There's no third sign and there's no going back. Choose.

This is a message to India. But also to a greater extent, to the United States. Only the "civil war" is fought on a larger turf. where will that turf be? The world economy? Get out of the GWOT business. Before it's too late.

Untouchables Become Miracle-Workers: Transforming Health Care

Much is said about health care, a subject that frequently borders on the dull. But in India, "health care" means the struggle between life and death, poverty and survival, superstition and rationality, being human and being nothing - "a stone without a soul". The unimaginable transformation of a small corner of rural India and those who inhabit it has a wider, deeper meaning for all humankind. What these people have done transcends ordinary heroics. It gets to the bottom of everything wrong, and right, with people.

This is the story of Sarubai Salve, Babai Sathe, and a mind-boggling "community health" (but really way beyond this paltry subject line) project called Jamkhed founded by 75-year-old Raj Arole and his wife Mabelle (who died in 1999) in one of the poorest areas in India. The idea was to provide health care for India's most destitute people, people without hope, people like the Untouchables.

Of course, we may know Untouchables as the lowest caste in the Hindu caste system of social stratification. Arole sought to reach the most impoverished people by training some of them, preferably among the lowest castes and most reviled, to be health care workers for the rest of their community. And the results have been jaw-dropping.

(Their native village of) Jawalke is a very different place because of Salve and Sathe. Salve has been doing (women's health care) rounds in Jawalke since 1984. By her own count, she has delivered 551 babies and says she's never lost a single infant or mother. "When I started, the children all had scabies and there was filth everywhere," she says. Small kids used to die. Pregnant women died during and after delivery. Poor sanitation led to malaria and diarrheal diseases. Children went unvaccinated. Leprosy and tuberculosis were common.

I ask Salve about Jawalke's health problems today. "Hypertension and diabetes," she says— rich-country illnesses. In most of rural India, only the fortunate suffer from such diseases.

They would perform services that doctors do not.

Even doctors who do treat villagers, moreover, rarely spend time teaching them about nutrition, breast-feeding, hygiene, and using home remedies such as oral rehydration solutions. They don't help villages acquire clean water and sanitation systems or improve their farming practices—ways to eliminate the root causes of disease. They don't work to dispel myths that keep people sick. They don't combat the discrimination against women and low-caste people that is toxic to good health. Doctors also present a powerful institutional lobby that can block the real solution for places like Jawalke: training villagers like Sarubai Salve and Babai Sathe to do all these things.

It's difficult to describe how these women became health workers without appreciating their background:

When Salve and Sathe started their work in Jawalke, they were destitute. As members of the Dalit, or Untouchable, castes, they were considered nonpersons, so reviled that higher caste people would throw out food if it even touched the edge of their saris. They went barefoot in the village, as Untouchable women were not allowed to wear shoes. Sathe remembers standing for hours at the local water pump—which she could not touch—waiting for a higher caste woman to take pity on her and fill her bucket. Salve was so poor she washed her hair with mud and owned a single sari. When she laundered it, she had to stay in the river until it dried.

It's hard to imagine living as a "nonperson", destitute, unable to touch the water pump to assuage one's own thirst. But it gets, if possible, even worse. Women's status in rural Indian society is so low, creating a sense of self was job one in transforming these women into the health care providers for their villages.

The health workers' first task was to transform themselves, beginning with two weeks of training on Jamkhed's campus. The Aroles' daughter Shobha, 47, a doctor who is now associate director of the program, conducted some of the training. "I would ask, ‘What's your name?' and they would say the village they come from and their caste. They had no self-identity," she says.

"They wouldn't look into your eyes or talk to you. They didn't even feel a woman has intelligence." Shobha's mother would ask the women, "Who is more intelligent—a woman or a rat?" "A rat," they would say. Shobha had the women practice saying their names in front of a mirror. She asked them, "Who is the one person who will never leave you?" Then they would walk behind a curtain to be confronted by the mirror. The training boosted their self-confidence. "Everyone can give technical knowledge," says Shobha. "What makes it successful is time spent building up their confidence." Training is an ongoing campaign: Every Tuesday many of the women return for two days to discuss problems in their villages, review what they learned the previous week, and tackle a new subject, such as heart disease. The women sleep on the floor under one enormous blanket they sewed together from small ones.

The idea is to improve the lot of people so poor, "health care" was a matter of bare survival, of staving off starvation and crippling diseases like leprosy. Doctors, says Raj Arole, cannot provide health care like local women-turned-nurses/midwives/healthcare providers.

A village health worker, Arole says, can take care of 80 percent of the village's health problems, because most are related to nutrition and to the environment. Infant mortality is actually three things: chronic starvation, diarrhea, and respiratory infections. For all three, you do not need doctors. "Rural problems are simple," Arole says. "Safe drinking water, education, and poverty alleviation do more to promote health than diagnostic tests and drugs."

In fact, local health care workers such as Salve can provide superior care to that of doctors, precisely because of their close ties to the community and their motivations being other than simply the "profit motive." Health care is ultimately about more than treating disease.

Even doctors who do treat villagers, moreover, rarely spend time teaching them about nutrition, breast-feeding, hygiene, and using home remedies such as oral rehydration solutions. They don't help villages acquire clean water and sanitation systems or improve their farming practices—ways to eliminate the root causes of disease. They don't work to dispel myths that keep people sick. They don't combat the discrimination against women and low-caste people that is toxic to good health. Doctors also present a powerful institutional lobby that can block the real solution for places like Jawalke: training villagers like Sarubai Salve and Babai Sathe to do all these things.

"Doctors promote medical care because that's where the money is," says Raj Arole. "We promote health."

Although this approach is specific to rural India, it has much wider applications than that: most of the undeveloped/developing world is in dire need of such health care, and much of what keeps such care from people is the wrong approach. Jamkhed's example shows how sympathetic people from within the community can totally transform the lives of themselves and their villages. It is a transformation that involves education and regular, local, hands-on care by people whose motivation is not money, but rather a sense of fulfillment and pride. And compassion.

If you think about it, even in the "developed" world, there is a need for affordable health care. Were the day-to-day preventive medicine that keeps people healthy given to people in the community, it would certain both cut costs and allow people to receive basic health services without the intervention of expensive, profit-motivated doctors. And it would also help bring communities together.

And amazingly, these victims of the worst form of oppression have now become transformative, inspiring figures of prestige within their communities. Jamkhed's training has truly remarkable results. But importantly, the greatest changes have been in the mind, in conquering superstitions and fears and ignorance.

Perhaps the hardest territory to colonize has been inside people's heads, where superstition and stigma prevailed. To villagers in the Jamkhed area, disease came from the gods. When a new mother died from tetanus because a dirty instrument was used to cut the umbilical cord, no one would take care of the child, says Salve. "People said the mother would become a ghost and take the child away." There were superstitions surrounding basic nutrition: Pregnant women were not supposed to eat very much, and new mothers would wait several days before starting to breast-feed. And sufferers of certain diseases, like tuberculosis and leprosy, knowing full well they'd be shunned by their neighbors, didn't dare to openly seek treatment.

Little by little, Salve and Sathe have banished such attitudes, demystifying health. Leprosy, for instance, is now treated like any other disease, which it is—leprosy is actually difficult to catch and curable with medication. The change is visible in the hands of Sakubai Gite. Now 32, she is in her sixth year as a health worker in the village of Pangulghavan. She was in her teens when leprosy took parts of her fingers before it was cured. Her hands are gnarled and deformed.

Those hands are one reason Jamkhed wanted her. "We wanted to show that a cured leprosy patient can be a village health worker," Gite said. "Today I am even permitted to deliver babies."

Jamkhed also succeeded beyond anyone's imagination because it trains workers to be responsible and not to be dependent on doctors or other "superiors."

It provides an ongoing weekly link for the village health worker to the hospital, a mobile team, a source of drugs and supplies, new skills and knowledge, and perhaps most important, it keeps her in touch with her fellow village health workers, which helps her stay motivated. Also, Jamkhed's health workers train villagers to diagnose and solve their own problems. "It is unique in truly getting people's involvement," says Carl E. Taylor, a professor emeritus at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and the world's foremost guru of community health programs. Taylor was the Aroles' teacher. "They were among the most stubborn students I had," he says. "They rejected anything that gave decision-making to the professionals and didn't involve the people."

And the results?

Among those that have been in the program for more than a few years, the traditional scourges—childhood diarrhea, pneumonia, neonatal deaths, malaria, leprosy, maternal tetanus, tuberculosis—have virtually vanished. Jamkhed villages have far higher rates of vaccination and an infant mortality rate of 22 per 1,000 births, less than half the average for rural Maharashtra. Almost half of all Indian children under age three are malnourished, while in Jamkhed villages there are not enough cases to register. In rural Maharashtra, 56 percent of births are attended by a health worker, compared with 99 percent in Jamkhed villages.

But the long-term results are more than just "health-related". This program has transformed the way people live and think.

Today, because of Jamkhed's business training and small business grants, its village health workers are no longer particularly poor. Salve, for instance, is one of the richer women in her village. She sells bangles and earrings, owns two houses, a flour mill, and, she proudly says, 15 saris; she also has a Jeep she rents out. This is a good strategy—the wealthier the health worker, the more weight she carries in the village. But it isn't the whole story. Perhaps the real secret of Jamkhed is how it motivates poor, sometimes destitute, women with overwhelming burdens to spend hours of their day on work that offers them no financial remuneration other than the occasional gift of a papaya from a grateful patient. Something clearly does. Most Jamkhed health workers are lifers. Very few leave.

The real benefits, the women say, cannot be measured in rupees. "When I started, I had no support from anyone, no education, no money," said Sathe. "I was like a stone with no soul. When I came here they gave me shape, life. I learned courage and boldness. I became a human being."
In 2005 Babai Sathe, Untouchable, was elected the sarpanch—village leader—of Jawalke.

The statistics are startling, too. From starvation to ... now the health issues are diabetes and heart disease - diseases of the rich. The story is much more - please read award-winning Tina Rosenberg's entire article for total immersion in this moving story.