Caste And Discrimination – Perpetuation Of Hegemony In The Context Of Child Labor
Despite almost seventy years of the ushering of a revolutionary constitutional framework driven in part by the genius of a man who called for an annihilation of caste, we find that the caste system continues to operate in ways, obvious and hidden, in the Indian social context. Historically, the system of organized caste-based discrimination has been responsible for the rampant inflicting of atrocities and systematic exclusion of certain sections of the population. With the advent of colonial rule, existing systems of hierarchy and hegemony were codified into the personal laws, which remained largely Brahmanical. In the context of the 21st India, caste has gradually transitioned into other forms of privilege, most notably those of education and employment. The benefits of modernization, far from uplifting everyone, have concretized the existing power structures and have also rendered a layer of legitimacy to them.
In the same vein, caste comes to bear upon the prospects and opportunities of an individual’s life, right from childhood. It plays a factor on whether the child will be made to perform child labor, as also on the kind of labor she is forced to undertake. The International Dalit Solidarity Network (ISDN) puts the issues of caste and injustice into startling focus through analytical articles on the Indian Committee on the Netherlands reports on child slavery in India’s yarn industry and cotton textile business child slavery is found in more than 90% of the spinning mills in South India. Most of the children enslaved are from marginalized communities. Children are ‘enslaved’ by employers who withhold their wages and lock them up in company-controlled hostels. As regards the cottonseed production industry, about half a million children, most of which are from marginalized backgrounds work long hours, are not sent to school and are subjected to hazardous work and harmful chemicals.
These reports speak to the systematic way in which children from backward castes and other minorities are oppressed, enslaved, and denied an ordinary childhood. The children of manual scavengers are perhaps the most affected. They are made to perform menial tasks like cleaning gutters, cleaning septic tanks and are also often forced to collect leftovers for mere survival. We see that their exclusion and ostracization do not end even when such children are sent to school, wherein the discrimination undermines all aspects of their education and often causes them to drop out of school altogether. A survey by Navsarjan trust, titled Voices of the Children of Manual Scavengers, reveals rampant discriminatory practices meted out to such children in government schools. Here, we see that by forcing these children to collect excrements and clean septic tanks, the agency of a progressive state acts in a manner most regressive to uphold and perpetuate an inhuman status quo over the larger equitable goals that the state has been vested with.
This raises larger questions about the roles of the law and the state in transforming the social fabric, as also their role in perpetuating and legitimizing hegemony. It also reveals the failings of an education system that promises access to opportunity but systematically deprives a significant section of the population of the same. We see that the ghosts of their past seem to haunt these children even when they are removed from the employment situation and sent into the formal education system. This begs the larger question: Can they ever be truly freed from bondage?
