00:00A 10-year-old Dalit girl was raped in Muzaffarpur, Bihar, last month.
00:05She died during treatment at Patna Medical College and Hospital.
00:09Her family has alleged hospital negligence.
00:12The incident sparked statewide protests and reignited conversations around caste, gender, and justice in India.
00:21Caste and gender-based violence are not new. It's structural, it's systemic.
00:26Dalits face humiliation, brutality, and silence.
00:31In Amreli, Gujarat, Nilesh Rathodh was beaten to death for calling an upper caste teen beta.
00:37In Mathura, a Dalit wedding was attacked for playing music and riding a mare.
00:43In Tikamgarh, Madhya Pradesh, a groom's wedding procession was pelted with stones for refusing to walk barefoot.
00:50In February 2024, Gujarat, a Dalit groom was slapped, dragged off his horse mid-procession, and told,
00:59You need permission to ride a horse. Only upper caste men do that.
01:04The groom later filed an FIR.
01:07The accused was arrested.
01:09But trauma doesn't disappear with an FIR.
01:1210 years ago, in Badau, Uttar Pradesh, the bodies of two Dalit girls were found hanging from a mango tree.
01:19Every day, their fathers work just 100 meters from the sight of that horror.
01:25The accused got bail.
01:27One was summoned.
01:29The others have never faced trial.
01:32Their case has been pending in the Allahabad High Court for 8 years.
01:36In Outlook's August 2024 special issue, editor Chinki Sinha spoke with scholar and activist Anand Tiltumde about the freedom of fantasy and caste and class in India.
01:49In India, there has not been a kind of politics of the lowest strata, whether it is caste or class.
02:00We will have to create something like what we call a socialist system.
02:07So that's the only way that the human race will survive, this planet will survive.
02:12A caste knows only splitting, like amoeba.
02:16Amoeba splits like things, so there is no end to it.
02:20So that way caste, the future of caste is that.
02:23And class tends to unite on your parameters of life, actual life.
02:34To understand the issue of caste in India, we also turned to Dalit literature for answers.
02:40Daya Pawar's Baluta, published in 1978, was the first Dalit autobiography in Marathi.
02:47In it, he writes,
02:49My sorrow an iceberg, only the tip above the water.
02:54My memories drops of acid that leave me shivering in pain.
02:59We remember Hathras, Badaum and now Muzaffarpur.
03:03But will India remember their pain long enough to change the system that allows it?
03:09This is not about one case.
03:11It's about a country that still asks Dalits to beg for dignity in courtrooms, on horses, in hospitals.
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