This article was rejected by the Brahmin-Chettri editors because they were too terrified to challenge PC perceptions of the janjati, and also because most probably they did not want to be branded racists. Hence rather late I decided to run it in my blog instead. The article addresses the violence against women in the name of witchcraft.
ROMANTICIZING THE JANJATI
Ten-year old Suman Nepali’s harrowing
eyewitness account of how his mother was killed by his teacher Hira Lama and
Hira’s mother Kailimaya Tamang, who tortured her and fed her human feces, was
published in NepalKhabar recently. Urban readers were sickened by this account,
in which the social science teacher hurled abuse at the young Dalit woman and
accusations of being a witch, tied her to a volleyball post in the schoolyard,
hit her on the head, tied her legs when she resisted forcible feeding of human
feces, and forced it down her throat, and beat her so savagely on her head she
succumbed to her injuries two days later.
The whole village watched as this incident
unfolded, and did not help, except for one woman who separated 10 year old
Suman from his enraged teacher after he attacked him when the boy pleaded with
him not to hurt his mother.
The victim, weakened by the torture on Tuesday, 6th
December, was unable to walk the three hours to Dhulikhel Hospital the next
day. The Nepal Police showed up on Thursday, two days after the incident, and
made the victim sign a “milapatra” or reconciliation agreement saying their
conflict had ended in the presence of 15 villagers. Used by the police often in
the case of domestic violence and abuse, the milapatra is a troublingly
overused system of restorative justice. The milapatra usually means the victim
has agreed to a reconciliation and will not pursue legal action. Laxmi Pariyar
died on Friday morning, while her husband and child slept nearby.
The account provoked storms of outrage on
social network Twitter. The protesters on Twitter demanded legal action against
the policeman who had made the victim sign this paper. Questions were raised as
to whether the justice system was misusing this informal method of local
community “reconciliation” to avoid prosecuting serious crime, in this case
murder.
Dalitonline, an online news portal, also
reported that the policeman in charge had been seen drinking with the
perpetrator shortly before. In an extraordinary misuse of the justice system,
the policeman Prempukar Chowdary, who had forced Laxmi Pariyar to sign the
concocted milapatra, apparently filed a case against the tortured victim, in
favor of the perpetrator.
Bisnukumari Pariyar, mother-in-law of the
deceased woman, explained in a press conference held by the police on 12th
December that Chowdhary had made them sign a paper in which they had to beg for
forgiveness from Hira Lama, and also pay him Rs.6000[1]. In addition, the husband of Laxmi
Pariyar was then arrested by the police, who are now claiming this incident
never occurred—according to the Dalitonline report, this is a strategy to frame
the innocent husband, in order to deflect attention from the calls of action
against the police involved, including those at district headquarters.
The multiple levels of misuse of the
justice system to torture, kill, hide the case, blame the victim, force them to
pay restitution, and then frame the innocent husband speaks of multiple levels
of miscarriage of justice for this Dalit family in Kavre. The Nepal Police have
failed in their line of duty. Not only did they fail to arrest the perpetrator
and take the victim to Kathmandu’s hospitals, which would have saved her life,
they allowed an innocent man to be framed.
This is not the first time a woman has been
fed human feces after being accused of witchcraft. Another high profile
documented case also involved a Tamang teacher who accused a woman of
witchcraft and fed her human feces. In 2009, the newspapers reported another
similar case in which Kumari BK was accused by Bimala Lama, the headmistress of a local primary school, of
practicing witchcraft. Ms Lama and a group of villagers then locked up Ms Kumari
BK and her husband for two days, and tortured the couple. When they threatened
to chop off her breasts with a knife, Ms Kumari BK "admitted" she was
a witch.
Advocacynet[2]
reports that:
Ms Kumari BK was kicked, punched, hit
with stones, and forced to eat excrement while Ms Lama and other villagers told
her that "Witches should be killed like this," according to a Jagaran
Media Center (JMC) report. The villagers also threatened to kill her husband if
he spoke up in her defense.
I remember talking to Subash Darnal, a
dynamic Dalit activist who headed the Jagaran Media Center, about this incident
in 2009. Subhash, sadly, died in a tragic accident while returning from a
fellowship at Stanford University. I assumed, like most people, that Brahmins
were somehow behind this conflict. He was the one who told me that during this
incident, the Brahmins of the community got so enraged about this sickening
violence against the Dalit woman that they had to physically send in the armed
police force from Kathmandu to manage the conflict between the Brahmins and the
Tamangs in the community.
It was also Subash who told me that the was
a need to analyze how janjati or ethnic cultures also oppressed Dalits—in
particular, he brought up the ways in which janjati men would marry Dalit
women, then abandon them once the parents protested and marry a second time
with women from their own cultures, leading to the social abandonment of Dalit
women left alone and vulnerable with children.
There is a tendency amongst the
intelligensia of Nepal, especially those educated in Western universities and
mentored by high profile Western academics, to automatically read this Dalit
oppression through the lens of what can, for lack of a better term, be labeled
“Evil Brahminism.” Through this frame of reference, all Dalit oppression is
directly attributable to the evil Brahmins and their scriptures, including
those of Manu. Parallel to this is the romanticized discourse of the “Good
Janjati,” especially Tamangs, whose contemporary situation has been read as
directly attributable to their being oppressed by the Ranas and Shahs, who used
this particular ethnic group for labor for centuries and therefore have driven
them into unimaginable poverty.
I have found, however, that that sort of
discourse is not just simplistic and misleading, but also has acted to
obfuscate the social realities on which intersecting oppressions of different
groups lies. This discourse fails to note that Tamangs have been beneficiaries
of the modern Nepal state since Panchayat times and more recently with the Maoist
civil conflict; and that they are in positions of power within the local
community, and that they have been incorporated into the discourses of progress
and development via the educational system. In both cases, the perpetrators of
these gender based violence were teachers, who are respected individuals who
received, in most likelihood, a government salary.
In addition, there’s also the ominous aspect of communal
ethnic cultures, missing in individualistic Brahmin Chettri culture, which is
the age-old “community court”, or local justice mechanisms. These kangaroo
courts can become violent when they gang up en masse against a marginalized
figure—an aspect often overlooked when we romaticize the benefic nature of
communal cultures.
It is also remarkable to me that amongst
all the new literature of ethnic cultures, no anthropologist has taken the time
to note that beliefs in witches exist almost exclusively amongst the animistic
cultures (including those of Rai-Limbus, Tamang, etc)--Brahmins have no mention
of witches in any of their scriptures. Which is one reason a careful analysis
of witchcraft accusations will probably, in most likelihood, bring up
non-Brahmin perpetrators. In other words, individuals of romanticized ethnic
cultures get off easily from gender violence and have uptil now not been made
accountable for these incidents of witchcraft torture, simply due to the
mistaken perception that ethnic cultures like Tamangs are inherently gender
equal, compared to the Brahmins. In fact, I would not be surprised to find some
international scholar in some faroff country reading about this incident and
writing a generic report, exclusively based on an epistemological framework of
Brahmin oppression.
I find these foreign experts (who shall
remain unnamed, but I will let on that many of them, from prestigious
universities from the USA and UK, are anthropologists) have exacerbated and
obfuscated serious issues like those of witchcraft by having the final say on
their own particular ethnic group. Nobody else is allowed to question the
epistemological supremacy of these individuals, who hold the supreme truth over
their own particular tribe (rather like old viceroys of yore), and which has
stopped other people within Nepal from asking the right questions, which may in
fact have stopped this gender based violence a long time ago.
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