Former Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar said on Tuesday that a crowd in Uttar Pradesh had used “chamar” as a slur for her father Babu Jagjivan Ram when he was the deputy prime minister, NDTV reported.
Chamar is a Dalit community classified under the Scheduled Caste category. The name of the community was used as slur for Ram when he was unveiling a statue of former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Sampurnanand in 1978.
“Jagjivan, chamar, go away,’ they said. And they washed the statue with Ganga Jal,” Kumar told the channel. “Because it was polluted. So you see, the caste system embraces everyone.”
On August 15, the Congress leader remarked that the caste system “remains our greatest enemy” even 75 years after independence.
“[A hundred] years ago, my father Babu Jagjivan Ram was prohibited from drinking water in school from the pitcher meant for Savarna Hindus,” she said. “It was a miracle his life was saved. Today, a nine-year-old Dalit boy has been killed for the same reason.”
Kumar was referring to the thrashing of a Dalit boy by his upper caste teacher for drinking water from his pot in Rajasthan’s Jalore district. The boy succumbed to his injuries at a hospital in Ahmedabad on August 13.
The former Lok Sabha Speaker said that she has also faced “snide remarks, gestures and open statements” humiliating her for her caste.
Kumar recalled an incident from a time when she was searching for a house in London when a Christian man asked about her caste.
“I liked the house and said I will shift,” she said. “When he was leaving, he shot the last question. ‘Are you a Brahmin?’ I said ‘No, I’m not a Brahmin. I’m a Scheduled Caste. Do you have a problem?’ He said ‘No’. But he did not give me the house.”
The Congress leader said in an article in The Quint that there were instances when people invited her to their homes, but some of their family members did not approve of her presence. “From the kitchen, I could hear voices such as ‘Why has she been invited?’ or ‘In which tea set should we serve her?’ I could hear all that,” she recalled.
Kumar said that her father as well as mother, Indrani Devi, were not allowed to eat in hostel dining rooms when they were in college.
The former Lok Sabha Speaker said that caste-based discrimination and crimes should not be politicised, but said that there was a need to change people’s mindsets. She added that the Constitution should mention that the caste system is abolished, on the lines of the United States Constitution, which mentions that slavery is abolished.
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