The Issue
The World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and related Intolerance (WCAR) will take place in South Africa from August 31 to September 7, 2001.
For many Human rights NGOs, and especially for the 240 – 260 million caste-discriminated people in Asia (the majority of whom are 160 million “Dalits” in India and 3 million Burakumin in Japan), the WCAR is an exemplary occasion to voice out their protest at the dehumanising treatment they have suffered for centuries simply because they were born in a certain “caste”.
See Appendix 1: Some Testimonies of Victims of Rights Abuses, presented at the Global Conference Against Racism and Caste-based Discrimination: Occupation and descent-based Discrimination Against Dalits, 1-4 March, 2001, New Delhi, India.
But the efforts of Dalit organisations and human rights NGOs to secure caste-based discrimination on the Agenda of the WCAR has met with resistance and sabotage by especially the Indian Government and its NGO extensions at every step of the preparatory traject. Even the Indian Attorney General and many other Indian officials have erroneously argued that caste-based discrimination does not fall under the scope of the WCAR.
This lesson series presents the arguments to support the claim of Dalit, Burakumin and other similar communities that the discrimination and human rights violations they undergo must be addressed as essentially similar to and even more fundamental than racism, and must be addressed by the WCAR.
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