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Marking the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, Human Rights Watch today called for an end to caste-based discrimination around the world.

The World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance will take place in South Africa from August 31 to September 7, 2001.

"This conference is a significant opportunity for the international community to address the situation of South Asia's 240 million Dalits, or so-called untouchables," said Smita Narula, senior researcher for Human Rights Watch. "In much of Asia, little regard will be paid to this conference if it does not effectively address this problem."

The rights group decried efforts by the Indian government to sabotage the efforts of Indian NGOs to raise awareness of the caste struggle at preparatory meetings in the lead-up to the conference, including the recently concluded Asian preparatory meeting in Tehran. The situation of Dalits stands alone as the only issue to have been systematically cut out of the conference's intergovernmental process so far.

"Although South Africa's apartheid was effectively challenged by the international community, South Asia's 'hidden apartheid' continues to condemn Dalits or "untouchables" to a lifetime of slavery, segregation, exploitation, and violence," Narula added. "Its place in international consciousness is long overdue."

India actively supported the anti-apartheid struggle, has ratified all major human rights conventions, and has enacted progressive legislation to tackle caste-related problems of bonded labor, manual scavenging, untouchability, and other atrocities against Dalit community members. Much of the legislation, however, remains completely unenforced. Laws are openly flouted and state complicity in attacks on Dalit communities has become a well-documented pattern. Caste-based abuse is also rampant in Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Japan, and parts of Western Africa.

The Indian attorney general and many other Indian officials have erroneously argued that this is a conference about racism, and not other forms of discrimination. The very title of the conference undercuts this argument, as do conclusions drawn by the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination that the situation of Dalits "falls within the scope of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination," and that the term "descent" contained in Article 1 of the Convention does not refer solely to race, and encompasses the situation of Dalits.

The government has also argued that efforts to raise the caste issue are part of an "external agenda." Their position conveniently ignores the efforts of hundreds of Indian human rights groups who in December 1999 collectively submitted over 2.5 million signatures to the Indian Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee demanding the abolishment of untouchability and urging U.N. bodies to squarely address the issue of caste-based abuse and discrimination.

Activists from around the world, including anti-apartheid activists in South Africa and African-American activists in the United States, have already begun to support the Dalit struggle. Given the magnitude and severity of this problem in Asia, the international monitoring group called on the international community to ensure that caste-based and similar discrimination against marginalized populations in Asia be explicitly addressed in the draft declaration and programme of action of the WCAR. Dalits, Burakumin in Japan, and other populations in similar situations, it added, should be explicitly acknowledged as groups of people who have been subject to perennial and persistent forms of discrimination and abuse on the basis of their descent.

Human Rights Watch has also repeatedly called attention to the pervasive racism and intolerance afflicting millions of migrants and refugees uprooted by economic developments and political strife and racial discrimination in the determination of nationality and citizenship rights. In the post-apartheid era, de facto rather than de jure discrimination takes on immense significance. The discriminatory effect of racist practices in criminal justice, public policy and administrative practice cannot be ignored.

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