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III. Scope of the Report

This report focuses solely on the issue of caste discrimination in India in response to its conspicuous absence in the Government of India’s combined report to CERD. The practice of “untouchability”—the imposition of social disabilities on persons by reason of their birth in certain castes—discriminates against more than one-sixth of India’s population.¹ Dalits, or so-called untouchables (known in Indian legal parlance as scheduled castes), are denied access to land, forced to work in degrading conditions, and routinely abused at the hands of the police and of higher-caste groups that often enjoy the state’s protection.² In what has been called India’s “hidden apartheid,” entire villages in many Indian states remain completely segregated by caste. In focusing on caste discrimination in India, this report acknowledges, but does not explore, the other pervasive practices of discrimination in India, including those that target religious minorities. In particular, Human Rights Watch has extensively documented human rights violations against India’s Christian³ and Muslim community, including the state-sponsored massacre of over 2,000 Muslims in the state of Gujarat in 2002.⁴ 

While the Government of India’s periodic report cites specifically to Constitutional provisions prohibiting discrimination by the State—including on grounds of a person’s caste—and generally to the existence of legislation enacting these provisions,⁵ this elaboration of its de jure prohibition on caste discrimination does not reflect the daily reality of the continued practice of “untouchability” and persecution of Dalits in India. Dalits are systematically discriminated against and abused by public authorities and private actors, who act without any fear of punishment as they rarely face sanctions for their violations of Dalits’ fundamental rights. 

The Committee itself has recognized that India is in breach of its international human rights obligations in its failure to bring an end to caste discrimination. In its Concluding Observations to India’s tenth to fourteenth periodic reports,⁶ the Committee asserted that:

although constitutional provisions and legal texts exist to abolish untouchability and to protect the members of the scheduled castes and tribes, and although social and educational policies have been adopted to improve the situation of members of scheduled castes and tribes and to protect them from abuses, widespread discrimination against them and the relative impunity of those who abuse them point to the limited effect of these measures.⁷

While tribal peoples in India, adivasis, face similar forms of discrimination, this report limits itself to caste-based discrimination based against Dalits or so-called untouchables.

Sources Used in this Report

This report draws on extensive investigations on the issue of caste discrimination conducted by Human Rights Watch in India; on information made publicly available by the Government of India through inter alia, a 2004 report by the NHRC on the “Prevention of Atrocities Against Scheduled Castes;”⁸ reports by the National Commission on Scheduled Tribes and Schedules Castes, the National Commission on Women, and the Annual Reports to the Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955,⁹ and the Prevention of Atrocities Act, 1989; ¹⁰ and on Indian media and NGO reports, among other sources.¹¹ Where relevant the report also draws attention to information from UN special procedures and treaty bodies that have noted with concern the prevalence of caste discrimination in India.

Availability of Information from the Government of India

The Indian government does not provide prompt and sufficient information on the situation of Dalits. Governmental agencies in India and the Indian Parliament itself have failed to make statistics available to the public in a timely fashion. In general, there are routine delays of between two to four years in the writing and tabling of reports from various national commissions. For example, at this writing, the most recent statistics available from the National Commission on Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes date from 2001-02 and were only made publicly available in 2004. 

UN treaty bodies have repeatedly exhorted the Indian government to conduct periodic surveys on the reality of descent-based discrimination and provide both qualitative and quantitative data disaggregated by caste and gender in its reports to the committees, so far to no avail. The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW Committee) has pointed to the Indian government’s tendency to provide “very old” information.¹² The State Party’s failure to collect and record information on the enjoyment of human rights by Dalits is in itself suggestive of the government’s inattention to the issue of caste discrimination.