Dalit village sarpanch contributes Rs 10 lakh to build temple; understands she may not be allowed to enter

Ahmedabad, August 3: In a corner of a dusty village near Ahmedabad, a temple stands out as an unusual project. It’s being built by a low-caste woman, Pintooben.

She is the sarpanch of Rahemalpur village, and is using her personal savings for the construction of the new shrine dedicated to Lord Shiva.  As she walks through the winding lanes of Rahemalpur to show the temple to India Today TV’s special investigation team, the woman stops short of climbing its unpainted steps.

Like numerous other fellow Dalits excluded from religion in Gujarat, Pintooben is not allowed to enter the sanctum of any Hindu house of worship. Custodians of the mainstream religion have drawn the boundaries for her and other low-caste worshippers.

After villagers demanded a new temple at Rahemalpur, the Dalit sarpanch generously sponsored its construction. She says she has so far spent Rs 10 lakh to build the holy place. The sarpanch earns her living from selling the produce from her 35-bhiga land.

When asked, “You are spending so much, wouldn’t you like to step into the temple?”, she says, “I’d like to, but there’s opposition. There can be a ruckus. One among 100 may be there to object and say the temple has been defiled, the god has been defiled.”

Pintooben summed up the fears of Gujarat’s Dalit community, who are socially banned from regular religious practices. Last month, four low-caste men were stripped, humiliated, and beaten with belts and rods for skinning a dead cow.

India Today TV’s investigative crew found that the anti-Dalit discrimination ran much deeper in the land of the father of the nation. The team observed that untouchability, outlawed after independence, remains sanctified by religion. Almost all temples there nurse the ancient notions of purity and pollution, the bedrock of untouchability.

Hindu temples were found to be shunning Dalits brazenly to preserve the so-called piety of the faith’s upper-caste elders.

“You are welcome if you want to come in, but these men can’t go inside,” warns the priest of a Kali temple at Kota village in Gandhinagar, as he segregated upper-caste worshippers from the low caste.

The priests refused to touch them. “Will you not even give them the tilaks?” asked an undercover India Today reporter. “They’ll do it with their own hands. None of us does that,” replied the priest.

The ostracism is drawn from a wretched, antiquated belief that stigmatises Dalits as a burdensome contamination, and exalts their isolation as purification.

“If they sit where they are sitting now (which is outside of the sanctum), we do nothing. But if they come inside, we’ll purify it with the holy water from the Ganga,” explains a temple caretaker, outlining age-old prejudices that label these people as contagiously toxic.

Temple seniors justify the Dalit prohibition, citing their own convoluted theories on karma.

“They are prohibited. … It’s their karma,” argues a temple caretaker. “God has prohibited them (from entering), not us. …This is his (god’s) ban,” he insisted.

Several local temples confirm Dalits themselves stay away from the holy places.

“They don’t come. They know what it (the custom) is. If they want to sing a hymn, they can do it at their homes,” claims a priest at a temple in Vani village.

India Today TV’s team found that Gujarat’s lower-caste villagers are too scared to visit temples themselves, the fear arising from deep scars of the discrimination itself.