1. Persecution:

The everyday siege

Your eighth stage
Is persecution:
Forced removals,
Confiscated Dalit bodies,
Legal harassment.

For us, persecution
Is the background radiation
Of existence.

When we ask
For the minimum wage,
The village withdraws
Our right
To buy milk,
To rent their dry fields,
To enter shops.
Our existence
Becomes an economic quarantine.

We Dalits, walled away through six millennia,
Quarantined on this bruised and muddy span
Of ancient, unrelenting "Hindu land."

Development comes
Like a bulldozer
Without a soul.
Highways, factories, dams
All require land
And somehow,
Our bony land
is always the easiest
to expropriate.
We are relocated
From one end
Of the map
To the other,
Still on the edge,
But now,
Even the little we had
is effaced.

The Atrocities Act
Attempts to list
Some of our suffering:
Boycott,
Forced labour,
Humiliation,
Violence.
But the very next day
It presumes to speak,
A chorus erupts
To strangle it
Editorials, petitions, protests
To weaken its bite.

We are arrested
On "false charges";
Our lawyers
Find their careers
Stonewalled;
Our allies
Are told
They are too "emotional,"
Too "negative,"
Too "anti-national."

You say persecution
Prepares the ground
For extermination.
Here, it is
Both rehearsal
And performance,
Running
For six thousand years.

2. Extermination:

The massacres with forgotten names

Your ninth stage,
Extermination,
Evokes
Mountains of shoes,
Fields of bones.

Our exterminations
Are bigger, infinite,
Lynched,
Carnaged,
Massacred,
Raped,
Dismembered,
Localised,
Nationalised,
Globalised,
Normalised,
Maimed,
Carefully
Under-counted
By the UN bodies.

In Kilvenmani,
They locked our people
In a hut
And fed the house
To fire.

In Karamchedu,
A quarrel
Grew teeth and guns
And left our dead
Scattered
Like thrown seeds
No one intended
To water.

In Tsunduru,
They waited
Near the canal,
Rifles ready,
And the water
Carried away
The evidence
Of their hate.

In Bathani Tola,
They did not spare
Infants;

In Laxmanpur Bathe,
They killed
As though
They were erasing
A blackboard.

In Khairlanji,
They tore the clothes
From a mother
And her daughter,
Took turns
Ravaging what was left,
Then crushed their skulls
Like clay pots.

Each time
The killers said,
"We will teach them a lesson."
Each time
The lesson was this:
"You may live here,
But you may not live
As human beings."

O Jurist Dr Gregory Stanton,

You ask,
Whether this is genocide
"In law,"
If the "intent to destroy"
Can be proven
"In whole or in part."

Tell me:
When a country decides
That no Dalit child
Shall live
To remember
Their dead parents' names,
What else
Is that intent?

I show you statistics:
One crime
Every eighteen minutes,
Thirteen Dalits murdered each week,
Twenty-seven atrocities
Every day,
Seven Dalit girls raped
Every eight hours.
Our reality replies:
There is no minute
In this land
Without a Dalit
Losing breath
To fear.
There is no daylight
Without a Dalit girl
Pinned down
By hands
That pray to different gods and Allah
But share the same contempt.

Hindu hands,
Muslim hands,
Sanatan-Sharia hands
On our thighs
They all feel the same.
Religion changes the prayer,
Never the terrorism.

We live in outposts,
Dalit ghettos,
Islands of darkness
Surrounded
By a sea
Of conditional mercy.
Our births,
Our deaths,
Are small decrees
Signed every day
By Hindus, Muslims,
Masjids,
Temples,
Shudras.

Call it genocide,
Call it atrocity,
Call it structural sin
My people call it
"Dalit life."