Injustices were all too common. In one region of India, a The seller’s booth was broken, depriving him of his livelihood. In another case, members of a poor family were denied subsidies by the government, forcing them to begging for survival. They are all Dalits, once considered sacrosanct by the Indian caste system.
Such episodes go largely unnoticed and unresolved for decades. But both cases were picked up by an online news agency that started two years ago with a mission to cover underprivileged groups in India. Then the officials began to act.
“That’s the impact of giving voice to those who have no voice,” said Meena Kotwal, the store’s founder.
Even as members of marginalized groups have become India’s president (a largely ceremonial position), the country’s nearly 300 million Dalits still face widespread abuse and violence. Despite decades of constitutional protections and affirmative action, thousands of people suffer every year. criminalinclude rape, torture, acid attack and murder.
To tell these stories and correct these wrongs, Ms. Kotwal, a Dalit, started Mooknayak – or “leader of the voiceless.” It is named after a biweekly newspaper founded more than a century ago by Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkarwhom scholars sometimes compare to Martin Luther King Jr. He helped draft the nation’s Constitution, which provided for a formal ban on caste discrimination.
Dalit, which makes up about 20% of India’s population, is in many cases still trapped in the lowest rungs of society. Although India has made great strides in helping the poor, nearly a third of the Dalit community, or about 100 million people, still live in poverty. according to the United Nations.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, flirted with and increasingly garnered the majority of Dalit’s vote. But it has done little to convince the religious thinkers among its support base to abandon a centuries-old Hindu social order that has left Dalits with the most undesirable jobs. such as cleaning toilets, skinning animals, and disposing of dead bodies.
Ms. Kotwal has no business plan for The Mooknayak, but she knows there are millions of people who desperately need their stories told. She hires Dalits, Indigenous peoples and women as reporters, editors and video journalists. Publishing articles and videos in Hindi and English, they aim to cover everything from personal injustices to policy debates.
Ms Kotwal, 33, said: “I want disadvantaged communities to be able to say: ‘We have our own media, we cover all kinds of stories and we raise issues. has not been raised up to this day’.
Mooknayak’s audience has been steadily growing and now attracts nearly 50,000 visitors per month to its website. It works on crowdfunding – readers have donated phones, a small amount of money, even a motorbike – and grants. Mooknayak received more than $12,000 from Google and about $6,000 as part of a YouTube-led training program that helped pay for a team of 11, as well as pay for typewriters and office furniture.
Its growing influence allowed Ms. Kotwal to get an interview with Rahul Gandhi, a descendant of a once powerful political dynasty is looking to challenge Mr. Modi in next year’s elections. However, her growing public profile has also brought her much rape and death threats.
Even being a Dalit woman this far is a victory in India’s caste society. Born into a family of manual laborers, Ms. Kotwal grew up in a Dalit neighborhood in New Delhi. Before going to school each morning, she stuffs her notebooks into a jute bag, which she also uses as a seat on the ground. Her family’s meager income meant that at the age of 16 she needed to work to pay for both her education and her personal needs.
Before long, she studied journalism, a path for which she has few role models from her community, which still faces rampant discrimination in employment.
But her perseverance paid off in 2017, when Ms Kotwal strutted across the Italian marble floor of a New Delhi tower and started working as a broadcast reporter for the BBC’s Hindi service. The job and its pitfalls terrified her and her family. “Are you in a swivel chair? Are you served tea at your place? her mother, an illiterate laborer, asked.
The honeymoon didn’t last long. She said, a colleague from the dominant caste urged Ms. Kotwal to reveal her caste, and then revealed her to the co-worker. It was the beginning of what she described as humiliation and discrimination in public.
Her bosses brushed off her worries. One person used a chorus commonly heard from people of the ruling classes, telling her that Dalits no longer existed in modern India, according to messages seen by The Times – denying not only her complaints but the very existence of her community.
After two years on the job, she filed a formal complaint with BBC officials in London. The company reviewed her complaints of discrimination, according to an internal document, but ruled that her complaints were without “value or substance.” Her contract, which is about to expire, is not renewed.
The BBC says it does not discuss personal personnel matters and is fully compliant with Indian law. A London-based spokesman added: “We know there is always more work to be done in a global organization, but we are making significant progress on the diversity of people who work with us. we.”
The representation of Dalit and other marginalized peoples remains an issue in most countries. all professions in India. That’s especially true in the country’s media industry, which is dominated by the privileged classes, who tend to hire people from similar backgrounds. survey shows that nearly 90 percent of the country’s top news media figures belong to the Hindu ruling classes.
Harish Wankhede, a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi who studies caste in media, said Dalit’s “almost complete absence” of journalists, writers and TV personalities on the Indian media, created a “black sentinel loophole”. highlighting crimes against Dalits are frequently buried.
The New York Times interviewed more than a dozen journalists from historically disadvantaged communities, including Ms. Kotwal, who said they had been discriminated against by colleagues. Several other journalists have corroborated their accounts.
Dalit journalists at mainstream Indian newspapers and television say that although they feel compelled to hide their caste identities in the workplace, they are sometimes questioned about it. in job interviews. Some said they have experienced forms of discrimination and alienation – such as one person who said a ruling-caste colleague refused to eat food he had touched.
Yashica Dutt, author of “Coming Out as Dalit” who hid her Dalit identity for 10 years as a journalist, said: “It’s like carrying a dirty, ugly secret. this tiger, and you know they’ll never accept you.” in India before moving to New York.
On a chilly January afternoon, Ms. Kotwal opened the shutters to her new office in New Delhi. She flipped a single switch and walked through the chairs still covered in plastic to a room with a large wooden table.
“Welcome to our newsroom,” says Ms. Kotwal, who sees her platform as a vehicle to bring about social change. “I want someone in the village to get their drinking water or help register their FIR,” she said, referring to the first informational report, the important but often difficult step of filing a formal complaint with the police in the area. India.
Shortly after losing her job at the BBC, Ms Kotwal gave birth to daughter Dharaa, now a toddler requiring to accompany her on reporting trips and on motorbikes to her office. Ms. Kotwal calls her daughter the biggest inspiration for her work.
“I kept thinking, ‘What will happen to her when she becomes a Dalit woman one day?’ She would ask me, ‘What did? Friend what to do, mom?’”
