New Delhi: Magsaysay Award winner Bezwada Wilson, a campaigner against manual scavenging, criticised the Prime Minister and the President on Saturday for their "silence" on the continuing deaths of unprotected civic workers inside sewers.
He said that 122 workers had died inside sewers in the past one year, and referred to them as "manual scavengers". Civic workers are expected to wear jackets and masks as a protection against gas poisoning and suffocation when they enter blocked sewers to clear them, but are rarely provided with these.
"So many manual scavengers have died while working inside sewage lines. But no Prime Minister, no President, talks about it. No dialogue is happening anywhere," he said.
Wilson and other Dalit scholars, such as former Rajya Sabha member Bhalchandra Mungekar and former Union minister Sanjay Paswan, rued the failure of the community's leaders to raise the Dalits' problems effectively in Parliament and at other forums.
Speaking at the release of a book, Ambedkar, Gandhi and Patel, by civil servant Raja Sekhar Vundru, they criticised the approach taken by Mahatma Gandhi and Vallabhbhai Patel towards the issues of untouchability and Dalit rights.
Wilson said that Babasaheb Ambedkar's dream of equal representation was yet to be realised, and accused Patel of not supporting the cause of Dalits.
Vundru has said in a chapter titled "Sardar Patel and Reserved Seats Abolition" that Patel had shocked the Constituent Assembly in 1949 by suggesting abolition of the two-year-old provision of reserving electoral constituencies for Dalits, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians and other minorities.
Mungekar said that Ambedkar wanted an equal share for Dalits in the economy, employment and other rights.
"But Gandhi was against any division of the Hindu social order. Gandhi wanted untouchability to go through moral persuasion," he said.
"In the Poona Pact, Gandhi succeeded as a politician but failed as Mahatma. Patel's approach to the problem of untouchability was not sympathetic."
Paswan stressed that leaders who can raise the issues of Dalits should be elected. Former chief election commissioner M.S. Gill released the book.
