Caste on the map Martinbhai Chhotubhai Macwan was swamped by a wave of hostility. He was in a television studio, arguing that caste had a place in the coming world conference on race in Durban. His opponent - a Member of Parliament - held that caste was not an issue. But the Parliamentarian had a curious way of referring to Dalits in his deposition. 'You people,' he said to Macwan on several occasions, prompting the anchor to ask if the Dalits were not his people as well. The MP let that pass. 'I felt really very sad,' Macwan says, recalling the debate. 'People still seem to know so little about the state of Dalits. Prejudices are still so strong.' Macwan missed the conclave - a debate on the issue again - in another programme on television the following evening. Dalit writer-scholar Kancha Ilaiah sat all by himself in what looked like a room full of jeering upper-caste men and women. Macwan later heard how a student - and at another point in the programme, a noted academic - described the Dalits as a privileged caste. And how the studio burst into spontaneous applause. For a so-called privileged class, the Dalits are curiously dispossessed - bereft of land, of jobs, of education, of basic amenities and of human rights. Consider these statistics. About 70 per cent of Dalit homes have no electricity and 90 per cent no sanitation. More than 20 per cent of the Dalits do not have access to safe drinking water. In 1999, 86.25 per cent of SC households were landless or marginal. In the last decade, general crime has fallen by 1.2 per cent. But crimes against Dalits have gone up by 99 per cent. The National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR), of which 42-year-old Macwan is the convener, intends to take these issues up in Durban. Macwan, who is now in the South African city for a series of meetings before the conference, will however be back in India when the meet opens. 'I think it is important for me to be here with our people while Durban takes up these issues,' he says. The Durban conference organised by the United Nations opened up the floodgates of controversy even before the meet could begin. The Israelis are upset about Zionism forming a part of the agenda. And the Indian government is up in arms about a move to include the condition of Dalits in India in the discussions. New Delhi did its bit to elbow out the inclusion of caste at the meet, arguing that caste was not race. Barbados had wanted to include discrimination based on work in the proceedings but was forced by India to squash the move. Even Nepal had tried to speak of caste in the subcontinent, but was persuaded by New Delhi to drop the issue. 'Despite all that, it has now been decided by the organisers that caste will be among the issues deliberated in the world conference,' says a relieved Macwan. 'We have been taking these issues up at home, but nothing has happened in these 50 years. Now we need to take it before a world forum.' And Macwan should know the importance of global attention. Till last year, even though the Gujarati Dalit Christian had been working for Dalit rights in Gujarat for over 20 years, few in the country knew of him. Then, the Robert F. Kennedy award was bestowed him - and Macwan became the symbol of Dalit empowerment. Macwan's story is the stuff legends are made of. His mother worked in a tobacco factory and his father was an agricultural labourer. Young Macwan went through school and college while he worked at the tobacco factory. He lived among scavengers, whose rights his organisation, Navsarjan, has been spearheading for over two decades. 'Most scavengers are employed by the government,' Macwan, who later did his M.Phil from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, says. 'And they continue to earn Rs 50 a month.' Navsarjan deals with land issues as well. It has an organised legal and research network. 'Its members are young Dalits. The moment they come to know of a Dalit being dispossessed of his or her land, they move court,' says a scribe who has written about the work of Navsarjan. 'They know the legal system and manage to win most cases or work out settlements,' she says. She points out that there has been a marked difference in caste equations in the region in recent years. In areas where Navsarjan has a strong presence, the upper-castes are uncharacteristically humble. ''Arrey, arrey baithiye baithiye,' they say when the Dalits go to an upper caste house to discuss a matter.' Among the Dalit villagers, of course, Macwan is like a demi-god. And that's not surprising, since his organisation fights for a people that modern India thinks it has left behind in the pages of history. 'Macwan's group has done some very good work in the area,' says Chandrabhan Prasad, a Dalit intellectual. 'But because he has always been with the NGO movement, he has a low profile outside the Dalit movement,' he says. Adds Vimal Thorat, a Dalit academic who teaches Hindi in the Indira Gandhi National Open University, 'Navsarjan has brought about real changes in the villages of Gujarat.' His group has also been focussing on education in Gujarat. The $90,000 that Macwan won for his two recent awards - the Kennedy prize and the American Gleitsman Foundation award - went into the spread of schools in Gujarat. 'But I was really touched when the villagers came to me one day, carrying Rs51,000 that they had collected to give me after I had put the award money into educational schemes,' he says. There is suspicion in some quarters about the funding of the Dalit movement, which has never been short of money. But Macwan says Navsarjan functions with the help of donations - Rs21 lakh has been contributed by the Dalit community - and money from foreign funders. But, clearly, for the NCDHR, a federation of over 20 Dalit bodies, money is not the issue. The fight, right now, is allowing Dalits to live with dignity. At Durban, there will be some - like Chandrabhan Prasad - who will urge the world community to impose sanctions on India if it does not improve the status of Dalits. Others, such as the group Macwan represents, hope that Dalit human rights will come up before bilateral dealings are struck or work as a precondition for grants and loans. 'We have seen it happen before. World pressure helped bring apartheid to an end. And the women's movement has got a real boost because of global pressures,' says Macwan. 'We are hopeful.' And after Durban? 'After Durban, we continue with our battle back home in India,' he says. 'After all, we are essentially street fighters.'