I started by asking Yogesh, though a translator, what he remembered about his village’s primary school. “I didn’t like it,” he said, looking at a blank section of the wall behind me. “The teachers made me and my friends sit in the back of the classroom because we were Dalits [untouchables], and the upper-caste students always sat in the front. If I was thirsty, I had to walk one and a half kilometres home, because the water pot was only for the upper castes. The teachers told the other kids not to touch us, because we would pollute them.”

I spoke with Yogesh for about 40 minutes, the conversation moving to his family, village and work, before it came time for dinner and I had to let him go.

As an AJWS World Partners Fellow I was placed in Gujarat, a mostly arid region on India’s northwest coast. Most of Gujarat is rural, save for Ahmedabad, a dusty city of four and a half million in which camels pull their loads of hay right past brand new mega-malls.

The vocational training centre where I worked is located just outside of a tiny village, about eight kilometres from the nearest town. It is run by a non-governmental organization (NGO) led by Dalits and dedicated to Dalit rights.

I knew absolutely nothing about Dalits, their history or current context, before I learned that I would be placed there, and I spent the first few months trying to absorb as much as I could. I learned that there are roughly 170 million Dalits in India, and another 90 million or so spread throughout the rest of South Asia. I was surprised to read that the caste system itself had not been made illegal, and only discrimination based on caste is considered an offence.

In modern India many Dalits have managed to improve their station in life, either in the private sector or through affirmative action programs in civil service jobs. The vast majority, however, remain landless in their native villages, stuck performing unskilled daily wage labour in fields or factories, or engaging in caste-based occupations assigned to the most “unclean” castes: skinning cows and water buffalo, removing dead dogs from the streets, and cleaning up human excreta. In village schools Dalit children suffer terrible discrimination, overt and subtle, designed to encourage them to drop out and assume the jobs forced on their parents, maintaining a cycle of dependence and powerlessness that stretches back 3,000 years.

I did not consider the similarities between Dalit and Jewish history until reading a passage in Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth. In it Gandhi writes, “Some of the classes which render us the greatest social service, but which we Hindus have chosen to regard as ‘untouchables,’ are relegated to remote quarters of a town or a village… In Christian Europe the Jews were once ‘untouchables,’ and the quarters that were assigned to them had the offensive name of ‘ghettos.’”

The comparison really struck me, and I thought about it for a long time. What were the implications of these similarities? What did it mean for the Jews now, 80 years after Gandhi penned the words in his native Gujarati, 60 years after the destruction of Jewish life in Christian Europe through the Holocaust, in a world with Israel and an American Jewish community of unparalleled prosperity?

It occurred to me then that Jews have an almost unique responsibility in the world today. As victims of 2,000 years of existence as a minority across the globe, consistently singled out for oppression, Jews have a perspective that should make it easy to indentify with Dalits and other marginalized communities throughout the world.

It was New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman who first used the metaphor of a “flat” world to explain the changing global economic system. Money, ideas and information flow freely over much of the world today, says Friedman, and the human race is more connected than ever before.

The more I thought about this interconnectedness, the more I came to believe that modern Jewish ethics in this flat world are tied to the goals of the American Jewish World Service.

AJWS describes itself as follows: “AJWS is an international development organisation motivated by Judaism’s imperative to pursue justice. It is dedicated to alleviating poverty, hunger and disease among the people of the developing world regardless of race, religion or nationality. Through grants to grassroots organisations, volunteer service, advocacy and education, AJWS fosters civil society, sustainable development and human rights for all people, while promoting the values and responsibilities of global citizenship within the Jewish community.”

As a part of these goals, AJWS sends volunteers of all ages around the world. There are summer programmes for high school and college students, “alternative breaks” for just a few weeks, and longer placements. In addition to working on advocacy campaigns, such as the Save Darfur movement, AJWS also supports small organisations like the one I worked with in Gujarat.

A globalized economic system requires globalized attention to human rights. Jewish history and experience, along with the Jewish commitment to justice, suggest that all Jews have a moral stake in what happens across this flat world. (David Rodwin, a graduate of Johns Hopkins University, is headed back to India in January to volunteer with AJWS.)

(Source: jewishtimes.com dated 21 November 2008)

http://www.jewishtimes.com/index.php/jewishtimes/news/jt/international_news/jews_indias_untouchables_and_a_flat_world/8930