At a rally near Chennai’s Mint bus terminus on September 25, a young Dalit woman, Anusuya, steps up to the microphone. Initially, she’s slightly unnerved by the crowd but quickly grows comfortable. “Neither my education nor the good job I had in my hand mattered, it was my caste that stood against me,” she goes on to tell the crowd how her husband Subash was murdered by his own dominant caste family while she was brutally wounded and left for dead.
Ten surgeries and an MSc degree later, she was speaking at the Tamil Nadu Untouchability Eradication Front’s (TNUEF) protest rally, demanding special legislation from the state government against caste killings of intercaste couples, commonly referred to as ‘honour’ killings. There is palpable anger at the rally against the DMK-led Tamil Nadu government. A point that keeps coming up in speeches is the tragic irony of how merely two days after Chief Minister MK Stalin had said on June 25, in the Assembly, that “it is better to conduct investigations correctly and bring perpetrators to justice using the existing laws,” Madurai district .
Neither Subash’s murder nor the Madurai murder can be booked under the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. In Subhash’s case, he is not Dalit. In Madurai, the victim and perpetrators are from different Dalit communities.
The motive for both crimes, however, was caste pride. It’s because of these very gaps in existing laws that multiple anti-cast.