A public lynching of five Dalit, or "untouchable," men in an Indian village last Friday evoked strong condemnation from rights activists who plan to hold a public rally where the relatives of the victims will be invited to convert to Buddhism in protest against the crime.
As a result of the deaths, several hundred Dalits--members of the lowest rung of the rigidly hierarchical Hindu caste system--are expected to publicly renounce Hinduism in favor of the casteless Buddhist faith at a conversion rally on Sunday organized by the All India Confederation of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe Organizations (AICSCSTO) in Gurgaon, a town just outside New Delhi where four of the victims lived.
"It will be a symbolic rally," said the organizer, Udit Raj, chairman of the one-million strong AICSCSTO. "Our protest against the lynching of the five Dalits will take the form of a protest against the centuries-old caste system that continues until today," he said.
The five men were killed by a mob in village Dulina, about 50 kilometers from New Delhi, on Dussehra, a Hindu festival, on October 15. The men, whose job it was to skin dead animals, were carrying a dead cow for skinning and some hides to a nearby leather factory when they were beaten to death by the mob.
The local administration said that the crowd thought the men were slaughtering a cow, a sacred animal within the Hindu religion. "It was mob fury," said Mahendra Singh, the chief administration official of the area. "They did not know who they were killing, but their anger was fueled by rumors that a cow had been slaughtered on a Hindu religious day," he said.
But Dalit rights groups, such as the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR), believe that the action may have been instigated by local police.
"From our interactions with the people in the area, we have come to believe that the men were killed after the police demanded a bribe. There could have been some problem about that and the policemen, in connivance with local Hindu fundamentalists, incited the mob to lynch them," said Vimal Thorat, the co-convener of the NCDHR, who visited the area soon after the incident.
Both Thorat and Raj are demanding that the policemen be criminally prosecuted. The local administration said that the policemen had been suspended and an inquiry launched. A forensic examination of the carcass of the dead cow, conducted by the government, showed that the animal had died at least a day before the men were lynched.
The Buddhist religion was founded about 2,500 years ago by the Hindu prince, Siddhartha Gotama, who rejected the Hindu caste system and promised enlightenment to those who followed a prescribed way of life.
The first major contemporary Dalit conversions to Buddhism took place in central India in 1956. They were organized by B. R. Ambedkar, Dalit leader and lawmaker, also known for his contribution to the framing of the Indian Constitution, which outlawed the caste system in 1950.
The caste system, however, continues in most parts of rural India, where Dalits continue to do the menial jobs that their ancestors did, such as scavenging, slaughtering animals, and skinning dead animals