The Siddi and Dalits: Why are India's Beautiful First People Still Oppressed?

The Black Untouchables of India face systemic oppression, exclusion, and caste-based discrimination. This marginalizes Dalit and Siddi people in South Asia even further within the complexities of climate change.

Dalit women and girls are the most discriminated, systematically excluded and historically oppressed group in the sub-continent. Dalit women lag behind in most of the areas of human development indicators. Unequal access to resources and opportunities makes Dalit Women more socially vulnerable and frequently exposes her to the chance of being a victim to caste, class and gender-based violence.

The historic, institutionalized and systemic oppression of Dalit women from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal will make them one of the most vulnerable, susceptible and high-risk targets in the changing climate. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power – which groups have it and which do not. It is about resources – which groups are seen as worthy of them and which are not, who gets to acquire and control them and who does not. It is about respect, authority and assumptions of competence – who is accorded these and who is not. As a means of assigning value to entire swaths of humankind, caste guides each of us often beyond the reaches of our awareness. It embeds into our bones an unconscious ranking of human characteristics and sets forth the rules.

The Hindu caste system categorizes society into four primary groups: Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and Shudras, the latter being the lowest caste and often associated with darker skin. It is widely held that these groups stem from Brahma, the Hindu deity of creation. Traditionally, the Hindu sociocultural system was segregated into exclusive, hereditary, and endogamous castes. These castes were hierarchical and unequal, bearing similarities to the concept of "race." However, the intricate caste system was not fundamentally predicated on skin color, as it encompassed individuals of diverse physical appearances. Paradoxically, climate change's impact on birth rates is leading to a decline in the numbers of the higher castes, while the birth rates among the Shudras are on the rise.

In India, colorism is rampant. Darker-skinned Indians, especially women, face discrimination at work, at school — even in love. Some arranged marriage websites let families filter out prospective brides by skin tone. Rural communities have long been arranged on the basis of castes - the upper and lower castes almost always lived in segregated colonies, the water wells were not shared, Brahmins would not accept food or drink from the Shudras, and one could marry only within one's caste. Many modern Indians of the Shudra caste are leaving for better prospects in the West and Caribbean and it is having a profound effect on the economic stability of the country.

In recent decades, the expansion of secular education and the rise of urbanization have diminished the impact of caste, especially in urban areas where different castes live together and inter-caste marriages are becoming more common. Simultaneously, India has seen a rapid shift from agrarian regions to overcrowded megacities. If humanity persists through the 21st century, our descendants may be shocked to discover that their ancestors casually tolerated, or even praised, a rigid caste system that provided abundant opportunities to a privileged minority while consigning the vast majority to a strenuous struggle for mere survival.

The Dalit community, which – along with Adivasis, or Indigenous peoples – is the lowest rung in the world's oldest social hierarchal system, which vertically stratifies Indian society. The Dalit Black Panthers is a social organization that seeks to combat caste discrimination. It was led by a group of Mahar writers and poets, including Raja Dhale, Namdeo Dhasal, and J. V. Pawar in sometime between the second and the third semester of 1972. The Dalit Panthers were inspired by the Black Panther Party, a socialist political party that sought to combat racial and economic discrimination against African-Americans.

In conclusion, if the fossil-fuel economy remains unchecked for another decade or two, the number of climate refugees could surge into the hundreds of millions. This is due to the ongoing flooding of low-lying coastal regions and the transformation of large swathes of the Earth into zones either too hot or too inundated and plagued by disease for the cultivation of food crops, or even for human habitation. The essay poses a critical question: Is there any ethical justification for an international legal framework that grants millions merely the "right" to citizenship in a land that is progressively becoming uninhabitable for human life?

Kochenov's essay, "Citizenship: The Great Extinguisher of Hope" (MIT Press 2019), incisively details the ethical crisis in our global caste system. The silver lining, however, is that within 50 years, demographic shifts and the decline of upper caste members lacking melanin's fertility protection will become irreversible. Consequently, as the climate crisis intensifies, the empowered global majority will likely find the current status quo increasingly unconscionable.