Congress president Sonia Gandhi wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday evening, urging him to bring the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities (Amendment) Bill to Parliament in the monsoon session, a Bill that was promulgated as an Ordinance by the UPA government shortly before it demitted office. The amendments seek to strengthen the implementation of the original Act.
“It is a matter of disappointment,” Ms. Gandhi writes, “that the NDA government allowed the Ordinance to lapse by sending it to the Standing Committee. Even though the Standing Committee submitted its report in December 2014, Government did not bring it to Parliament for passage in the budget session.”
The reason for Ms. Gandhi’s letter is, as she says in her letter, “the distressing rise in the incidence of atrocities against Dalits across the country.” She specifically mentions the mowing down on May 14 of 17 Dalits by a tractor by a largely Jat mob over a long-standing land dispute in Rajasthan’s Nagaur district. She points out that three months before this, three Dalits were burnt alive in the same district. No arrests were made in this case, she continues, thus “creating a sense of impunity and context for this mass lynching based on caste dominance.”
‘Not an isolated case’Stressing that Rajasthan’s is not an isolated case, Ms. Gandhi points out that other States too have witnessed brutal assaults on Dalits such as “the shocking instance of a Dalit youth being murdered in Shirdi in Maharashtra — a stone’s throw away from the local police station — for having an Ambedkar ring tone on his mobile phone.”
The Congress president then writes that just as it is important that a fair and impartial inquiry is conducted in all these cases and the guilty are punished as per law, “it is equally important to ensure that the institutional machinery charged with the welfare and protection of Dalits is strengthened and made accountable so that all Dalits are able to access justice as a matter of right.”
It is for this reason that the UPA government had brought the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Amendment Ordinance 2014, she writes, urging him to convert into law in the monsoon session of Parliament. Ms. Gandhi’s letter also comes in the wake of her sending a four-member fact-finding team to Nagaur on May 26.
