Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This paper analyses the efforts of human rights organizations in India to address the socio-economic discrimination experienced by Dalits (so-called 'untouchables') through an innovative combination of global advocacy, grassroots activism and active efforts to collaborate with national-level policy makers on their terms and ‘in their language’.

I will begin my paper by exploring the particular nexus of economic, political, social and religious exclusion and inequality Dalits face in contemporary India. Caste-based inequality is articulated in myriad forms ranging from the avoidance of physical contact or 'untouchability', to the active exclusion of Dalits from many sectors of the labour market and the persistence of brutal acts of everyday violence. Following this brief discussion I will then move on to argue that the issues facing Dalits today have grown from locally and culturally isolated concerns that lie at the heart of regionally-based resistance movements into a matter global importance due to the efforts of new Dalit Human Rights organizations and the rising prominence of global human rights debates. By adopting a ‘professional’ image and distancing themselves from wider performance-based methods of activism or identity politics, such NGOs have not only successfully advanced along a path that takes seriously official, structured or ‘policy-like’ approaches, but have also managed to promote the problem of untouchability as a classic human rights violation on the international stage. However, I also want to draw attention to the fact that through their efforts of translating the concerns of Dalits on the grassroots into an internationally accepted language of human rights, and lobbying for changes in Dalit policy on the national level, HR NGOs claim a complex middle ground between power and marginalization. Therefore the final part of my paper will analyse Dalit HR NGOs as ‘middle’ (Merry, 2006) institutions and ask whether they succeed in bridging the gap between so-called grassroots expressions of discrimination or outcries for increased caste equality, and the professional arena of formal and professional political solutions to Dalit inequality.