Why we cannot separate Jisha's rape from her Dalit identity

While discussing the gruesome rape and murder of Dalit law student Jisha in Kerala's Perambavoor on April 28, a friend commented that the fact that she was a Dalit is not important and the case should be expedited without bringing in irrelevant details.

It reminded me of this courtroom scene from the movie Philadelphia, where Andrew Beckett's lawyer, Joe Miller asks him to remove his shirt and show in the courtroom the red lesions on his chest due to his AIDS infection. Andrew Beckett is fighting a case against the partners of the law firm where he worked. 

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The partners fire him on the pretext of some missing files while Andrew believes he was fired because of his homosexuality and his medical condition. Miller asks Andrew to take off his shirt because at the time he was fired, he had similar lesions on his forehead (which the bosses claim they hadn't noticed). The defence lawyer objects to which Joe Miller replies:

"Your Honour, if Mr Beckett was forced by his illness to use a wheelchair, would the defence ask him to park it outside? We're talking about AIDS, we're talking about lesions. Let's see what we're talking about."

In the Perambavoor case, Jisha was raped and murdered because she was a woman; she was raped and murdered (in all probability) because she was a "Dalit". If we are not parking her womanness outside, why should we park her "Dalitness" outside? When a disproportionately high number of Dalit women face rapes, should we ignore the fact that she was a Dalit?

Her intestines were torn out, similar to Nirbhaya's. To rape a woman you don't need to tear her guts out. You need brutal strength to overpower her, but you don't need to stabbed her 30 times. Rape is not about sex, it's about violence and power. Rapists feel this extreme urge to establish their dominance. The Dalit woman is already at the bottom of the social hierarchy. She faces discrimination and violence due to her womanness *and* due to her Dalitness.

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True Nirbhaya was not a Dalit, in her case her womanness had to be violently overpowered. But the teeming numbers of rape and acts of violence cases in the country prove that in their case, their womanness *and* Dalitness had to be shown their place. Maybe Jisha's was one such case. Can we leave her Dalit identity out of it?

Once, I had attended a lecture on caste and society, the panellist commented that when you formulate a policy, when you investigate caste issues, you have to take into account all possible types of discrimination a person may face.

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Say, for example, the local government of a village decided that all the physically challenged of a village will be given wheelchairs. Even after the implementation, an inquiry revealed that half the wheelchairs were not being used. It was found out that the physically-challenged Dalits were unable to use the wheelchairs because the caste laws of the village forbade them from using pucca roads. How can we leave caste out of anything, be it investigation of a crime, or policy formulation, when it strangles our very voice?

Here, we are talking about discrimination and violence. Let us know what we are talking about.