How dare you ask an 'upper caste' Indian to clean toilets?

A few days ago, an NGO run by St Xavier's non-formal education society received much flak after it put up an advertisement announcing vacancies for sanitation workers. The notice stated that candidates from the unreserved, general category would be preferred for the post. It listed the "upper castes" as Brahmin, Kshatriya, Baniya, Patel, Sayyid (a Muslim upper caste), Syrian Christians (an elite Christian group from Kerala) and Parsis.

Upper caste groups and a group of people affiliated to the Sangh Parivar did not waste time in vandalising the NGO’s office. They were obviously scandalised—how can anyone in India expect the savarnas to clean toilets? How dare such a notice go up?

What the notice intended to do was put forward many thought-provoking questions.

No one wants to clean toilets — if the upper caste does not want to do it, how can they expect another set of human beings to be okay with it?

As the owner of the NGO Prasad Chacko rightly put it in one of his interviews: “For centuries, the Dalit communities have been forced to do it. Now it is the time that all savarna communities realise their criminal complicity in perpetuating this inhuman casteist practice. So I feel that it is our social responsibility to invite savarnas also to engage in this occupation.”

On the one hand, all these so-called upper caste savarna groups call for the end of reservation, citing the reason that every community has moved ahead and should not be valued according to what their ancestors did for a living. They argue that things have changed; that there is no taboo nor any discrimination.

At the same time, they go up in arms at the sight of a few words that link their names to a degrading occupation that is still forced upon Dalits. The hypocrisy is well-evident.

Each religious group blames the other for denigrating them.

If this indeed is denigration, then why is it applicable to just one class of the society? How can an advertisement to invite candidates be a crime, but employing human beings to work in inhumane conditions that are banned by law still carry on without any legal obstacle?

It is high time we realised that sentiments don’t have colour, caste or race. If your sentiments get hurt when you are asked to clean faeces, so do everyone else’s.