I spent the day yesterday with my friends from Dhruba, a Bangladeshi NGO based in Khulna which serves the needs of the Dalit community in southwestern Bangladesh. This area is home to at least 50 Dalit villages, communities of 200-400 people each, extremely poor farmers and laborers. Mostly Hindu. We must have spent 8 hours on the motorcycle yesterday, going from village to village meeting with entire Dalit communities who had gathered for the occasion in the flimsy bamboo structures that serve as local schools. It was an incredible day, filled with stories of both abuse and discrimination and the ever-present, hopeful smiles of young kids, the future of their communities. They have an uphill battle, because in Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world, the Dalits are at the very bottom of the socio-economic ladder, kept there by a combination of discrimination, poverty and injustice.
It’s often hard for people in well-developed countries to relate to the mindset created by the past caste system, but
