Reality of Equality- Does Equality Serves Justice?

Equality and Justice/equity aren’t the same, one may interpret the same meaning but in fact, both have different aspects. Equality stands for social equality, equal opportunity for all, and ensuring an equivalent privilege in every life. Equality guarantees that no one should be set off by caste, religion, race, sex, etc.

It has no skepticism that from intolerance to equal rights for everyone we have fought a long battle and still fighting. Equality has a strong impact that everyone who is born in this world at least should not have an indigent life due to our social norms. Their caste, religion, and sex should not come in between their success and it’s my conviction that it’s logical also. Here we will talk over why?

Where does the ‘Equality’ word come from?

Equality word comes from the Middle French word ‘equalite’ swooped from Latin aequalitas, which means the same in quality, measure, and value. Equality came under the law for providing basic fundamental rights and holding the government beholden to basic human rights.

As a result, we have a strong law against discrimination. We can’t disavow that from the beginning people from different caste, religion, race, and gender was deprived of social equality, for instance, they were not allowed to sit with higher ones and were being called Untouchables. They were deprived of the right to education and couldn’t go to the upper caste gatherings.

Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar also known as Babasaheb Ambedkar took a strong stand against social discrimination he was seeing since childhood, he motivated the Dalit Buddhist movement and campaign against intolerance of ‘Untouchables’.

As a result of this movement, those who were considered lower ones got their basic rights and the right to education. Social discrimination against them somehow also being reduced. But the question arises “Is Equality exists?” What actually lies in the ground reality? Is the rule of law within the books?

Let’s talk over this.

Ground Reality of Being Equal

This is a controversial topic from the beginning, many heated debates we can see on television but this is not enough. It is very bleak to know that in the modernization era things have not changed much. A reservation has provided many social windfalls to them and today they can have their social life but the mindset of deprivation has not changed yet.

In the rural areas still, these customs can be observed very easily, I have seen these things very closely as I belong to remote areas. I feel very guilty that these things somehow followed in my locality also, and after many tries, I failed to make a change. That’s why I am trying to write something about it so that I could transform the mindset of ‘being Equal’.

These practices can often be observed in rural areas. According to the National UNICEF and Human Rights Watch, there are 250 million people affected by Caste discrimination in the world and most are from Asia, Where 200 million are Dalit and Schedule Caste.

This figure astonished much when One side we are bestowing a connotation that there is no imbalance exists and at the same eternity there is one caste which is still bound to do the same task for years.

Here I am talking about the Valmiki samaj/community in India also known as Sweepers and scavengers. We can often see them cleaning up the public toilets, cleaning the sewerage, public hospitals, and manual scavenging (removal of manual human excrement from the public sewer, gutters, etc).

Now the question arises why not anyone else does that work? Aren’t we snatching justice in the name of equality?

Does Equality Means Justice?

I think definitely no because equality is related to equal rights for everyone and Justice is a fair and true decision for everyone. Here when we talk about the Valmiki community, I think government tries to give them equal rights by reservations and attractive accommodations but not doing justice to them, before we go further look at the stats first.

In India, often there is a reservation, the policy has been implemented by the DR. Bhim Rao Ambedkar who’s try was to give equal status to vulnerable peoples. However, it’s very disheartening to know that even after the reservation the job converted ratio is very low.

Now, one could argue that if we give reservations sometimes denies justice.

According to The Times of India Survey, there are 93% of managers are Non-SC in the private sector but the stats is pretty much good in the public sector. Around 46000 Workers are in Leathering work from which 41000 are stuck with their traditional work- Like Dhusia, Chamar, etc.

Moreover, 76,000 Sweepers are In Uttar Pradesh Of which 50,000 are from Valmiki Samaj (a community). It’s become a matter of concern when their occupation becomes a cause of death for themselves. According to a recent analysis in 2019 around 110 sweepers lost their life in manual scavenging and it has increased by 60% from previous years. For more information, read the India manual scavenging issue.

Moving toward the point, Caste still decides what to do and how to do it. Well after caste the inequalities also exist in Gender, education, religion, etc. Let’s see how?

Existence of Inequality

Moving first with gender disparity, despite many awareness programs, and a high GDP Growth rate, we somehow lack equality for women and men. It can be seen that even after many years of Independence, the ratio of women’s dominance is still not much higher than in developed countries.

And, perhaps this may be the reason that even after 70 years, India’s top court has not had any female Chief Justice yet. It may possible there might be another reason for it, but it should also be taken into consideration while talking about Equality.

Still, the distribution of income prevails by gender, we can count the name of successful women at our fingertips, isn’t it strange? Related post:- Significance of women in the world.

Now come to Education, here equality means the same way of education and learning to every child, which is good. But every child sitting in the classroom has their own needs, different dreams, different perspectives, and different ways of learning why only the same way of learning is preferred? Here I expect that many of you will also disagree with me. Therefore, we made a separate post regarding schooling. Check this post Does schooling interfere with your education?

What Can be the Solution?

Equality is the souls of liberty,

there is, in fact, no liberty without it

Frances Wright

Equality Is something more than just making a law, we have to properly examine whether these prevail in society or not. We make sure that there must be an equal distribution of income, it’s our moral duty, to make vulnerable people live better. All I want to say we have to change the mindset. The stereotype thinking should be checked immediately.

Although I agree that the concept of equality doesn’t apply sometimes due to a variety of reasons. Because at times delivering Justice is far better than following the concept of equality. And I don’t think that I can explain better than these two images. What do you think?

And yes, No one is of lower caste or anything unless we quote them publicly or make them inferior. As the government has made a reservation policy for providing them equal rights but at the same time they are putting them into a special category.

As a result, this reservation could give them equal rights but not social justice because the taboo of the lower caste is still not removed yet. These caste words should be removed from our daily life or we should teach the next generation, that no caste exists. We all are equal.

We should not depend on one community to make our surrounding hygiene we should have to come together to clean a little fraction of our area. Let’s give them an opportunity to make life better.

Edited By:- Ritish Sharma

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