If we look at other numbers including that of rape and kidnapping mentioned in the meme, we find similar deceptions that we find in the numbers for murders. We could continue to deconstruct this meme further. But that would be flogging a horse that is pretty dead already.

But two manoeuvres may need some consideration as they may not be readily apparent.

First, the implication that all crimes against SCs represented by these numbers are due to caste “discrimination" or “oppression”. While a section of the crimes may be because of hatred between communities, to imply that all crimes are due to only such motives is a hasty generalisation without any evidence. Have the propagandists spreading the meme not even considered the fact that the numbers being quoted are general rates of crimes against Scheduled Castes and hence also include cases in which even the accused belong to the Scheduled Castes?

Also, if we look at some of the cases in question, through the publicly available court judgments and documents, we find that many of the crimes have had motives such as personal enmity, altercations over business transactions, marital discord, property disputes, love affairs etc - similar perhaps to why some French commit crimes against other French and some British against other British. This is unless one wants to resort to lazy Orientalism to assert that Indians are motivated only by that thing called “caste” and there are no crimes in India that are correlated with interpersonal and socio-economic interactions that are known to exist in all populations, the world over.

Secondly, it appears that both, the drafters of the European Parliament’s resolutions and Arundhati Roy, to some extent realise that the claims made on behalf of these numbers are not borne out by the numbers themselves. They hence scaffold these numbers with a caveat that these crimes are also excessively under-reported.



Under-reporting of crimes is a known phenomenon in all populations. But severe violent crimes, especially those resulting in death, are considered less likely to be significantly under-reported except in extreme conflict zones or places where there is a long-term breakdown of law and order or of mechanisms that report these crimes. But to make a claim of excessive violence against SCs even when the crime statistics show the opposite, one has to resort to extraordinary claims about the levels of under-reporting of crimes against SCs. Roy, for example, has to pull a number straight out of her hat, which she calls the “rule of thumb” by which only 10 per cent of crimes like rapes and murders against Dalits are supposed to be ever reported. What is the basis of this "rule of thumb"? A fiction writer’s wild imagination? If true, would it not imply that the numbers Roy herself quotes so passionately are actually off by a margin of 900 per cent? What purpose would it then serve to quote those numbers? Are numbers meant only as aesthetic embellishments to the rhetoric?

Also, if 90 per cent of murders of Scheduled Castes in India indeed go unreported, as Roy implies, that would amount to more than 6,000 dead bodies hidden away every year. Is there even a shred of evidence to make such macabre claims? And even if we for a moment, suspend all logic and reason to accommodate Roy’s reckless manoeuvre and the arbitrary number she supplies, it would still give us rates of murders of Scheduled Castes that are nearly on par or marginally above the average rates of murders in India, and not excessively higher. Roy could have conjured up a more profitable magic-number than the 10 per cent she comes up with. Say 5 per cent, 2 per cent or 1 per cent? While still being spurious and arbitrary, these could at least have made her claims seem a bit substantial and somewhat mathematically coherent with the numbers she quotes.

Having seen through the propaganda, it is important for us to note that the low levels of violence that the crime statistics indicate should in no way be construed as a reason for being lax or less vigilant. Every attempt should be made to recognise and further reduce crime by effective monitoring and improving the police and criminal justice systems. But building a propaganda based on incorrect data and wrong statistical judgment laced in ideology and theology is in no way of any help to Dalits or in reducing crime or violence against anybody. Rather such exaggerated and false narratives create unnecessary frenzy between communities leading to mistrust and possibly even to violence.

Has the European Parliament passed strictures against Britain or Germany, for example, or other countries of Europe, most of which have far greater rates of crimes compared to what the European Parliament quotes as the rates for crimes against Dalits in India? Why not? And, more importantly, how is it that the wordings of the European Parliament’s resolutions fit so precisely with the atrocity propaganda of the evangelist groups to the extent that even the deception in statistics is exactly reproduced? When the European Parliament passed resolutions castigating India and expressing alarm, did they not even consider those numbers carefully? And how is it that nobody could detect such simple mathematical and logical errors? What explains for such collective blindness?

The meme possibly gives us some hints. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins who introduced the concept of ‘meme’ tells us how memes like whistle tunes, lyrics of songs, ideas etc sometimes acquire mutations or errors that make them more prone to replication, because the errors may render the meme more conducive to a certain environment. These memes replicate, overshadowing the original, becoming rampant and even universally present. Something similar seems to have happened with the above meme on caste violence. The deception embedded within it, which completely inverts, twists and misrepresents the numbers, seems to have made the meme replicate itself throughout an environment that is congenial particularly to hoaxes, stereotypes and a skewed view of India.