Israel and India face a common concern. Both Zionist and Hindu caste discrimination could be raised at the UN's World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Relate Intolerance opening in Durban, South Africa, on August 31. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, has warned Yasser Arafat not to derail the conference by demonising Israel. The US will not be there, it has warned, if its ally is to be vilified by equating Zionism with racism.

The draft resolution against Israel charges it with "ethnic cleansing," "crimes against humanity" and practicing "racial superiority." This indictment finds full support from the barbarous Israeli conduct and conception. In asserting common ancestry and exclusive and eternal rights to the "promised land" as God's "chosen people," Israel's ideological foundation declares its "supremacy" over all other "inferior" beings.

Hence, its forcible expulsion of the Palestinians from their centuries' old homeland and a blatant refusal to let them return even while opening its citizenship to all Jews the world over. If this isn't discrimination, what is? It is a matter of detail whether this discrimination is racial or religious, or both.

Even so, Israel may escape chastisement at Durban. Its improving relations with the Arabs had allowed the UN in 1991 to rescind a General Assembly resolution of 1975 equating Zionism with racism. The Arabs, having again experienced the Israeli whiplash, would like to revive the 1975 equation. But India, like the US, will oppose overloading the conference with "extraneous issues."

For the US, which had boycotted the first two conferences (in 1978 and 1983), there is another reason for staying away. The African nations are demanding an apology and compensation for slavery and colonisation. The ever moralising super power does not fancy being reminded of its ugly past, much less having to pay for it.

Besides, its present isn't pretty either. Amnesty International says blacks and whites are murdered in almost equal numbers in the US. But more than 80% of the convicts executed since 1977 were charged with killing a white person. There is, thus, an 80% chance of getting away with the murder of a black person.

The Washington Post found that "9.7% of black males in their twenties are imprisoned, compared with 2.9% of Hispanic men and 1.1% of white men in the same age group. This disparity exceeds anything that can be explained by differential rates of criminal activity across racial groups. When it comes to assault, burglary and drug crimes, for example, more whites are arrested than blacks. And yet more blacks are behind bars for all three categories of offence." What, if not ingrained and institutional racism, accounts for this abomination?

The European colonisers would also not like to be held accountable by their former slaves. Like the US, they prefer a "forward looking" agenda covering racial discrimination against refugees, asylum seekers and migrants. Important contemporary issues, undoubtedly, but spring from the colonial hangover. Like 4,500 white farmers still owning 75% of Zimbabwe's prime land, and rich white South Africans spending more money on protecting their residential enclaves than the entire national budget for black housing. Thus, for future attitudes to change, the shameful past has to be acknowledged and atoned for.

As for India, Amnesty International says its 160 million Dalits (the non-caste "untouchables") are vulnerable to a range of abuses because their caste is a license for the police to disregard the crimes committed against them. Regardless of how far the Hindu caste system follows race lines, it is a 3000-year-old Brahmanic creation to institutionalise slavery - with the Dalits, tribal people and minorities, not fitting into the four standard castes, considered unclean sub-humans whose mere sight is polluting.

Commenting on India's hectic efforts to exclude caste discrimination from Durban, the Times of India noted two grounds on which its case was based. One, that caste is "unique to Indian society and its historical processes" and is, thus, not debatable in a forum discussing multi-national issues. Two, "caste discrimination is essentially social and class-based in nature and falls outside the definition and purview of racial discrimination."

The first was rejected because "if caste operation can be likened to racial discrimination in some essential respect" then it was debatable under the "rubric of race." Greater umbrage was correctly taken against the second premise from which flows the bizarre argument that "caste discrimination (is), in essence, no more than an economic division of labour gone awry" as the Indian attorney general Soli Sorabjee, "educated" the UNHRC in Geneva.

The paper felt that "economic and social discrimination is not the essence of the caste system but only an effect." Caste-system was, thus, very much equatable with racial distinction as it ranks "entire social groups and populations on the basis of accidents of birth." Hence its assertion that "the undeniable fact of continuing caste operation must, therefore, not be allowed to become a victim of false nationalist pride."

But this politically correct view is not widely practiced in India. Its National Human Rights Commission, a body supposedly independent of the government and headed by a former supreme court judge (J S Verma), has withdrawn from the Durban conference even though it seems the organisation which should be most concerned with the ravages of caste and least concerned with the official attempts to skirt the shame.

Chairman Verma's reason for non-participation: "Durban might give you a platform to discuss and bring home new ideas to tackle the (caste) menace, but it will not ensure their translation into action." He is obviously not a Dalit and, thus, international pressure and "new ideas" carry no significance for him.

However, some human rights groups, backed by academics and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the only political party to do so, are gathering evidence to prove at Durban "that caste-based discrimination remains one of the biggest scourges on humanity" and, contrary to the official Indian view, it is not a domestic issue which "should be kept within the national jurisdiction." They aim to use Durban to compel the Indian government to accept caste-prejudice as "an element of racial discrimination" and that "caste atrocities are a bigger stigma."

At the heart of the debate is the misery of India's Dalits. Comprising 16% of the population, the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights says these "untouchables" are almost invisible in government service and elected offices - but form "the backbone of the country's sanitation workforce." As for their future, only 15% Dalit children join school against 83% high-caste children.

This being the fruit of 54 years of democracy, the official Indian spokesperson rejected Durban on the plea that there exists an "enabling environment within India, such as the judiciary and the executive, to tackle the (caste) issue." True, but not true enough for the Dalits.

Mahatama Gandhi was discomfited by the term "untouchable" as it soiled the grand vision of India's emergence on the world scene as a democracy. He, thus, renamed them Harijans (children of God). This subterfuge hid the ugly reality until exploded by the firebrand Mayawati, leader of the lower-caste Bahujansamaj Party. If Dalits are God's children, she blasted a sheepish interviewer, are the others (the upper castes) sired by the devil?

Thus, despite the laws and constitutional guarantees, the socio-religious curse continues. In the Hindu Kingdom of Nepal, there wasn't even this legal pretence. Awakened perhaps by the imminence of Durban, Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba has promised to outlaw the discrimination against "our (lower-caste) brothers and sisters" and to punish "untouchability". Dalits, he said, would now be free to enter any temple without hindrance. Going by the Indian experience, Dalits need not hold their breath.

Thus, the definitional hair-splitting aside, caste and racism are both degrading and discriminatory. But while these may by articles of faith in Hinduism and the well-spring of white and Zionist supremacists, we too are not entirely free of similar prejudices - which is more culpable considering Islam's emphasis on human equality and equity.

Fair skin, for example, is still deemed socially superior. But a more shameful residue of Hinduism, is the lingering social disdain for the 'Kammis' (workers). The peasants, potters, weavers, cobblers, barbers, sweepers, etc are still considered lesser beings, particularly in rural Sindh and Punjab. There is also human bondage, and the new educational apartheid. Thus, even if we face no embarrassment at Durban, there is a lot of equalising to be done at home.

The writer is a freelance columnist