{"id":1193,"date":"2001-09-09T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2001-09-09T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2001\/09\/09\/2001-09-09-thousands-of-hindu-dalits-convert\/"},"modified":"2001-09-09T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2001-09-09T12:00:00","slug":"2001-09-09-thousands-of-hindu-dalits-convert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2001\/09\/09\/2001-09-09-thousands-of-hindu-dalits-convert\/","title":{"rendered":"Thousands of Hindu Dalits Convert"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/aponline\/international\/AP-India-Mass-Conversions.html\">GO TO SOURCE<\/A><\/P><br \/>\n<P><\/p>\n<p>LUCKNOW, INDIA, Sept. 9, 2001: Thousands of Dalits, often segregated as &#8220;untouchables&#8221; in India&#8217;s Hindu caste hierarchy, converted to Buddhism at in a northern Indian city. Leaders of the late-Saturday ritual by some 6,000 Dalits said they were protesting discrimination by upper caste people and India&#8217;s failure to raise caste issues at the racism conference in Durban, South Africa that concluded over the weekend. In Kanpur, 240 miles southeast of India&#8217;s capital, New Delhi, hundreds of monks in flowing robes arrived from Nepal, Japan and other countries to witness the ceremony, which was presided over by a Japanese Buddhist priest. Participants were distributed posters condemning Hinduism, the religion of India&#8217;s overwhelming majority. Several Dalit groups had met in the South African city to press for inclusion of caste-based discrimination in the U.N. World Conference on Racism. They said caste-based discrimination in India was as bad as racial discrimination in other parts of the world. But Indian officials lobbied, and succeeded, in keeping it off the conference declaration.<br \/>\n<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>GO TO SOURCE LUCKNOW, INDIA, Sept. 9, 2001: Thousands of Dalits, often segregated as &#8220;untouchables&#8221; in India&#8217;s Hindu caste hierarchy,,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1193\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}