{"id":487,"date":"2001-02-06T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2001-02-06T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2001\/02\/06\/2001-02-06-untouchable-villagers-in-madurai-to-take-to-islam\/"},"modified":"2001-02-06T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2001-02-06T12:00:00","slug":"2001-02-06-untouchable-villagers-in-madurai-to-take-to-islam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2001\/02\/06\/2001-02-06-untouchable-villagers-in-madurai-to-take-to-islam\/","title":{"rendered":"Untouchable Villagers In Madurai To Take To Islam"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.rediff.com\/news\/2001\/jan\/16satya.htm\">GO TO SOURCE<\/A><\/P><br \/>\n<P><\/p>\n<p>MADURAI, INDIA, January 16, 2001: Dalit (untouchable) residents in a village in Madurai district of Tamil Nadu plan to convert to Islam, blaming it on social stigma and the state government&#8217;s failure to meet their economic demands. &#8220;All Dalits in the village intend converting to Islam,&#8221; said the local panchayat (village governing body) president, Murthy. &#8220;The upper castes don&#8217;t respect us and untouchability is a curse when it comes to eking out a living,&#8221; he explained. It is not only the illiterate among the Dalits who feel ostracized. Even a post-graduate from the village says that conversion is the only way out to &#8221;buy social respect.&#8221; Murthy said that over 25 Dalit families in the village intend to convert to Islam on Friday.<br \/>\n<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>GO TO SOURCE MADURAI, INDIA, January 16, 2001: Dalit (untouchable) residents in a village in Madurai district of Tamil Nadu,&#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-487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487","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=487"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}