Twenty-five years after the Durban World Conference Against Racism (2001), Dalit human rights defenders and allied movements across India convened a series of city-based symposia to confront a foundational omission in global human rights law: the continued marginalization of caste and analogous systems of inherited social hierarchy.
These gatherings focused on the urgent task of addressing caste and descent-based discrimination as global phenomena, situating Dalit struggles within international legal frameworks and transnational solidarities. The question at stake was not simply one of recognition, but of capacity: whether global human rights institutions can meaningfully confront forms of hierarchy that are structural, inherited, and embedded in everyday social and economic life.
Durban’s Silence and Its Afterlives
The Durban Declaration and Programme of Action (DDPA) did not explicitly name caste-based discrimination. Yet it repeatedly invoked discrimination based on “descent,” a category that has since become central to anti-caste advocacy at the United Nations. The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) has consistently affirmed that caste falls within the scope of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination through this clause.
This position was formally articulated in CERD’s General Recommendation XXIX (2002), which clarified that descent is not reducible to race and includes caste and analogous systems of inherited status that impair the equal enjoyment of human rights. Subsequent reviews by treaty bodies such as CEDAW, CAT, CRC, and CESCR have addressed caste-based discrimination in state reporting processes, reinforcing that caste is not a culturally exceptional issue but a legitimate concern of international human rights law.
UN Special Rapporteurs and other Special Procedures have similarly treated caste and inherited systems of exclusion as falling within their mandates. Further, a study mandated by the former Commission on Human Rights led to draft principles on eliminating discrimination based on work and descent, defining it as exclusion rooted in inherited status—whether through caste, occupation, family, community, social origin, or place of residence.
Caste, Descent, and Global Parallels
Communities identified as Communities Discriminated on Work and Descent (CDWD)—including Dalits in South Asia, Roma communities in Europe, Haratine and Osu communities in Africa, Burakumin in Japan, and Quilombola and Palenque communities in Latin America—experience strikingly similar patterns of exclusion. These include inherited status, stigmatized or forced labour, residential and educational segregation, barriers to political participation, gendered violence, and exposure to contemporary forms of economic unfreedom.
Despite these parallels, caste and descent-based discrimination remain fragmented within international discourse, often treated as regional, cultural, or historical problems rather than as structural global injustices. The symposium series sought to address this gap by advancing a shared analytical framework for understanding caste globally, while refusing any flattening of distinct histories, contexts, or political identities.
Deepening Understanding, Building Strategy
Led by the Asia Dalit Rights Forum (ADRF) and the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR), and organized with groups including the Global Forum of Communities Discriminated on Work and Descent (GFoD), Indian Social Institute (Delhi and Bengaluru), Centre for Inclusion at the University of Hyderabad, Centre for Social Justice, Madras School of Social Work, the National Federation of Dalit Women (NFDW), Social Awareness Society for Youths (SASY), and the Association for Social and Economic Equality, the campaign brought together activists, scholars, and movement leaders from across regions and sectors. Dalit Voice was part of this collective effort.
Key figures anchoring the symposium included Paul Divakar Namala, Global Convenor of GFoD and a longstanding Dalit rights advocate, and Beena Pallical, Dalit feminist leader and General Secretary of NCDHR, who played a central organizing role in shaping the convening and its political direction. At the Bengaluru symposium, Salil Shetty, founder of the Dalit Sahitya Academy—under which Dalit Voice operates—and a member of the Dalit Voice Steering Committee, participated in the proceedings, marking the connection between the symposium and Dalit Voice’s longer trajectory in internationalist movements.
The principal intellectual intervention was offered by Dr. Asang Wankhede, lawyer and scholar on caste and analogous systems of hierarchy, who traced how caste has been engaged within international legal and political forums, drawing on both scholarly analysis and lived experience of global advocacy.
Discussions spanned how caste and analogous systems intersect with race, slavery, and occupational stratification; examined legal frameworks such as ICERD, CERD General Recommendation 29, and ILO Convention 111; mapped similarities and differences across regions; and analyzed intersections with gender, labour exploitation, economic injustice, and global supply chains—particularly the experiences of Dalit and CDWD women. The symposium also foregrounded lived experiences and resistance strategies while exploring coordinated national and international advocacy through coalition-building and movement convergence.
The symposium was attended by activists and practitioners from a wide range of social justice movements, including Abirami Jotheeswaran, Bezwada Wilson, Somnath Waghmare, and Professor Uma Kant, alongside members of organizations working across caste annihilation, labour rights, gender justice, education, cultural resistance, and human rights advocacy.
Between International Norms and Political Reality
A central tension at the symposium concerned the distance between international norms and political reality. Distrust of global governance is justified: civic space is shrinking, social justice commitments are diluted, and states routinely avoid accountability. International law is not neutral or external to power; it is produced and enforced through hierarchies of caste, race, and capital. Authority does not vanish in global arenas—it is rearranged.
Caste remains unnamed not for lack of evidence, but because recognition disrupts dominant narratives of progress, democracy, and cultural exceptionalism. Silence functions as a governing strategy. Framing caste as culture rather than domination shields hierarchy from scrutiny. Withdrawal from international spaces is therefore a political act, not neutrality. Meaningful engagement must be adversarial and rooted in movement autonomy. Its purpose is leverage, not representation: compelling acknowledgment, exposing institutional contradictions, and increasing the cost of denial. Where caste structures labour, migration, and supply chains, refusal to name it signals complicity rather than caution.
Dr. Asang Wankhede’s work as Lead Research Consultant for the Australian Human Rights Commission’s National Community Consultations on Caste Discrimination (2024) illustrates both the possibilities and limits of such engagement. The process contributed to formal recognition of caste-based discrimination in Australia, mapping how caste circulates through diasporic formations, social institutions, and economic networks, while also revealing the resistance these claims provoke. As long observed, “If Hindus migrate to other regions on earth, Indian caste would become a world problem.” Growing recognition beyond South Asia confirms its global political weight.
Participation in international forums does not guarantee transformation, and gains remain partial and contested. The significance of this work lies in rendering hierarchy legible where it is denied and forcing institutions to confront what they seek to ignore. Addressing caste across borders is not optimism, but an insistence that inherited domination remains visible, actionable, and politically unavoidable.
Paresh Hate is a Bahujan queer researcher, writer, documenter and activist and the Lead Content Manager at Dalit Voice.
