Tag Archives: Caste

Dalit Voice is inviting pitches for a thematic booklet on injustice and discrimination in formal institutions. Formal institutions often claim to operate through rules and ideas of merit and professionalism with a veneer of neutrality and objectivity. But the everyday life of institutions reveals that they are shaped by the same structural and ideological patterns of discrimination and inequality that shape society more broadly. At the same time, institutional practices themselves help reproduce and shape discriminatory social relations within and beyond those institutions, especially when they wield significant power within society. We want to examine how systems of social power and discrimination exist within and enter institutional life, how they shape the experiences of people from marginalised and oppressed communities, and how institutions in turn affect those who encounter them from the outside.

The call is open for social justice writing on universities and schools, workplaces, courts, government departments, political parties, media organisations, cultural institutions, NGOs, religious institutions, professional bodies and other formally constituted organisations.

Some possible questions include:

• What happens when an institution’s stated rules come up against practices of discrimination and bigotry?
• What does discrimination and bigotry look like in the functioning of a particular institution?
• How do people from marginalised and oppressed communities navigate institutions where they remain underrepresented or unequally situated?
• What happens when discriminatory and bigoted practices within an institution are challenged?
• How have particular institutions changed in response to struggles over social justice?
• How do institutional rules, norms and practices reproduce existing forms of social power or create new forms of discrimination?
• How do people respond to and challenge institutional forms of discrimination?

These questions are intended to suggest possible directions rather than define the scope of the call. Contributors are welcome to approach the theme from other angles.

Formats

1. Long-form essays — 3 pieces
   Approx. 4,000-5000 words
   Honorarium: ₹8,000 per piece

We are looking for deeply researched pieces that investigate a specific institution, question, history, event or development. The research need not be academic. It might involve interviews, documents, archival material, reporting, data or other sources appropriate to the subject. We want essays that have something substantive to establish or uncover, rather than opinion pieces expanded to 4,000 words.

2. Short commentary — 5 pieces
   Approx. 1500-2000 words
   Honorarium: ₹3,000 per piece

These can engage with an institutional development, controversy, decision, debate or question, whether recent or longstanding. We are looking for pieces that offer a fresh way of thinking about the subject and develop a clear argument.

3. Reviews — 3 pieces
   Approx. 1200-1500 words
   Honorarium: ₹2,000 per piece

Reviews of books or other forms of media that offer an entry point into questions of social inequality, discrimination, bigotry and formal institutions. We are particularly interested in reviews that use the work to open up a wider political, social or intellectual question.

Sending a pitch

When sending a pitch, please give us a clear sense of what you want to write, what you want to examine, and why the subject is worth examining. Rather than pitching the broad issue itself, identify a concrete subject through which you can explore the larger questions raised by the theme.

For example, a pitch on “discrimination in higher education” would be too broad. A pitch examining patterns of exclusion in the recruitment practices of a particular university, the handling of a discrimination complaint, the experience of a particular group within the institution, or the history of an institutional policy gives us a clearer sense of the proposed piece.

For long-form essays, please explain what you intend to investigate and what material or sources you expect to draw on. For commentaries, tell us the argument you want to develop. For reviews, tell us the larger question you want to explore through the book.

Priority will be given to pitches from and about communities that experience structural marginalisation and oppression, including Dalits, OBCs, Adivasis, religious minorities, women, queer and trans persons, and other historically excluded groups.

All submissions should be original and unpublished.

Dalit Voice reserves the right to edit commissioned pieces for length, clarity and consistency with the booklet’s editorial requirements.

Submission

Please send:

• A 500 word pitch of your proposed piece
• A short bio less of less than 100 words
• The name of the format you are applying for

Each contributor may submit one pitch only.

Send your pitch to dsa@dalitsahityaacademy.com.

Timeline

Pitch submission deadline: 23 October 2026.

Selected contributors will be notified and commissions confirmed by 30 October 2026.

Accepted contributors will be expected to submit the completed piece by 22 November 2026.

The booklet is being produced on a fixed schedule. If a commissioned piece is not submitted within the stipulated timeline, the commission will be withdrawn so that the booklet can proceed on schedule. If you expect a problem meeting the deadline, please let us know before it passes.

Honorarium will be paid upon submission of the completed commissioned piece.

“The purpose of a system is what it does,” Stafford Beer once said: not what its charter claims, not what its founders intended, not what its defenders insist it’s secretly working toward once the numbers look bad. The line comes from Beer’s work in cybernetics and systems theory, but it travels well, because it was really a warning against taking any institution’s word for itself. Apply it to the state and the sentence stops being quippy and starts being uncomfortable. A state does not do what its Constitution’s preamble promises. It does not do what its bare acts say it must. It does what its politicians ignore until an election forces a promise out of them. It does what a police force using violence on citizens with impunity does. It does the slow torture bureaucrats in government offices administer by attrition. It does the routine ignoring of injustice courts specialise in. Everything else is marketing.

A state’s default setting isn’t a neutral one, but it isn’t a fixed conspiracy either: it simply doesn’t move unless it’s made to. Every gain anyone has pulled out of a state came after someone made not conceding more expensive than conceding.

Reservation itself carries the memory of that fact in its own founding story. Ambedkar’s original demand, at the Round Table Conferences, was a separate electorate for the Depressed Classes: our own constituencies, our own voters, our own representatives answerable to no one else’s veto, a political existence independent of Hindu society rather than embedded inside it. The Communal Award of August 1932 granted exactly that. Gandhi, in prison, announced a fast unto death to force its withdrawal, blackmailing the Depressed Classes and its leaders as well as the British rulers, on the ground that a separate electorate would permanently divide Hindu society. Ambedkar held out against a starving man for days before the political pressure, not the argument, became unbearable on practical grounds, and what emerged from the negotiation at Poona was not the separate electorate but reserved seats inside a joint electorate: more seats than the Award had granted, 148 in the provincial legislatures instead of the original allotment, but folded back into the same political body Ambedkar had tried to exit. Reservation was not the original ask. It is what remained after the original mandate was made impossible by someone else’s leverage and the Hindu moral bankruptcy behind it. The instrument defended for ninety years since it has itself been a settlement, arriving at under duress, from a wider claim.

Rahul Sonpimple, founder of the All India Independent Scheduled Castes Association (AIISCA), made a version of this point at a press meeting on private sector reservation in Delhi on 27th September, framing reservation as something closer to a treaty than an entitlement: a thin, fragile thread and the only one tying Dalits, Adivasis and OBCs to the Indian state, functioning not as generosity but as a negotiated peace. It buys the state and the dominant castes who still hold most of the country’s assets a measure of calm from a majority whose rightful share has otherwise been denied, while giving the numerically dominant Bahujan population some working proxy for the democratic weight their numbers should carry. A contract, not a gift. Except a contract is only as good as what a party can be made to perform under it, and a state that already treats its own preamble as marketing will treat a contract no differently.

A contract implies parties, and a state, unlike a private employer, actually has one with its citizens. It demands loyalty, taxation, submission to its law, alongside the monopoly to dictate the political fates of those within its territory, in exchange for a set of standing obligations back. A private firm asks for labour under a contract either side can in principle at least walk from, and owes nothing back to someone who was never bound to it in any comparable way. That asymmetry is a large part of why a claim on the state’s own hiring is different in kind from a claim on a firm’s, not because the state behaves more responsibly in practice, as we are all well-aware, but because it owes something on the terms of the relationship itself. Although an obligation the state owes but doesn’t perform is worth exactly as much as a preamble it doesn’t act on.

A private firm is not identical to the state, and the case for reaching it anyway doesn’t depend on pretending otherwise. It rests on two separate facts. The economy itself has changed since the framers drew the line at public employment, and a social justice framework confined to the public sector now leaves most of economic life untouched, because most of it no longer sits inside the public sector at all, a gap widened further by the same state’s ongoing privatisation of what public capacity remains, shrinking the one terrain where proportional representation currently carries legal force. But the second fact runs deeper and doesn’t depend on how recent liberalisation is: a private sector built on land, credit, licenses and infrastructure the state provides, privatising its profits while routinely and unsparingly socialising its costs through subsidy, tax concession and public investment, has never sat outside the state’s reach in the first place, this was true of Indian capital before 1991 as much as after it. A firm that depends on the state which itself takes from the public commons for that much can never be allowed to answer to nothing beyond its own balance sheet.

Even so, there’s a real limit to what representation alone produces. Elevated individuals from a movement or caste often become instruments of the institution’s own legitimation rather than being accountable to the base that elevated them, and when they try to push further beyond the constraints and the logics of those systems, they get cut down by the sheer weight of social forces unwilling to tolerate the progress already made. Despite that, political reservation has still converted into something more durable than individual token presence, an independent structure of Bahujan power that didn’t exist before it, even as oppressor-caste violence against that rise has grown alongside it. What government service has that the private sector doesn’t is exactly this: decades of organised structure built up around the reserved seat, structure that keeps contesting the ceiling even where it doesn’t break through it. The private sector has never had an equivalent foothold, and no amount of employer voluntarism has ever built one. That’s the case for statutory reservation even in its thinnest form: not that a quota alone delivers equality, especially substantively, but that it’s the minimum legal anchor around which durable, organisable power can be built at all.

Against that backdrop, private sector reservation is not a new demand groping for its first hearing. It has been formally raised for close to two decades. The All India Confederation of SC/ST Organisations was pressing the case as early as 2012, organising a march on Delhi backed by three dozen SC/ST organisations, arguing plainly that no nation stays strong while its economic and social levels remain this split. But even before that, in 2003, then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee addressed a meeting of SC and ST MPs and said that the private sector cannot exist in isolation and has to be responsive to the needs of the society, making it essential to have reservation in the private sector. This was followed by a broad consensus among electoral parties across the ideological spectrum on the matter, even though it has not yet been translated into political will or substantive action. One concrete effort came in 2006, under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, when he appealed directly to Indian industries to become the government’s partner on the question. However, rather than legislate a mandate, the government let industry regulate itself: CII, FICCI and ASSOCHAM each adopted a Voluntary Code of Conduct built around four pillars, Employability, Education, Entrepreneurship Development and Employment. That October, the PMO had already constituted a Coordination Committee on Affirmative Action in the Private Sector, chaired by the Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister, drawing on the Department of Personnel and Training, the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, and serviced by the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion. The Committee has met nine times since. By 2010, the government’s own review found adoption of the voluntary codes was slow; by 2013, it was still describing the same dialogue as ongoing; by 2015, industry associations were reporting hundreds of member companies signed on. Twenty years of this arrangement has produced a voluntary code without enforceable duties, and industry associations professing over a lakh of beneficiaries with no verifiable representation data to back the figure. Now we cannot sit once again with a renewed appeal for goodwill. What is needed is to go beyond an empty promise and fight for a statutory guarantee: a binding quota, backed by rule of law, not another code any signatory can stop honouring when they feel like it.

On 26 July 2024, that demand reached Parliament directly. Chandrashekhar Azad, MP for Nagina, introduced a private member’s bill titled the Reservation for the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes and the Other Backward Classes in Private Sector Act, 2024, one of three private member’s bills he introduced in the Lok Sabha that day. It covers private firms, educational institutions and other establishments employing at least twenty people with no government financial stake. Even this bill stops short of a binding hiring quota: its mechanism is incentive-based, requiring the central government to induce private firms toward reservation through special concessions and lower-interest loans via nationalised banks, with an annual implementation report tabled in both Houses. Structurally, a private member’s bill has almost no chance of becoming law: enactment is the exception, not the rule, and has been for decades. That a bill this cautious, relying on incentives rather than quotas, remains a private member’s bill and is still pending says something about how far Parliament remains from treating this as settled business.

But the case for the demand itself rests on documented discrimination. Sukhadeo Thorat and Paul Attewell’s 2007 correspondence study sent matched applications under upper-caste Hindu, Dalit and Muslim names to private-sector job advertisements in the English dailies and found discrimination operating at the very first screening stage, before any interview, before any assessment of merit beyond a name on a page. Zahra Siddique’s 2011 work went further, quantifying the size of the gap and who was driving it: low-caste applicants had to send 20% more resumes than high-caste applicants to get the same callback rate, with the disparity sharpest when the recruiter was male or Hindu, and more pronounced at smaller firms than larger ones. Axmann, Swanson and Cuspinera Contreras, using Indian Human Development Survey data in 2016, found significant wage discrimination against Dalits and Adivasis specifically inside the private sector. Madheswaran and Singhari, drawing on National Sample Survey employment data the same year, found SC workers earning less than equally qualified forward-caste workers in urban labour markets, with the gap wider in private employment than public, and unequal access to occupations itself doing much of the work in producing the disparity. Pattayat’s 2024 study of rural non-farm workers, using NSSO and PLFS data spanning 2004-05 to 2019-20, found the earnings gap persisting across that entire period and examined how much of it discrimination itself accounted for.

Article 15(5) already gives the state constitutional room to act on half of this. Inserted by the 93rd Amendment in 2005 and in force since January 2006, it permits special provision by law for socially and educationally backward classes, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in admission to educational institutions, explicitly including private institutions, aided or unaided, with the sole carve-out for Article 30(1) minority institutions. Because education sits on the Concurrent List, both Parliament and state legislatures can act under it, and several states have already legislated on private educational admissions. Tamil Nadu enacted a 2006 law providing 69% reservation for Backward Classes, Most Backward Classes and Denotified Communities, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in private educational institutions. Andhra Pradesh had already applied SC, ST and Backward Class reservations to admissions in private professional institutions through its admission rules. Karnataka’s 2006 Professional Educational Institutions Act provides for 50% reservation for SCs, STs and OBCs in unaided non-minority professional institutions. Maharashtra enacted a 2006 law providing reservation for SCs, STs, Denotified Tribes, Nomadic Tribes and OBCs in private professional educational institutions, while Haryana’s 2016 Backward Classes Act provides reservation for Backward Classes in admissions to educational institutions, including private institutions.

What that record shows is that Article 15(5) has been given statutory effect at the state level, but unevenly and without a nationwide framework. A Parliamentary Standing Committee report presented to the Rajya Sabha in August 2025 said that private educational institutions are currently under no national legal obligation to implement reservation because there is no central statute mandating it. It recommended that Parliament legislate 27%, 15% and 7.5% reservation for OBCs, SCs and STs respectively in private higher educational institutions, with government reimbursement of the associated costs on the model of the Right to Education Act. Although a sincere Caste Census may tell us that the necessary numbers should be much higher, the constitutional ceiling on reservation itself also needs to be revisited.

What Article 15(5) doesn’t reach at all is employment, and that gap isn’t small: education and employment were never separable; a degree that doesn’t convert into a job is a credential, not a livelihood. One state that tried a binding private-sector quota by its own legislation ran straight into that trap. Haryana’s 2020 State Employment of Local Candidates Act mandated 75% reservation for domiciled candidates in private jobs under a salary threshold, with a 10% district sub-cap built in, not a caste quota, a domicile one. The Punjab and Haryana High Court struck it down in 2023 as unconstitutional and violative of Part III of the Constitution; the challenge to that judgment remains pending before the Supreme Court. The deeper problem predates the ruling: the 93rd Amendment gave the state constitutional room to reach private education specifically and never extended that room to private employment. Domicile was the classification that failed here, not caste, but replacing domicile with caste would not by itself resolve the Article 19(1)(g) problem, because no amendment has yet done for employment what the 93rd did for education. That is what this demand still needs and hasn’t gotten: not just a statute, but a constitutional amendment opening the same room for private employment that the 93rd opened for private education, without which any statute meets the wall Haryana did.

Winning that room would still only secure a narrower claim than the one Ambedkar himself eventually made. Private sector reservation, at its most comprehensive, means reservation in private employment, reservation in private educational institutions, and an Equal Employment Opportunity Act as organizations like AIISCA and others have been demanding: legislation with a working complaint mechanism, an investigation process, ongoing monitoring, and real accountability, reaching recruitment, wages, promotion, workplace treatment, termination, occupational allocation, contract employment and professional advancement, not just the moment of hire. That last piece is the one twenty years of voluntary codes never touched, because a Voluntary Code of Conduct had no enforceable complaint mechanism and no statutory consequence for ignoring it. A statute would. But even this full slate, a foothold at every stage of the employment relationship, asks only for fair terms of entry into an economy whose ownership stays exactly where it already is. It is a claim to be treated fairly inside the room. It has never been a claim on who owns the room.

Ambedkar’s own economic writing sits alongside all of this as one part of a longer record, that expands the horizon of economic fight itself. In States and Minorities, the memorandum he prepared for the Constituent Assembly on behalf of the Scheduled Caste Federation, he proposed a state control over economy in which key industries would be owned and run directly by the state and basic industries owned by the state and run through its own corporations, with land held under state ownership and cultivated through cooperative farming, aimed at dismantling landlordism and the agrarian exploitation caste had built itself around. That program was never incorporated into the Constitution in the form Ambedkar proposed. Although a version of that was found in the Nehruvian socialist project, which was itself eventually given up in the face of global neoliberal onslaught. What it shows, regardless of anyone’s own view of state ownership as a remedy, is how early and how directly Ambedkar located the actual target in who owns the economy, not merely who holds a fair position inside it.

Ambedkar’s economic target, and the demand for reservation in the private sector, concern forms of structural injustice that are harder to see than the moments when that injustice erupts into visible violence. That shapes not only who gets to have this conversation and on what terms, but who is willing to listen to it. Oppressor-caste liberals attend to Dalit-Bahujan life most readily through the news cycle of atrocity, because atrocity is visceral and immediately legible, while the guilt of a grieving conscience often springs into action only when Dalit-Bahujan rage forces that attention. A Dalit-Bahujan body demands attention in a way a hiring statistic does not. A wage-discrimination dataset spanning fifteen years, a Coordination Committee that has gone nowhere, a bill pending in Parliament since 2024, none of these produces the same urgency because none offers an easy villain, a headline image or a clean moment of collective horror to perform. Grieving a corpse asks nothing ongoing of anyone. But there is a real villain here, even if it is harder to identify in any single moment: the state, which owes more than what it does and routinely shows where its priorities lie, alongside the structural violence produced through years of oppressor-caste apathy at best and antipathy at worst.

The historical record here is a caution, not a reason to wait. What survived Poona wasn’t Ambedkar’s original demand: it was a narrower settlement that still had to be fought for afterward, seat by seat, for decades, before it was more than ink. The same will be true of a private-sector statute and an Equal Employment Opportunity Act alongside it. Winning them will not finish anything on its own; a seat is captured as often as it’s built on. Beer’s sentence applies once more, now to the law: a statute’s purpose isn’t what its statement of objects and reasons says either. It’s what the Act does. Whether the complaint mechanism gets used, whether a violation carries any real cost, whether the oversight committee holds its next meeting or goes missing in action the way it already has. None of that follows from any bill becoming an act. It follows only if the pressure that forces the act into existence keeps being applied after it exists. Because a state, as established, only holds what it’s made to hold.

Paresh Hate is a Bahujan queer researcher, writer, documenter and activist and the Lead Content Manager at Dalit Voice.

There is a persistent, naive belief in India that premier engineering institutes are pristine spaces of pure meritocracy, immune to the social hierarchies of the world outside. The institutional murder of 22-year-old Sahil Ravindra Wakode at IIT Bombay violently shatters this myth. Sahil, a first-generation student from Yavatmal, entered IIT carrying the monumental hopes of his parents, who had endured lifelong socioeconomic deprivation. Academically stellar, with a category rank of 614 in JEE Advanced and an 8.5 CGPA in his first year, he was exactly the kind of brilliant mind these institutions claim to nurture. Yet, upon stepping into this elite campus, he encountered an environment engineered not for his intellectual growth but for his profound psychological alienation.

A Predictable Structural Output

What transpired on September 18, 2026, was not an isolated tragedy or an individual anomaly. It was the predictable output of a structurally casteist institution.

Data shared by IIT Bombay sociologist Prof. Suryakant Waghmore reveals a grim reality: between 2019 and 2023, of the students who dropped out of IITs, 56% were from the General Category, 25% OBC, 13% SC, and 5% ST. These disproportionate figures are the direct consequence of systematic, daily caste-based hostility. The mechanism of this exclusion is well-documented: marginalized students, often first-generation learners from rural or non-English medium backgrounds, are thrust into a hyper-competitive campus culture dominated by upper-caste privilege. A recent interim report by the National Task Force (NTF) explicitly noted that students from disadvantaged communities face severe isolation because they are routinely excluded from the dominant campus culture, failing arbitrary social “vibe checks” set by privileged peers. Ground reports reveal that Dalit and Adivasi students are frequently stigmatized as “reservation candidates,” alienated from informal peer study groups and subjected to constant indirect pressure and microaggressions from unsensitized faculty.

When academic struggles arise, this pre-existing environment of social boycott and lack of institutional mentorship compounds their stress into profound psychological trauma, ultimately forcing them to drop out simply to survive.

During a mid-term examination, Sahil was caught using his mobile phone to search for answers on ChatGPT. Under extreme academic stress, this is a disciplinary infraction that warrants standard administrative recourse. Instead, the invigilator, Prof. Suryanarayan Doolla, allegedly bypassed procedural norms, subjecting Sahil to profound public humiliation and threats of immediate expulsion. This hostility was not a sudden outburst. For three months prior, Sahil’s father alleged that Prof. Doolla had constantly taunted and humiliated Sahil over his caste.

This tragic pattern echoes the institutional deaths of Darshan Solanki (2023) and Aniket Ambhore (2014), where internal mechanisms ultimately operated to shield the administration, and there is little reason yet to expect a different outcome this time.  In Solanki’s case, the 12-member internal committee headed by Prof. Nand Kishore shamelessly blamed his death on ‘poor academic performance’ and ‘aloofness,’ deliberately ignoring multiple testimonies and prior SC/ST Cell surveys that documented severe caste-based alienation on campus. Similarly, after Aniket Ambhore fell to his death, the A.K. Suresh Committee report recorded that professors had humiliated him for being a ‘category student’ and suggested he belonged in a ‘normal’ engineering college. Rather than penalizing the offending faculty, the institutional response minimized this overt casteist violence as mere ‘academic pressure,’ protecting the institution’s reputation at the direct expense of truth and accountability.

Administrative Deflection: Individualizing the Systemic

The administration’s immediate reflex was to criminalize Sahil, reducing a systemic failure to a singular moment of student misconduct. Within hours of his death, IIT Bombay hastily issued a statement explicitly accusing him of copying via AI, feeding a convenient “cheating” narrative to the media. When student outrage erupted over this blatant lack of empathy, the administration deleted the statement, only to issue an apology days later on X (formerly Twitter) which admitted it was ‘inappropriate’ to characterize details before investigations concluded, stripped of any meaningful accountability.

CCTV footage from the exam hall and hostel lobby entered the public record as part of the investigation. A source described the footage: between 12:30 and 12:45 PM, just minutes before the exam was to end at 1 pm, Sahil was seen bending and checking something in his pocket, after which Prof. Doolla was seen questioning him and taking him aside, away from other students. The same source said Wakode was then seen leaving the hall and, by around 1:25 pm, entering his hostel room, after which he did not leave again before he was found dead.

This timeline, once public, kept the story anchored to the exam-hall infraction: a student caught peeping at his phone, confronted by his invigilator, entering his room forty minutes later. What it does not show, and cannot show, is the three months of alleged caste-based taunting that preceded it. By foregrounding a visual record of the “cheating” moment while offering no equivalent documentation of the harassment the family alleges, the timeline reinforces the same individualizing frame as the administration’s original statement: it locates the cause of Sahil’s death in a single infraction rather than in a pattern of institutional hostility building for months.

The Crisis of Representation and Profound Isolation

The root cause of this unchecked harassment is the glaring absence of marginalized communities in positions of academic power. Out of 6,000 professors across IITs in the country, only 149 belong to Scheduled Castes (SC) and 21 to Scheduled Tribes (ST). This meager 2.8 percent vividly illustrates a reality of academic apartheid. Representation is an active structural antidote to institutional violence. When campuses lack Dalit, Adivasi, and Bahujan faculty, marginalized students are cut off from organic mentors who can decode their unique sociological realities and intervene before distress turns fatal. Without such allies in academic and administrative bodies, grievances of casteism inevitably hit a brick wall of apathy erected by an overwhelmingly upper-caste establishment, one that routinely lacks the sociological vocabulary to perceive caste violence, dismissing it as ‘individual merit failure.’ True representation breaks this cycle because faculty from oppressed backgrounds possess the institutional legitimacy to challenge biased disciplinary actions and dismantle the discriminatory peer dynamics and psychological isolation that force first-generation learners to internalize their trauma.

The systemic closing of ranks to protect upper-caste faculty is horrifying. Following protests by nearly 6,000 students, IIT Bombay merely removed Prof. Doolla from his post as Dean of Administrative Affairs, flatly refusing to suspend him from his active professorship. This distinction is a deeply sinister protection racket. By retaining his teaching, research, and departmental evaluation roles, the administration ensures that an individual accused of severe caste-based intimidation continues to wield life-and-death academic power over students in the very classrooms where these abuses occur. It signals to the campus that an accused upper-caste professor can be temporarily shuffled out of the public eye to defuse protests, while his systemic authority to grade, pass, or fail vulnerable students remains completely untouched. This ongoing structural proximity to power leaves marginalized learners utterly defenseless, trapped under the authority of the very educator accused of driving their peers to the edge.

In response to the criminal FIR filed under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act against Prof. Doolla, the ‘IIT Bombay Faculty Forum’ and the ‘IIT Delhi Faculty Forum’ rushed to issue coordinated defensive statements, framing Doolla as an educator ‘discharging his academic duties’ against a student accused of ‘academic malpractice.’ The IIT Delhi Faculty Forum audaciously condemned the massive student-led demonstrations, warning against what it termed ‘mob-driven behaviour’ that supposedly pressured the administration into taking action. This rhetorical framing is a cynical, institutional inversion of reality: it pathologizes student solidarity and legitimate political outrage as a ‘mob,’ criminalizing accountability while shielding an upper-caste professor from legal scrutiny. This collective closing of ranks exposes an ugly, protective arrogance: the system will ruthlessly safeguard its own elite status and shield its perpetrators at the direct expense of marginalized student lives.

Performative Gestures vs. Structural Remedies

Despite four students losing their lives under the tenure of the current Director, Prof. Shirish Kedare, the administration’s most heavily publicized “solution” to this crisis was a cynical architectural modification: removing ceiling fans from hostel rooms and installing wall-mounted ones. This administrative reflex lays bare a profound moral bankruptcy and an evasion of institutional responsibility. This shows a lack of comprehensive and considerate thinking toward student welfare. In the presence case, too, modifying ceiling fans treats only the final, terminal physical symptom of unbearable psychological distress, while leaving the actual, rotting disease, institutional casteism and unchecked faculty harassment, entirely untouched. This intervention operates on a perverse and absurd logic: it assumes that removing a mechanism of self-harm eliminates the profound despair that causes it, ignoring the toxic, hostile environment engineered by upper-caste hegemony that drives these brilliant minds to the edge. It is a hollow, paternalistic cosmetic fix designed solely to insulate the administration from legal liability and public outrage, substituting genuine, structural accountability with superficial tinkering that treats human lives as mere logistical inconveniences.

Nationwide, a staggering 171 students have committed suicide in IITs over the last 20 years. Altering the method of death while leaving the toxic environment intact is an insult to the lives lost. Real remedy cannot be found in performative, procedural gestures. The solutions must be structural and uncompromising:

Mandatory Anti-Caste Sensitization: Professors and administrators must undergo rigorous, mandatory anti-caste education to dismantle centuries-old biases, moving far beyond superficial paper compliance. This demand is a direct corrective necessitated by Prof. Doolla’s alleged conduct and the elite institutional immunity that protected him. Had rigorous anti-caste training been mandatory, the months of alleged casteist taunts, public humiliation in the exam hall, and the subsequent closing of ranks by faculty forums would have been treated as structural crimes rather than routine disciplinary exercises. Sensitization must dismantle the upper-caste impunity that allows figures in power to weaponize academic rules against marginalized students without administrative consequence.

Independent Investigations & Accountability: Internal inquiries are historically biased. Investigations into student deaths and allegations of caste discrimination must involve independent committees with external democratic representatives to ensure transparency, able to investigate faculty conduct and administrative attempts to shield those accused of misconduct. Their findings must lead to clear institutional action rather than being buried in internal procedures. No faculty body or administrative office should be allowed to investigate itself when students’ lives and allegations of caste discrimination are at stake.

Robust Mental Health Infrastructure: The emotional bankruptcy of these institutions must end. As demanded by the protesting students, there must be an independent audit of the Student Wellness Centre, the appointment of at least one counselor per hostel (or per 250 students), and 24/7 availability of trained psychiatrists equipped to understand the sociological realities of caste trauma. Students must be able to seek help without being treated as the problem or fearing consequences within the institution. Mental health support must recognise caste humiliation and discrimination as sources of distress rather than reducing every crisis to academic pressure.

True Representation: Aggressive and inclusive faculty recruitment policies must be enforced to bridge the 2.8% representation gap, bringing Dalit, Adivasi, and Bahujan voices into positions of academic authority. This cannot mean a few token appointments while decision-making remains dominated by the same social groups. Reserved positions must be filled and representation must extend to committees and positions with real institutional authority. Students should not have to navigate institutions where almost no one in a position of power shares or understands their social experience.

Until this arrogant system of so-called ‘merit’ acknowledges that its campuses function as exclusionary spaces for the marginalized, institutions like IIT Bombay will continue to fail their students. Accountability must be demanded, and the structural roots of casteism must be dismantled, so that no more students are driven to the edge by the very institutions meant to educate them.

Mujammil Shahin Siraj Shaikh is a Pune-based independent researcher and prospective PhD scholar examining structural inequality, public policy, and institutional power in modern India.

Nationalist Demands in the New Law

The Prevention of Insults to National Honour (Amendment) Bill, 2026 was introduced by Amit Shah in the Rajya Sabha on 24 July 2026. Its Statement of Objects and Reasons recalls that Rajendra Prasad, as President of the Constituent Assembly, said on 24 January 1950 that Vande Mataram would be “honoured equally” with Jana Gana Mana. It notes that no legal provision existed to prevent interference with the singing of the National Song and proposes to address this by amending Section 3 of the 1971 Act, which already made intentionally preventing the singing of the National Anthem, or disturbing an assembly engaged in singing it, punishable with imprisonment of up to three years, a fine, or both, with a mandatory minimum of one year for a second and subsequent conviction. The amendment extends that same offence, and the same penalties, to the National Song. Article 51A(a) names the Constitution, the national flag and the national anthem as objects of citizens’ respect; it has never named the National Song.

The amendment arrived alongside a separate, longer-running push to change what gets sung. Vande Mataram has six stanzas; since 1937, only the first two have been used at national gatherings, a convention set by the Congress Working Committee. The Ministry of Home Affairs had already moved to reverse that convention on its own, issuing a protocol on 28 January 2026 requiring the full six-stanza version at government, ceremonial and cultural events, well before this amendment existed. That protocol was advisory and, as the courts would go on to hold twice over the following months, carried no penalty of its own. Only after those two challenges failed did the government tighten the position twice more: a July 9 MHA letter to all states specifying that only the official six-stanza version could be recited whenever the song was sung in mass singing, and then, on 24 July, the amendment itself. Where both the song and the anthem are performed at one event, Vande Mataram now goes first. Schools are directed to open assemblies with it, although many schools already practiced this of their own volition. It is to be played at state functions, civilian award ceremonies, flag-hoisting events, and the arrivals and departures of the President and Governors.

The Political Fight Over the Song
The push for the full six-stanza version followed a ten-hour special discussion in the Lok Sabha in December 2025 marking the song’s 150th anniversary, in which the Prime Minister accused the Congress of having “sowed the seeds of division” by trimming the song. In 1937, the Congress Working Committee, after consultation with Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rabindranath Tagore, Subhas Chandra Bose, Rajendra Prasad and Vallabhbhai Patel, decided that only the first two stanzas would be used at national gatherings because of objections to the religious imagery in the later verses. Tagore had written to Nehru that the first two stanzas had “acquired a separate individuality and an inspiring significance of its own,” while the later verses, read in context, “[are] liable to be interpreted in ways that might wound [Muslim] susceptibilities.” Congress rejected the Prime Minister’s charge, pointing to this 1937 decision and Tagore’s letter and accusing the government of manufacturing the controversy for present gain in the context of then upcoming elections, a charge Priyanka Gandhi Vadra made directly. The Congress Working Committee has since reaffirmed the two-stanza position for its own party programmes.

The dispute has now also moved into a question of federal authority after the Karnataka government ordered on 8 September that only the first two stanzas be sung at state government programmes, except when the President, Vice-President, Prime Minister or Governor is present. Within days, advocate Girish Bharadwaj filed a PIL challenging the state’s authority to prescribe a shorter version, arguing that the matter falls within Parliament’s residuary legislative powers and that the state order conflicts with the 2026 amendment to the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act. The petition also challenged the procedure by which the Karnataka Cabinet took the decision, alleging that it was approved as an “Informal Discussion” without a Cabinet Note or Law Department advice. Governor Thaawarchand Gehlot then wrote to Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar, invoking Articles 162, 256 and 257(1) and asking the government to reconsider its order on the ground that it conflicted with the Union’s statutory and executive framework. On 16 September, BJP MLA S.N. Channabasappa walked out of a government programme in Shivamogga after only the first two stanzas were sung.

The opposition, however, has also been weak in resisting the Centre’s position. In Kerala, the Congress-led UDF government initially circulated the Centre’s instruction that Vande Mataram be sung in full during the Har Ghar Tiranga campaign from 9 to 17 August. This put a Congress-led government in the position of appearing to implement the same six-stanza version promoted by the BJP-led Union government, despite Congress’s objections to treating the full version, with its references to Hindu deities, as a compulsory expression of national identity. The CPI(M) criticised the UDF’s position, with Leader of the Opposition Pinarayi Vijayan arguing that the song “in its entirety is not compatible with secularism” and that “there is nothing wrong with reciting the opening stanzas”, and accusing the UDF of surrendering to an RSS agenda. The UDF subsequently clarified that it would not follow the full version, and the state government ultimately omitted Vande Mataram from its official Independence Day function.

The song’s meaning has remained contested within the communities whose religious commitments are most directly implicated by it, a history the government’s “everybody knows what is national song” formulation simply passes over. The distinction made in 1937 remains central to the dispute: the Congress Working Committee accepted the first two stanzas for national gatherings while recognising objections to the later verses and their religious imagery. Muslim religious authorities have continued to make this distinction. Darul Uloom Deoband and Maulana Mahmood Madani have objected to the later verses on the grounds that their depiction of the motherland as divine conflicts with the Islamic doctrine of tawhid, while the All India Sunni Ulema Board ruled in 2006 that Muslims could sing the first two stanzas.

The dispute, however, has not been confined to Muslim objections. During the 2006 centenary controversy, the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee initially instructed its schools not to sing Vande Mataram, with its president arguing that it promoted a particular religion and did not fulfil the aspirations of minorities, before subsequently backing away from that position. In 2026, the Andhra Pradesh Christian Leaders Forum objected to the newly mandated full version, specifically citing its references to Durga and their implications for Christian beliefs. The question is therefore not simply whether Vande Mataram is the national song, but what religious content the state is asking people to affirm when it mandates the complete text. The Home Ministry’s circular treats that underlying question as though it had never been contested. Where it does allude to the religious objection, it reduces it to a question of Muslim reluctance, allowing a disagreement over religious belief to be recast as a question of patriotism.

The Text Behind the Mandate
The distinction between the first two stanzas and the later verses can be traced to how the song was written. Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay had written the first two stanzas in the 1870s, describing a land of rivers, fruit and gentle winds. He added four more when he incorporated the song into his 1882 novel Anandamath, and those later stanzas carry the divine imagery: the third stanza calls the motherland “protector of millions and destroyer of enemies,” the fourth names her Durga, Lakshmi and Saraswati outright, while the fifth and sixth complete the poem as a vow of devotion.

Anandamath provides the setting in which those later stanzas acquire their political and religious meaning. Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay is one of the key figures of proto-Hindutva politics in British India, and the novel is set during the Sannyasi Rebellion. Its protagonist, Mahendra, a zamindar separated from his family amid famine and unrest, falls in with the Santans, a band of ascetic soldiers who have taken up arms to liberate the motherland from Muslim rule, with the British entering the story only later. One of Satyananda’s disciples wants to “pull down the city of the renegades” and “throw it into the river.” Bhavananda, inducting Mahendra into the cause, tells him “unless we drive these tipsy long-beards away, a Hindu can no longer hope to save his religion,” and answers the question of method with “we will beat them.” He then leads Mahendra to the order’s temple, where, standing before the idols of Durga and Kali, he tries to fill him with religious fervor for the fight ahead. Elsewhere in the novel, the Santans send emissaries into villages to gather bands of Hindus, then raid Muslim settlements, which are burned “to ashes.” Characters imagine the day a mosque will be razed to build a temple to Radha-Madhava in its place. The four later stanzas of Vande Mataram were written for, and inside, this story. This is the context of the text now mandated by law.

The Limits of the Law’s Imagination
That January 28 protocol was challenged twice. In February, Muhammed Sayeed Noori approached the Supreme Court, arguing that requiring the complete version raised questions of religious freedom and conscience. On 25 March, the Court declined to entertain the petition, holding that the protocol was advisory and carried no penalty for those who chose not to sing, while leaving open the possibility of intervention if the advisory hardened into actual discrimination or coercion. A parallel challenge in the Karnataka High Court, filed by Bengaluru-based advocate Somashekhar Rajavamshi, objected specifically to the inclusion of stanzas three through six and their references to Durga, Saraswati and Lakshmi; the High Court dismissed it on 9 April on the same ground, that the protocol did not make singing the full version mandatory.

The 2026 amendment changes that position. The January protocol could prescribe the full version’s use; it could not, on its own, criminalise a refusal to sing it. The amendment extends the National Song to the Section 3 offence applicable to the National Anthem since 1971: intentionally preventing its singing, or disturbing an assembly engaged in singing it.

On 22 September 2026, the Supreme Court heard a petition by T. M. Krishna, with senior advocate S. Muralidhar appearing for him. The petition challenges the 2026 amendment insofar as it extends the existing criminal provision to the National Song. It also challenges the Home Ministry’s directions requiring the complete six-stanza version at official functions. The petition argues that the amended provision and the directions violate Articles 14 (equality before the law), 15(1) (prohibition of discrimination on specified grounds), 19(1)(a) (freedom of speech and expression), 21 (protection of life and personal liberty) and 25(1) (freedom of conscience and the right to profess, practise and propagate religion).

The Court refused to decide whether the National Song should consist of two stanzas or six, indicating that this was for the democratically elected state to determine rather than for the Court to prescribe. Justice Bagchi also questioned the suggestion that religious references in all six stanzas are, by themselves, incompatible with the Constitution’s secular character, pointing to the reference to God in the US national anthem. That another country’s anthem contains a religious line does not make it a benchmark for what India’s Constitution should tolerate; it only shows that one other state has also let religious language sit inside a national symbol. Whether a lingering religious motif of that kind is compatible with secularism is exactly the question in front of the Court, and pointing to a second, unexamined instance of the same thing does not answer it. The Centre has two weeks to respond, and the Court has not yet ruled on the constitutional validity of the amendment or the six-stanza directions.

At the hearing, however, the Court drew a distinction between the State’s choice of a national symbol and the use of criminal law in relation to participation in it. Nothing in the amendment says that simply refusing to sing Vande Mataram is itself an offence; the crime, as under the original Section 3, is preventing others from singing or disturbing an assembly engaged in it. The question before the Court is therefore whether the protection recognised in Bijoe Emmanuel, which concerned refusal to sing the National Anthem under that same original section, also protects a person who refuses to sing the National Song on grounds of conscience or religion while leaving others free to do so.

That leaves an odd gap. If the amendment truly does not touch a refusal that neither prevents others from singing nor disturbs an assembly, the state loses nothing by saying so outright, and Krishna’s petition should fall outside the law’s reach without a fight. The Centre resisted even the issuing of notice, and Solicitor General Mehta pressed the Court not to entertain the petition at all. That resistance points to a state interest that Section 3’s text does not itself supply: the discretion to withhold, for as long as possible, any confirmation that non-participation is safe.

Bijoe Emmanuel v. State of Kerala, which the Court said still governs the field and has never been challenged, is the case that established that refusal to sing the National Anthem, where the person neither prevents others from singing nor disturbs the assembly, does not constitute an offence under Section 3. In 1986, the Court considered three schoolchildren in Kerala who belonged to the Jehovah’s Witnesses faith. They believed that singing the National Anthem was incompatible with their religious convictions, although they had no objection to the words or sentiments of Jana Gana Mana. During their school’s morning assembly, they stood silently while the anthem was sung. After the issue was raised, they were expelled from school, despite an inquiry finding that they were law-abiding and had shown no disrespect. The Supreme Court held that their expulsion violated their fundamental rights. It also held that there was no law obliging anyone to sing the National Anthem and that their standing silently while it was sung did not constitute an offence under Section 3 because it neither prevented the singing nor disturbed the assembly.

The Court in Bijoe Emmanuel answered for the facts it had: the children stood, in silence, while others sang, and that was respect enough. Whether sitting, or some other form of non-participation, would count the same way was never argued before it, and the judgment does not say. The Court’s later National Anthem jurisprudence went further than Bijoe Emmanuel by imposing a general requirement to stand, but went no further in deciding whether an able-bodied person who chose not to comply had thereby committed an act of disrespect. In Shyam Narayan Chouksey v. Union of India, the Court initially ordered, in 2016, that the National Anthem be played before every feature film and that everyone present stand. It subsequently recognised exceptions for people unable to stand and for occasions when the anthem appeared within a film, newsreel or documentary. In 2018, it made the playing of the anthem before films optional and handed the wider question of its regulation to the government. What remained unresolved was whether an able-bodied person who deliberately remained seated when the National Anthem was played had thereby shown disrespect.

Article 51A(a) requires citizens to respect the Constitution, the national flag and the national anthem. That language concerns respect for specified national symbols, while Section 3 concerns conduct that interferes with their public performance. The Constitution speaks of an attitude of respect; Section 3 defines specific acts that the law prohibits. Bijoe Emmanuel is the only case here that actually examined a specific act of non-participation and ruled on whether it counted as respectful: the children stood silently while others sang. Chouksey, by contrast, imposed a general rule about what everyone present in a cinema hall had to do when the anthem was played, and later withdrew the requirement that the anthem be played there at all. The distinction between respectful and disrespectful non-participation has therefore never actually been adjudicated on its own terms. That leaves the discretion to decide sitting with whoever is enforcing the law in the moment, not with any settled rule a citizen could rely on in advance. And even supposing that gap could be closed, and the state produced a clean definition of respectful non-participation tomorrow, a further question is why a person should have to demonstrate respect for a national symbol through participation of any kind, rather than simply being left alone by the law altogether.

Article 51A(a) itself answers none of this. The Fundamental Duties, inserted into the Constitution by the 42nd Amendment in 1976, are not enforceable in court. No citizen has ever been prosecuted for an abstract failure to respect the Constitution, the flag or the anthem. Section 3 punishes specific conduct: preventing a performance, disturbing an assembly, even though the boundaries of that conduct can still be interpreted and policed according to the discretion of whoever is enforcing the law. Article 51A(a) supplies the word “respect” and nothing else. It does not say what respect consists of, and it does not say respect must be shown rather than merely left unviolated. The state has built a criminal statute that reaches only interference, and rested it on a duty clause that was written to describe an attitude, not to compel an act.

The Right Not to Sing
The present controversy asks a larger question about the limits of state power over national rituals. A person may have a religious objection to the text, reject the use of a national symbol altogether, or simply choose not to participate. If that refusal does not prevent anyone else from singing, what is the state entitled to demand from the person who refuses? Even as the space for conscientious objection shrinks in the shadow of ultranationalism, we must continue to ask: why should the state require that refusal to take a prescribed form of respect, and why can it not leave room for people to decline participation altogether?

Archival Note

Published in Dalit Voice (Vol. 29, Issue No. 03, 01/02/2010), this essay by V. T. Rajshekar examines Hinduism through the question of caste. He traces caste divisions to the Purusha Sukta and the Bhagavad Gita, then turns to the Manusmriti and its treatment of Brahmins, Sudras and women.

Rajshekar connects these religious texts to the oppression of Dalits and cites accounts of violence against Untouchables alongside condemnations of caste from writers and public figures. His argument leads to a direct question: if caste is part of the religious order Rajshekar identifies as Hinduism, can Hinduism exist without caste?

The essay closes by putting that question to the Hindu believer featured in the film that prompted Rajshekar’s article. How can Hindu faith be reconciled with the caste system? And if caste is rejected, what does that mean for the religious traditions that Rajshekar argues have sustained it?

Read the full piece here

British Anthropologist Details Barbarity of Hinduism

“Revelations: How do you know god exists”, is a film by Anthony Thomas (Channel 4). I saw this film on Aug. 16, 2009. I was particularly interested in what the Hindus had to say. I lived in India for 15 years and found their belief system very confusing. The Hindus as well as the others interviewed failed to show us how he knew god exists.

PART-1

The caste system & origins of Hinduism:

Hinduism is based on myth. Seven rishis overheard “wisdom” being spoken by the gods. This wisdom they passed on to mankind as the four Vedas:

1. Rig Veda
2. Yajur Veda
3. Sama Veda
4. Atharva Veda

The Rig Veda is our principal concern. It is a composition of 1,028 poems. But more of this later.

HINDU & GREEK GODS

33 crore gods:

According to Lord Winstone (April 17, 2006), the Hindus have about 330,000,000 gods. Shiva, one of the main gods, has 1,008 epithets. Most deities have consorts: Shiva’s wife is Parvati, Vishnu’s wife is Lakshmi and Brahma’s wife is Sarasvati. Mention must be made of two other important gods: Durga and Kali. Sitala is the goddess of smallpox. And the Hindu deity Devagana, it is believed, lives in the anus. And so on.

The Greeks also believed in gods and goddesses. The Greek philosophers found that the gods and goddesses resembled mortals too much and the “myths were nothing but human notions”.

Xenophanes who lived about the year 570 BC was the exponent of this view. There followed developments from a mythological mode to one based on experience and reason. The aim of Greek philosophy was to find natural rather than supernatural explanations for natural processes. The Greek gods and goddesses were then relegated to the realms of fiction.

But the Hindus, on the other hand, continue to believe in their gods and goddesses to this day. The Hindu belief that human beings are born unequal is based on a Vedic hymn called Purusha Sukta found in the fourth veda, the Rig Veda.

According to the Purusha Sukta, the social divisions into which all human beings fall are:

(1) Brahmins, the highest caste, (2) Kshatriyas, the warrior caste, (3) Vaisyas, the merchant caste and (4) Sudras, the working caste.

GOD CREATED CASTE SYSTEM

Outside this demarcation based on strict hereditary lines are the outcastes or Untouchables, who do not belong to any caste at all. They are called Dalits today. It was further confirmed by God Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita (4.13):

The fourfold caste was created by me by the different distribution of guna and karma.

It was finally codified by someone called Manu, the greatest lawgiver.

Who was this Manu?

Manu was born directly of the god Brahma and was hermaphrodite. The human race began from Manu and his family. (Romila Thaper: A History of India, p. 28).

HINDU LAWS OF MANU

Gidoomal and Thomson on p. 17 of their book, A Way of Life, say:

Manu represents the beginning. A semi-divine mythical creature; he is the first man, the first king of India, the first to light the sacrificial fire and the first and the greatest lawgiver.

Every Hindu man and woman is expected to follow the laws of Manu which came to be called Varnashrama Dharma or Manusmriti. They were written down about 200 BC. Hindus follow the laws of Manu to the letter even to this day. And what are some of the laws set by Manu for Hindus to follow?

Here are some taken at random:

(1) The Brahmins are the highest caste. They are the gods among humans.

(2) The drum, the illiterate, the low caste, animals and women must be beaten to make them fit.

(3) A woman must never be independent.

(4) The Brahmin is holy and has a claim to veneration even if he commits shameful deeds.

(5) A Brahmin is born as the highest on earth, the lord of all created things. Whatever exists in the world is the property of the Brahmin on account of the excellence of his origin. The Brahmin is indeed entitled to it all.

(6) The lord has prescribed only one occupation for Sudras (the lowest caste). They must perform service without malice to the other three castes.

(7) Those who educate Sudras will go to hell. A Sudra is unfit to receive education. The upper varnas or castes should not impart education or give advice to a Sudra. Violators will go to hell, called Asamvritta.

(8) If a Sudra (low caste) listens to a recitation of the Vedas (Hindu holy books), his ears shall be filled with tin or lac. If he recites Vedic texts, his tongue shall be cut. Only the Brahmins are entitled to receive the teachings imparted in the Vedas.

ATROCITIES AGAINST DALITS

It is difficult to credit the misanthropic effusions as law to this man who, it is said, was the son of Brahma, the supreme god. No wonder Indian women in 2000 AD

“publicly burned copies of the Manusmriti declaring that the text was misogynistic” (Introducing Hinduism, Lall & Von Lodon, p. 30).

Then there are millions and millions of people in India who have no caste at all. They are without caste because of sins committed by them in a previous incarnation. They are called outcastes or Untouchables. Today they are referred to as Dalits.

The effect of Manu on the outcastes has been devastating. From the time they are born till they die they suffer discrimination and humiliation at every turn of their lives.

GOD ORDERED HINDUS TO KILL DALITS

They have no redress. Here are a few examples of atrocities chosen at random which are committed against the Untouchables:

(1) 1969: India: A Million Mutinies Now by V. S. Naipaul (Viking): “In 1969, 40 Untouchables (Harijans) were burnt alive in a hut.”

(2) April 14, 1992: Commemorating the birthday of Dr. Ambedkar: “20 houses belonging to Untouchables were burnt at Kadalur village (80 km from Madras).” Reported by Henry Thiagaraj in The Wounded Society.

(3) June 18, 2000: The London Observer. “A picture showing a village of low castes (Untouchables) being massacred by high caste thugs in Bihar, India.”

(4) March 30, 2003: The Guardian: “A young lower caste woman was set on fire and burned to death yesterday by the upper caste father of the man she accused of raping her.”

(5) Dec. 16, 2005: Dalit Voice (magazine, p. 9). Gohana (Haryana) incident in Aug. 2005 when 60 Untouchable houses were burnt with police looking on.

(6) 2006: Indian National Bureau of Crime report. 27,007 crimes had been committed against Dalits. Many go unreported (See box):

In 1999, William Dalrymple, reviewing Robert Deliege’s book, The Untouchables of India, says in the London Sunday Times:

“Hindus actually believe god has authorised atrocities to be committed against these Untouchables.”

UNIVERSALLY CONDEMNED

Never in any part of this wide, wide world, whether savage or civilised, is systematic murder of human beings given such divine approval, except in India. Dalrymple goes on to say in the same review:

“In many high caste-dominated villages no Untouchable is allowed to ride a bicycle, sit down or even wear shoes in the presence of a high caste Hindu… Reported incidents of serious violence against Untouchables run at about 9,000 cases annually and this is the tip of the iceberg”.

The caste system of which untouchability is the indispensable part is integral to Hinduism.

‘….those whose conduct has been evil will quickly attain evil birth, the birth of a dog, the birth of a hog, or the birth of a Chandala (Untouchable).

Chandogya, translated by Dr. S. Radhakrishnan and quoted by Pratima Bowes in her The Hindu Religious Tradition (p. 57).

The caste system and especially untouchability is universally condemned.

(1) Dr. Karan Singh, a leading Hindu thinker, in his Essays on Hinduism, quoted by Gidoomal & Thomson (p. 9), described the ill-treatment of Untouchables “over the centuries as a standing disgrace”.

(2) Pratima Bowes, The Hindu Religious Tradition (p. 17): The opinion (is) often expressed that the caste system is the centre of the Hindu religion and that the breakdown of this system means the end of this religion.

(3) Caspar Melville, editor of the New Humanist, Nov. 2005 (p. 19), is “against the caste system, the subordination of women and the invested power of the Brahmin”.

(4) Buddha to Manmohan Singh: The caste system has been condemned by writers and reformers from Buddha, Akbar, Mahatma Phule, Periyar, Gora, Tilak, Guru Nanak, Mahavira, Tukaram, Ram Mohan Roy, the Bhakti movement of Southern India to Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister of India, and countless others.

(5) Jawaharlal Nehru in Glimpses of World History (p. 112) says: “The caste system had the seeds of decay in it. It was based on perpetuating inequality and injustice and any such attempt was bound to fail in the end. No sound and stable society can be built upon the basis of inequality and injustice or on the exploitation of one class or group by another.”

BLEAK FUTURE OF HINDUISM

I give you three sources:

(1) Loon and Lall: Introducing Hinduism (p. 127):

As knowledge of India grows around the world: Bollywood, Indian fashions, Indian classical music, tandoori cooking and India’s famed gurus Hinduism will come under increasing scrutiny.

On p. 161, they go on to say:

Secular Indians and many others with a humanist vision think of the future of India as bleak.

(2) Ram Gidoomal & Robin Thomson in A Way of Life, (p. 150) say:

Whoever is in power, the tensions over caste and class will continue.

(3) Nirad Chaudry in his Preface to Hinduism (p. XI) says:

I have lost faith in the tenets of Hinduism, indeed in all established religions long ago.

CONCLUSION

Hinduism without the caste system is like Hamlet without the Prince.

I would like to ask the Hindu believer in the film wrapped in saffron robes and daubed in symbols of Hindu piety how he could reconcile his Hindu faith without the caste system.

The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) has raised serious concerns over the treatment of some of India’s most marginalised communities, including Dalits, Adivasi and tribal peoples, Rohingya, Bengali-speaking Muslims, migrants and asylum-seekers. Its findings follow the first review of India by the Committee since 2007 and examine the country’s combined 20th and 21st periodic reports under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.

The findings were issued after CERD’s 118th session, which also examined Finland, Honduras and Kuwait. This was part of the Committee’s regular review of states that have signed the Convention. CERD’s concluding observations are not court judgments and do not have the force of law. They assess how governments are implementing their obligations under the Convention and identify areas where the Committee finds serious problems.

In India’s case, CERD raised concerns spanning caste, ethnicity, religion, citizenship and policing. One of its gravest concerns was the alleged conduct of law-enforcement agencies towards Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, Scheduled Tribes, Scheduled Castes, particularly Dalits, ethnic and ethno-religious groups and non-citizens. CERD recorded reports of excessive force, racially motivated violence, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary and prolonged detention, torture, ill-treatment and sexual violence. It called for prompt, thorough and impartial investigations, with accountability where violations are established.

The reference to Dalits and Scheduled Castes also brings an older disagreement into the review. The Indian government maintains that caste should not be treated as equivalent to race or “descent” for the purposes of CERD. Its submissions nevertheless contain information on Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes and measures intended to address their disadvantages. CERD’s treatment of caste within its examination of descent and discrimination places caste exclusion within the scope of the Committee’s scrutiny, even as the Indian state rejects that equivalence.

CERD also drew particular attention to Rohingya, Bengali-speaking Muslims, migrants and asylum-seekers. It noted an increase in law-enforcement operations involving these groups, particularly after a 2017 Home Affairs order and the April 2025 Pahalgam attack. Reports of police stops and identity checks based on racial profiling allegedly resulted in arbitrary arrests and detention, torture and other mistreatment. The Committee also raised concerns about deportations and forcible returns involving people who may require international protection.

During the review, CERD Country Rapporteur Stamatia Stavrinaki referred to independent monitoring that recorded more than 1,300 anti-Muslim hate-speech incidents in 2025, including recurring rhetoric attributed to senior officials. India’s delegation responded that legislation enacted in 2023 criminalises acts amounting to hate speech and hate crimes, with additional protections applying when offences target Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. It also pointed to freedom of religion as a constitutional guarantee.

But CERD’s observations focused on what these protections mean in practice. Alongside the government’s account of its legal safeguards, the Committee recorded concerns about discrimination, hate speech, violence and the conduct of law-enforcement agencies. It called on India to address hate crimes against Rohingya, Bengali-speaking Muslims, migrants and asylum-seekers, refrain from collective expulsions and ensure access to international protection. This includes respecting non-refoulement, the principle that people should not be returned to a place where they face a serious risk of persecution or other grave harm.

The findings also address citizenship and documentation. CERD noted the absence of adequate disaggregated data on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, ethnic and ethno-religious groups, migrants, refugees, asylum-seekers and stateless people. It highlighted the categorisation of Bengali-speaking Muslims as “non-original inhabitants” and reports that they face more stringent scrutiny during National Register of Citizens verification. The Committee also noted that much of India’s available data on Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and refugees still derives from the 2011 Census, while acknowledging the delayed 2026 Census and its proposed collection of caste data through self-identification.

The treatment of Bengali-speaking Muslims in the NRC process raises a broader question about how citizenship is administered. CERD’s concern is not simply that documentation is required, but that particular ethnic and religious groups are reportedly subjected to different levels of scrutiny. In a political environment where Muslims are repeatedly cast as outsiders or demographic threats, administrative categories such as “non-original inhabitants” can acquire consequences beyond paperwork. The NRC thus becomes part of a wider system in which belonging is subjected to heightened state verification.

The concerns around Rohingya also sit within a longer history of UN scrutiny. A 2025 communication by UN Special Procedures carried allegations that deportation operations against Muslims, including Rohingya, intensified after the Pahalgam attack, involving raids, arrests, ill-treatment and forcible returns. Those allegations came through a separate UN process and were not findings by CERD or a judicial determination.

India is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol and has no comprehensive national refugee law. UNHCR therefore carries out protection-related functions for refugees and asylum-seekers in the country. This absence has become more significant alongside changes to India’s citizenship and immigration regime.

The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 was defended by BJP ministers as addressing the unfinished business or “wrongs” of Partition. Yet the CAA was not a refugee law. It created a religion-based route to accelerated citizenship for specified non-Muslim communities from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. It did not establish a general system of refugee protection based on persecution or the risk of serious harm.

And in 2025, Parliament enacted the Immigration and Foreigners Act, replacing four earlier laws governing the entry and treatment of foreign nationals. The new law consolidated the state’s immigration powers without creating a corresponding refugee protection framework. CERD’s call for protection against collective expulsions and respect for non-refoulement therefore comes alongside a strengthened legal machinery for controlling and removing foreign nationals, while India still lacks a dedicated process for determining who requires refugee protection. For Rohingya and other asylum-seekers, that leaves a basic question: what domestic procedure requires the danger they may face after removal to be considered before the state deports them?

India’s delegation, led by Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, defended the country’s legal framework and its claims of pluralism and equality. The government reiterated its position that caste should not be equated with race or “descent” under the Convention and pointed to legislation addressing hate speech and protections for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.

CERD’s findings place those claims alongside reports of how state institutions operate on the ground. The Committee’s concerns cover law-enforcement violence against Dalits and Adivasi and tribal communities, anti-Muslim hate speech, racial profiling of Bengali-speaking Muslims and Rohingya, and the treatment of people whose citizenship or immigration status is under scrutiny.

For Dalit and Adivasi communities, and for Muslims and other minorities whose belonging is increasingly subjected to state scrutiny, the findings also expose how Hindu nationalism operates through state power. Caste discrimination, communal targeting, citizenship enforcement and policing are often treated as separate questions, even as they converge in the lives of communities whose relationship with the state is shaped by unequal power. CERD’s observations bring these questions into the same examination of discrimination and direct attention towards the institutions through which unequal treatment is carried out.

“They take our sweat to cement the arches of their intellectual temples, but reserve the sanctuary for their own kin. We are allowed into the university only as day-laborers of the mind, expected to clean the dust of their theories and vanish before the sun sets.”

— Notes from an Unappointed Ad-Hoc Scholar

I. Introduction: The Ivory Plantation and the Underground Specters

The modern Indian university is not an agora of enlightenment; it is a meticulously landscaped plantation whose ivory towers are held upright by bamboo scaffolding made of invisible hands. If you walk through the marble corridors of Delhi University, the red-brick courtyards of Hyderabad, or the ancient stone arcades of state universities in Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra, you will breathe an air thick with the incense of academic grandiosity. High-table seminars deliberate on post-colonial subalternity, international journals publish lavish treatises on “decolonizing the mind,” and vice-chancellors deliver pious speeches on national progress. Yet, step beneath the floorboards of this grand theater, into the subterranean basements where tutorial sheets are evaluated and attendance registers are marked, and you will encounter an army of specters. They are the Guest Faculty, the Ad-Hoc Scholars, the Temporary Lecturers—disproportionately hailing from Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi communities—who inhabit the university not as citizens of letters, but as unacknowledged day-laborers of the intellect.

To understand the crisis of the Dalit-Bahujan guest lecturer is to understand a sophisticated, modernized form of institutional untouchability. It is a system that does not banish the untouchable body from the temple of learning, but rather admits it on the condition that it remains eternally temporary, economically broken, and structurally voiceless. The old caste order barred the Shudra and Ati-Shudra from listening to the Vedas by pouring molten lead into their ears; the modern neoliberal-feudal university permits them to teach the Vedas, the Constitution, and Quantum Mechanics, but ensures that their monthly stipend of a few thousand rupees arrives six months late, without healthcare, without maternity leave, and with the permanent threat of instant dismissal at the end of every 120-day contract cycle.

IIA. The Reservation Bypass: How Public Universities Invented the “Academic Coolie”

For seven decades, the Indian Constitution guaranteed that public universities—the primary engines of social mobility for marginalized communities—would reflect the demographic reality of the nation through affirmative action (Reservation). However, the Savarna oligarchy that controls the levers of academic administration executed a masterstroke of systemic evasion. Rather than directly opposing reservations—which would invite constitutional penalties and street protest—they rendered the permanent faculty position an endangered species. By deliberately freezing regular recruitment for decades, university administrations created an artificial vacuum, which they then filled with temporary, contract, and guest faculty.

Consider the brutal arithmetic of this institutional fraud. When a university advertises a permanent Assistant Professor position, it is legally bound to apply the constitutional quota (15% SC, 7.5% ST, 27% OBC, alongside EWS). But when the university hires a “Guest Lecturer” or “Ad-hoc Teacher” to take the exact same classes, grade the exact same papers, and invigilate the exact same examinations, the reservation roster is blithely discarded under the legal pretext that guest teaching is “hourly engagement” or “contingent work.”

IIB. The Reservation Bypass: Institutional Anomie: Higher Education Disparity Data

• 33%+ Sanctioned Faculty Vacancies Left unfilled across Central and State universities.
• 50% Undergraduate Teaching Load Executed by guest, ad-hoc, and contract labor.
• 4.2% SC/ST Full Professors Representation in premier institutions.

This is the Reservation Bypass Architecture. By shifting the bulk of teaching workloads onto unreserved, arbitrarily appointed guest arrangements, university syndicates have successfully preserved permanent professorships as exclusive fiefdoms of elite caste networks. The Dalit-Bahujan scholar who spent a decade earning a PhD from a premier central institution, publishing peer-reviewed papers, and passing the National Eligibility Test (NET), arrives at the university gates expecting the fulfillment of constitutional promises. Instead, they are directed to the guest room—a cramped closet under the stairs—and handed an hourly wage contract that pays less than the daily minimum wage of an industrial supervisor.

III. The Metaphor of the Academic Plantation: The Sugar Mill of the Mind

To capture the existential dread of the guest faculty, one must discard the sterile vocabulary of human resource management and turn to the literature of plantation economies. The guest scholar is the cane-cutter of the academic sugar mill. Every morning, they arrive at the campus with bundles of intellect harvested from nights of lamp-lit reading, only to feed them into the administrative crusher. The sweetness—the tuition fees paid by students, the accreditation scores (NAAC) awarded to the college, the university’s ranking metrics—is extracted by the administration to polish the institution’s facade. The leftover bagasse—the exhausted, underpaid, un-benefited human being—is swept out at the end of the term.

There is a cruel satire in how elite institutions market their commitment to social justice. A college will organize a national seminar on “Ambedkarite Hermeneutics” or “Post-Colonial Subalternity,” funded by public grants. The keynote speaker, a tenured professor enjoying a six-figure salary, housing allowances, and sabbatical privileges, will deliver an impassioned address on the plight of the marginalized. Meanwhile, the microphone is adjusted, the water glasses are refilled, and the attendance registers are compiled by a guest lecturer who holds a Doctorate in Marathi Literature, belongs to the Mahar or Matang community, and is wondering if their bank balance of ₹412 will stretch to cover next month’s room rent.

“We are asked to lecture on human rights in the morning and beg the clerk for our unpaid honorarium in the afternoon. The university teaches equality through our mouths while practicing feudalism on our throats.”

This paradox is structural rather than incidental. The tenured Savarna academic elite requires the guest faculty in the same way the Victorian aristocracy required domestic servants. The presence of a vast, desperate reserve army of unemployed and underemployed Dalit-Bahujan PhDs allows tenured professors to reduce their own teaching workloads, delegate tedious administrative drudgery, pursue prestigious foreign fellowships, and maintain an aura of Olympian intellectual detachment. The guest lecturer becomes the institutional sponge that absorbs all the friction, labor, and anxiety of the educational machine, allowing those above them to glide seamlessly through the realm of pure thought.

IV. The 120-Day Executioner: Contracts, Caste Privilege, and Psychological Castration

The contract structure of guest and ad-hoc appointments is designed with psychological precision to break the spirit of resistance. In many state and central universities, appointments are made for 120 days, 89 days, or purely on a “per-lecture” basis (capped at a paltry monthly maximum). At the end of every term, the guest faculty undergoes a symbolic execution: their contract terminates, their temporary library pass expires, and they are cast back into the abyss of non-existence.

To be re-appointed for the next term, the scholar must perform a ritual of submission. They must court the favor of Departmental Heads, College Principals, and Governing Body members. In a society where social capital is coterminous with caste networks, this ritual is deeply stacked against Dalit-Bahujan scholars. A Savarna candidate, connected through family ties, alumni networks, shared dietary habits, and cultural codes, effortlessly navigates the informal corridors of power. They engage in light banter over filter coffee or tea with the Principal, discussing shared acquaintances and theoretical inclinations. The Dalit-Bahujan candidate, lacking this inherited cultural currency, enters the administrative office carrying the heavy burden of historical exclusion, acutely aware that any slip of tongue, any display of political assertion, or even a lack of “servile deference” can result in immediate, unwritten blacklisting.

Satire turns into horror when one examines the “Interview Boards” for ad-hoc and guest panels. Every few months, thousands of scholars line up outside principal offices across university towns like cattle at an auction. They hold thick files containing books they have written, research articles published in Scopus-indexed journals, and certificates of national awards. They are called into the interview room for precisely 90 seconds. 90 seconds to justify ten years of doctoral labor. The committee members—often bored, scrolling through their smartphones—ask a superficial question, check the candidate’s last name (a transparent proxy for caste identity in the Indian context), and make a silent mark on their scorecards. The process is repeated term after term, year after year, converting vibrant young intellectuals into anxious, sycophantic mendicants.

V. The Political Economy of Silence: Why the Academic Subaltern Cannot Speak

Why do guest faculty not unionize and shut down the university until their demands for regularisation are met? The answer lies in the totalizing nature of their precarity. Tenured faculty can go on strike because their salaries are protected by civil service rules and UGC regulations. Permanent staff have trade unions, legal representation, and tenure protection. The guest lecturer has none of these shield walls.

If a guest teacher speaks out against administrative corruption, caste discrimination, or delayed payments, they are not served with a show-cause notice—they are simply not invited back next semester. No order is issued; no explanation is required. The phone simply stops ringing. Their name disappears from the timetable as quietly as a drop of water evaporating on a hot slate. This form of retaliation is clean, silent, and untraceable. It is the bureaucratic equivalent of an extra-judicial disappearance.

Furthermore, this precarious labor market actively fractures solidarity among the oppressed. When fifty Dalit-Bahujan PhD graduates are competing for two temporary guest slots paying a meager hourly wage, the university successfully pits victim against victim. Solidarity is replaced by a desperate, panicky competition for survival. The scholar who raises their voice against an unjust workload is instantly replaced by another scholar whose rent is due tomorrow and whose family is waiting for a remittance back in the village.

VI. A Personal Monologue: A Letter from the Shadows

Let me speak to you not as an abstract sociological voice, but as Mujammil Shahin Siraj Shaikh—a chronicler who has watched the brightest minds of my generation wither in the waiting rooms of higher education.

I have seen my friend—a man who spent six years translating obscure 19th-century anti-caste manuscripts, a scholar whose mind burns with the brilliance of a supernova—standing outside the account section of a state university in the scorching summer heat of June. He was not there to collect a research grant or a publication prize. He was begging a clerk, who was half-asleep under a whirring ceiling fan, to release his lecture fees for the previous semester—money that had been withheld for seven months because a signature on a voucher sheet was missing a middle initial. His mother in the village needed insulin; his landlord had threatened to lock his room by the weekend. In his pocket was a copy of Antonio Gramsci’s Hegemony and the Intellectuals, a book he had taught to fifty eager undergraduate students that very morning.

What does it do to a human soul to articulate theories of freedom, justice, and human dignity on the lectern, while living a personal reality of complete disenfranchisement? It creates a profound, tearing schizophrenia. The guest scholar lives in two worlds simultaneously: in the morning, they are “Doctor,” an authority figure guiding the next generation toward critical thought; in the evening, they are a pauper, calculating whether they can afford egg curry or must settle for plain rice to survive till the end of the month.

This humiliation is explicitly gendered and caste-coded. Bahujan women guest lecturers face a double furnace of oppression. They navigate not only the structural precarity of temporary contracts and caste bias but also the insidious sexual harassment and paternalistic condescension inherent in hierarchical university departments, where renewal of contracts is frequently dangled as a weapon of behavioral control by senior male academics.

VII. The Imperial Caste-Class Trap: Data, Statistics, and Structural Reality

The tragedy of the guest faculty is not a temporary glitch in an otherwise healthy educational system; it is the logical outcome of a neoliberal state colluding with a feudal social structure. Let us examine the national indicators that illustrate this structural betrayal:

• Systemic Vacancies as Policy: According to official data presented in Parliament and AISHE reports, thousands of faculty positions remain vacant across Central Universities, IITs, and NITs. The vast majority of these unfilled posts belong to the reserved categories (SC, ST, OBC). By leaving these posts vacant under the pretext of “Non-Availability of Suitable Candidates” (NASC)—a notorious administrative euphemism used for decades to reject qualified Dalit-Bahujan applicants—universities fill the operational gap by hiring guest lecturers at a fraction of the cost.
• The Economic Exploitation Ratio: A permanent Assistant Professor under the 7th Pay Commission earns a starting basic pay of approximately ₹57,700 plus allowances (totalling upwards of ₹85,000 to ₹1,000,000+ monthly). A Guest Faculty member teaching the exact same course load is capped at a maximum ceiling (often ₹50,000 in central norms, but frequently down to ₹12,000 – ₹20,000 in state universities), with zero pay during vacations, zero health insurance, zero Provident Fund, and zero annual increments. The university extracts 100% of the labor value while paying less than 20% of the cost.
• The Psychological Toll: Studies on academic precarity show alarming rates of chronic anxiety, depression, and existential despair among ad-hoc and guest educators. When social identity (caste stigma) combines with economic instability, the result is an intolerable mental crucible. The tragic institutional suicides of scholars like Rohit Vemula and Payal Tadvi are merely the visible tip of an underwater iceberg of silent, slow-motion institutional violence inflicted on thousands of contract educators daily.

VIII. Reclaiming the Temple: A Call for Radical Academic Emancipation

We must strip away the romantic mythologies of the Indian university. The university is not a sanctuary of pure scholarship; it is a battleground of social power. As long as higher education relies on an underclass of disenfranchised, underpaid, and structurally vulnerable Dalit-Bahujan guest faculty, every degree awarded by these institutions is tainted by the sweat of unfree labor.

To dismantle this modern plantation system, we do not need incremental policy tweaks or patronizing sympathies from academic senates. We require radical structural restructuring:

• Immediate Abolition of the “Guest/Ad-Hoc” Bypass: Higher education regulatory bodies (UGC, Ministry of Education) must mandate that any teaching position required for more than one academic term MUST be converted into a regular, permanent position subject to constitutional reservation rosters.
• Equal Pay for Equal Work: Until regularisation is achieved, guest faculty performing identical teaching, evaluation, and administrative duties must receive equal hourly and monthly remuneration, along with full health coverage and seasonal pay continuity, in strict compliance with Supreme Court mandates on labor rights.
• National Audit of Reservation Rosters: A high-powered, independent judicial commission comprising Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi jurists must audit the faculty recruitment records and vacancy distributions of all central and state universities to expose and penalize administrative manipulation of reservation panels.
• Democratization of Departmental Governance: Departmental chairs and university committees must be stripped of arbitrary, unilateral power over contract renewals. Evaluation of teaching staff must be transparent, peer-reviewed, and protected against personal and caste-based bias.

Until these measures are implemented, the Dalit-Bahujan intellectual will remain a ghost in the machine—hired to teach the youth how to think, but forbidden from claiming a place to exist. But let the managers of the academic plantation take warning: ghosts do not remain silent forever. The scaffolding of precarity is rotting from within, and when it collapses, it will take the ivory tower down with it.

Mujammil Shahin Siraj Shaikh is a Pune-based independent researcher and prospective PhD scholar examining structural inequality, public policy and institutional power in modern India.

Jason Arday was a sociologist, a teacher, a writer, a son, a partner, a father, a brother and a man whose life had already contained extraordinary difficulties and achievements long before Cambridge made him a symbol. He was 41 when he was found dead at his home in south London on August 14, nine days after resigning from the University of Cambridge amid allegations concerning plagiarism, his academic record and aspects of the life story he had publicly told. The Metropolitan Police said his death was unexpected but not believed to be suspicious. An inquest is to determine the circumstances of his death.

His life was more than his Cambridge appointment, more than the allegations against him and certainly more than the controversy that consumed his final weeks. He had spoken about being diagnosed with autism and other developmental difficulties as a child, about remaining non-verbal until he was 11 and about his difficulties with reading and writing. He nevertheless went on to earn a PhD, teach across several British universities, write about race and education, and become Cambridge’s youngest Black professor in 2023.

The allegations against Arday were presented as a matter of academic misconduct without sufficient scrutiny of their origin and validity. What is disturbing about the Arday affair is the point at which scrutiny of an individual appeared to become a much larger argument about who deserves to occupy an elite institution.

NewsCord’s review counted 249 distinct articles about Arday across 15 British national outlets between July 24 and the evening of August 14. Of these, 188 appeared in the nine days after his resignation. That amounted to an average of 20.9 articles a day after he had already stepped down.

There was plainly a story to investigate. But the coverage did not remain confined to his academic work. His childhood, memoir, personal claims, sporting achievements and biography became subjects of repeated public examination. NewsCord’s account documents coverage that moved into ridicule, speculation and commentary about parts of his life that went far beyond the original academic allegations.

The most troubling context is that some of the controversy was explicitly connected to arguments about race and diversity. The academic who brought the plagiarism allegations to wider attention, Nathan Cofnas, has described himself as a “race realist” and has previously written about racial representation in elite professions in terms that explicitly invoke supposedly innate differences in ability. He has since said that his concern was with diversity, equity and inclusion rather than personal hostility towards Arday. Cofnas, now sacked from his institute, must nonetheless be held accountable for the chain of events he initiated. The positions and politics he espouses form part of the context in which Arday’s case was interpreted and circulated, and of a wider social order in which Black and other oppressed communities are made to experience institutions as spaces of conditional belonging.

What happened to Arday, then, cannot be understood only as a dispute over one academic’s work. The larger question is what happens when the presence of someone from a historically excluded community inside an elite institution is treated as something that must continually be justified.

For many of us in India, there is something painfully familiar in that question.

The specific histories are different. Arday was a Black British academic; caste is a different system from race, with its own history and mechanisms. But the experience of being treated as an exception whose presence requires explanation has recognisable parallels.

Think about the Dalit student who enters an elite university. The Dalit scholar who gets a faculty position. The first-generation student who enters medicine, the civil services or a prestigious professional institution. Their achievement is often not allowed to remain simply an achievement. A question enters the room before they do: Did they actually deserve this?

That question is rarely asked in isolation. It arrives carrying the weight of caste. Reservation makes that question explicit. “Merit” becomes the language through which caste privilege can present itself as a neutral achievement. We are seeing this today in India, where Delhi’s designated protest site has a sit-in by Reservation Hatao Andolan, a group of snowflake oppressor-caste members who cannot ask for structural change from the state and would rather espouse casteist statements of exclusion and degradation on camera while claiming victimhood.

The same logic that asks whether a Black professor really belongs at Cambridge can, in another context, ask whether a Dalit professor really belongs in a university at all. The language changes. The hierarchy does not.

This is why the mythology of merit matters. The mythology of merit depends on forgetting the conditions under which merit is produced. Before a person sits for an examination, submits a PhD application or interviews for an academic job, they have already travelled through a social world. Some people grow up with educated parents, private schooling, books, stable housing, English-language fluency, professional networks and the confidence that elite institutions are places where they naturally belong. Others encounter those institutions after crossing barriers that were never faced by their supposedly more “meritorious” peers.

Yet once the final credential is produced, all of that history disappears behind an apparently objective label: merit. Caste makes this contradiction impossible to ignore.

For generations, education and professional authority were overwhelmingly concentrated among particular castes. Property, literacy, institutional familiarity, social networks and cultural capital accumulated across families and communities. When the descendants of those histories arrive at elite universities, their inherited advantages are rarely described as an intervention into merit. They appear as merit itself. Reservation disrupts that story because it makes social exclusion visible.

That is why the rhetoric around merit can become so vicious. Merit is presented as a timeless measure of individual worth, when in practice institutions decide what counts as merit, how it will be measured and who gets the opportunity to demonstrate it.

The same baton is used to beat affirmative action in different contexts: DEI in the West and reservations in India. In both cases, policies intended to address historical exclusion are recast as threats to a supposedly neutral system that was never neutral to begin with.

Once this idea of merit is entertained, the presence of a Black professor or a Dalit professor can become suspicious before anything about their work is examined. Their success is treated as something requiring an explanation. Their mistakes become evidence of a larger failure. Their credentials become open to a level of scrutiny that their social position was already unlikely to protect them from.

This is what makes the racial invocation against Arday’s career so pernicious. The question moves from a basic inquiry, “Did this individual meet the standards?”, to “Why was someone like this here in the first place?”

The second question may present itself as a defence of objectivity, but it is not really interested in objectivity, real or imagined. It is about belonging. It is about who gets to occupy the public arena without having their presence continually explained, defended or justified.

And that is where Arday’s story speaks beyond itself. Because many people from historically oppressed communities recognise the particular pain of entering spaces that were not built with them in mind and then discovering that their right to be there remains permanently open to question.

Mangesh is a law student from Mumbai, Maharashtra.

India has expanded education as a formal right while simultaneously allowing the conditions under which that right is exercised to become increasingly differentiated by market capacity. Because market capacity is structured by caste and class, the marketisation of education can undermine the equalising function that constitutional education rights were intended to serve.

Article 21A, inserted through the Constitution (Eighty-Sixth Amendment) Act, 2002, establishes free and compulsory education as a fundamental right for all children between six and fourteen years of age. The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, provides the statutory framework for implementing this constitutional guarantee. This places an obligation on the government to ensure that free and compulsory education reaches children across the most disadvantaged sections of society.

However, there is an evident gap between what the Constitution proclaims education must be, namely, not a private commodity, and what is happening under a neoliberal economic structure. While the right to education is formally universal, as it should be, the quality and conditions under which that right is delivered remain deeply unequal, disproportionately affecting the most vulnerable sections of society, particularly students from SC/ST communities.

In India, there are broadly two types of institutional spaces that provide education and shape the kind of education, exposure, infrastructure, and social networks available to a child: private schools and public schools. Private schools operate through fees and market demand, with annual fees ranging from thousands to several lakhs of rupees, and reaching as high as ₹28–30 lakh in some elite schools. Their appeal is often associated not only with classroom teaching but also with advanced infrastructure, English-language education, extracurricular opportunities, technology, and claims of global exposure. Government schools, by contrast, depend substantially on public expenditure and government provision. A 2025 national survey indicates that average annual household expenditure per child in non-government schools was ₹25,002, compared with ₹2,863 in government schools, making household expenditure on non-government schooling nearly nine times higher.

The government budget for School Education and Literacy, as per the latest available Union Budget 2026–27, is ₹83,562 crore, of which around 70–80% goes towards salaries and administrative costs, leaving substantially less budget for infrastructure, school advancements, and labs. This substantially impacts the passing rate of students and the quality of education they receive.

When a private-educated student and a public-educated student enter a university, the field becomes unequal and highly disadvantageous for public-school students. It is within this unequal field that the neoliberal commodification of education becomes particularly important, as access to better educational opportunities increasingly depends on one’s ability to pay.

Neoliberalism places considerable emphasis on markets, competition, individual choice, and the withdrawal or restructuring of direct state provision. When applied to education, these principles can transform education from a predominantly public responsibility into a service increasingly mediated by market mechanisms. It drives the privatisation of government schools, turning education into a marketable commodity driven by competition, choice, and profit. This is what can be seen in the Indian education system.

Rather than increasing funding and upgrading public schools, the right-wing government has used policies to systematically transfer school ownership, management, or funding to private entities. This has resulted in the closure or merger of 94,000 government schools since 2014, as per a NITI Aayog report. That is 25 public schools per day. On the other hand, private unaided schools grew from 2.88 lakh to roughly 3.39 lakh.

This systematic institutional mobility of schools has resulted in two major shifts. First, the migration of public-school students towards private schools, numbering around 86 lakh. Second, those unable to transfer to or pay for private schools were denied their fundamental right to education.

Such consequences of this marketisation cannot be separated from India’s existing social structure. The ability to choose between schools is itself socially differentiated in India, as income, wealth, social capital, geography, and caste are already unequally distributed.

According to the UDISE+ (Unified District Information System for Education) school database system, around 68.7% of ST students and 62.4% of SC students rely on government schools. For them, public schools continue to function as a major educational lifeline.

A wealthy household facing declining public provision can respond by purchasing private education. A poor household may not have that option. The same policy therefore produces different consequences for different social groups. And therefore, when public education is weakened and monetised, the consequences are not distributed evenly across society, with SC and ST communities bearing a disproportionate share of the impediment.

Furthermore, the incumbent government has allocated just 4% of its GDP to education instead of the 6% recommended by NEP 2020. This gap in allocation, combined with the residual income gap among people, inadequate facilities, and caste domination in government schooling, provides a stark contrast between the constitutional right to formal educational inclusion and substantive equality in education.

In this class and caste divide, SC and ST students are among the most vulnerable. The inequality that begins with access to education continues into the opportunities available to students, eventually contributing to economic inequality. This creates a vicious circular system of unequal education.

unequal schooling → unequal educational attainment → unequal skills and credentials → unequal employment opportunities → reproduction of economic inequality.

Public schooling in India is not simply about education; it is also a political question. In India, neoliberal governance and right-wing politics are lovers, bound together in the making and remaking of the state’s approach to public education. Here, neoliberal restructuring can generate social and economic crises that produce grievances and uncertainty, which right-wing populism can then mobilise politically. In turn, right-wing populism can reinforce the same neoliberal restructuring by redirecting these grievances, generating doubt and distrust towards alternative political and economic narratives, and weakening challenges to the prevailing order.

The recent “School Thik Karo” movement by CJP provides a contemporary illustration of such a love story. The campaign involved visits to government schools, interaction with students, and demands for improvements in educational infrastructure and facilities. What government should fear a demand for better schools? However, rather than being understood simply as a demand for better schools, the campaign encountered political resistance, including restrictions on access to schools in Rajasthan and an FIR in Maharashtra.

This points to a broader tension: government schools are public institutions intended to deliver a constitutional right, yet demands for better infrastructure and greater accountability can become politically contentious. And once again, the consequences fall most heavily on those who have the fewest alternatives: SC and ST students.

Their inability to purchase education, or their household’s lack of the resources necessary to exercise that choice, is a systemic failure of neoliberalism. As neoliberal marketisation increasingly determines who can access quality education, the danger is that education itself, which is intended to enable social mobility, may instead reproduce the inequalities it was expected to overcome.

Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar said, “Education is the milk of a tigress, and he who drinks it will not fail to roar.”

But what happens when that milk is filtered by income, caste, and market access? The milk is no longer the same for everyone. Some receive it diluted and adulterated, while others receive what allows them to roar. Who gets which kind of milk, and who decides?

Mrunal Madhuri Milind Dupte is a development economics researcher, anti-caste writer and public speaker working on inequality, Dalit and Buddhist economics.

Say what you will about the CJP protests against the NEET paper leak, everyone has already said that the immediate demands are not enough to change the education system. Education scholars are more likely to tell you about the 5-point charter submitted by the CJP to the Government of India. But one class of discourse generators is rattled by the protests themselves, or has been looking for an opportunity to vent its pre-existing frustrations or biases and has now found the perfect one . This is the oppressed castes’ general status and their tiresome, repeated, annoying rant against reservation.

This includes someone fabricating a fake post by actor Vijay Varma about his one non-reserved category friend suffering in some educational institution, which the pro-protest actor quickly said he had never posted. His acting in the anti-Mandal movement film Hurdang alongside Sunny Kaushal, however, may not have made his supposed stance difficult to believe had the post been genuine. Whether he posted it or not, and whether he believes the logic underneath that post, are different questions.

Mrunal Thakur, another actor, apparently posted a story on her Instagram account suggesting that the key moment that changed the game for everyone during these protests was NEET aspirant Harsh Dubey questioning the dominant narrative around the protests, arguing that the focus on the paper leak has overshadowed other longstanding issues in medical admissions. This was apparently a clip from a conversation with NDTV’s Shiv Aroor, where Dubey said questions around reservation policy and the difficulties faced by general category students also deserve public attention. Whether Mrunal Thakur will also come out and deny posting this is a matter of no one’s concern. Bollywood celebrities have shown their political illiteracy and general inhumanity more than once.

But this idea that neither the BJP nor the CJP wants to touch reservation, and that this is what led to the compromise, is one of those Savarna delusions burdened with so many argumentative flaws that a sane mind can hardly engage with it. To begin with, despite its classist and meritocratic articulation of the protests, the CJP does not appear to be opposed to reservation, partly reflected in its use of Ambedkarite symbolism, whether sincere or strategic. One also forgets that the BJP is a heterogeneous party with multiple caste groups and not simply Brahmins and other general category persons. There is no consensus on this question even within the Hindutva fold, something evident from the raita vs. trad debates that have long existed within their own ideological circles. To treat a single interview, one that merely regurgitates the most banal opinion circulating on the Savarna reactionary internet, as having played any pivotal role in shaping the protests is fantasy writing in its purest form.

But what is up with the casteist Savarnas? In a protest that brought together people from the non-protesting middle classes and celebrities, wherein status and privilege are also disproportionately held by oppressor castes, what has made the casteist Savarnas launch into their regular rant with great vigour? Are Savarnas simply waiting for any needle to move so they can carry their anti-reservation agenda? Are they simply incapable of shutting up for once?

Why, then, does every major public mobilisation touching education or even employment seem to invite an anti-reservation chorus from casteist Savarnas? The answer is not that reservation is secretly the central issue every time, like the Dubeys make it out to be. It is that reservation has become the preferred language through which sections of the Savarna public interpret almost every institutional crisis. Whenever a crisis emerges in education or public recruitment, reservation is summoned as the familiar explanation, even when it has little to do with the event itself. It is less a response to the facts before them than a political reflex.

This reflex performs an ideological function. It redirects public anger away from institutions and towards beneficiaries of affirmative action. A paper leak points towards failures of governance, regulation, corruption, examination agencies, and political accountability. None of these explanations preserve the moral authority of the existing Brahminical social order. Reservation, on the other hand, offers an already available narrative; and if Savarna public discourse has shown anything, it is that they love readily available labour, intellectual and otherwise. The next generation of casteists also lack imagination and will rely on the intellectual dis-labour of their Savarna forefathers.

These complaints are very vapid. They transform a structural failure into a grievance against redistributive and representational justice. Instead of asking why an examination system repeatedly fails millions of students, they ask who supposedly enjoys unfair advantages, even though the empirical facts reveal it is they who do. The institution escapes scrutiny because caste once again becomes framed as the problem only when it attempts to correct itself.

There is another reason why these moments are politically useful. Large protests produce so much uncertainty. They reopen public debate and create the possibility that questions long considered settled may be discussed again, especially now that social media has permitted everyone to have an opinion, for good and bad alike. For anti-reservation voices, this is an opportunity to attach their long-standing campaign to a movement that was never organised around their demands. They seek legitimacy through proximity of discourse. If enough people begin associating educational injustice with reservation rather than with state failure, the moment gets a new meaning.

This explains why Harsh Dubey’s interview came to acquire symbolic importance far beyond its actual place in the protests. It offered something many casteist Savarnas had been waiting for: an apparently articulate voice on national television through which they could restate arguments that have circulated for decades. Reservation disrupts the comforting belief that educational success reflects individual merit alone. Every conversation about admissions threatens to reopen the history of caste privilege that made merit appear natural in the first place. It is therefore unsurprising that even a movement against examination malpractice becomes, for some, another occasion to defend inherited advantages while presenting themselves as victims of an unjust system. The anti-reservation discourse surrounding the NEET protests tells us less about the movement than about the persistence of Savarna political common sense.

DalitThinkerToday is a Chartered Accountant by profession from Sangli, Maharashtra, who occasionally dabbles in thinking about politics when people in her oppressor-caste-majority office frustrate her. This is her pseudonym.

Archival Note

Published in Dalit Voice (Vol. 17, Issue No. 11, 16 April 1998), this essay enters debates over whether oppressed communities should relinquish their jati identities as part of the struggle against caste. Rajshekar argues that such demands misunderstand the relationship between caste hierarchy and the identities of historically oppressed communities, and questions whether calls for caste abolition are being applied equally across society.

Building his argument through a close reading of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s discussion of subcastes in Annihilation of Caste, Rajshekar contends that abolishing subcastes without dismantling the caste order would strengthen existing hierarchies. He therefore defends jati identity as a political question rather than treating it as an obstacle to emancipation.

The latter part of the essay draws on examples from Kerala to argue for separate representation within the Scheduled Castes and questions the classification of some communities under the reservation system. These assertions reflect Rajshekar’s interpretation and should not be read as established historical or legal fact.

Debate On “Jati” Identity

Subcaste abolition will strengthen Hindus & their caste system: Dr. Ambedkar

Our fake democrats, socialists, and other savarna outfits say: “Don’t ask about caste, don’t think about caste, and don’t talk about caste.” They repeat this mantra through their media, so much so that our innocent Dalits and BCs, who are the original victims of the caste system, have also started repeating this very same mantra. As they are the original victims of the caste system, they want to annihilate this devilish system. That is why, when the savarnas just whisper about destroying caste, the Dalits and BCs shout and scream. But why are the savarnas (Hindus), who are the beneficiaries of the caste system, advising only Dalits not to ask about caste, not to think about caste, and not to talk about caste? Are the Hindus willing to surrender the benefits of their caste system? Will they lead a movement, the ultimate result of which will destroy the power and prestige of the savarnas? This is a serious question that we Dalits and BCs have to answer.

CALL TO ELAVAS

No Pope can be a revolutionary. Similarly, no upper-caste man can be a revolutionary. The source of his income, power, prestige, and property is his caste system. So, can he think sincerely of destroying caste? Still, he talks about destroying caste. Why? This is where we become suspicious of his motive. While they call upon us to destroy our caste, what they actually mean is to destroy our ethnic identities, but not their caste system. When they say yes, they actually mean no, and vice versa.

Sree Narayana Guru, the liberator of the Elavas of Kerala, once said:

“Don’t ask about caste, don’t think about caste, and don’t talk about caste,” but his disciple, Sahodharan Ayyappan, the most revolutionary among the disciples of Sree Narayana Guru, reversed the statement and said: “We must always ask, think, and talk about caste.”

USE THORN TO REMOVE THORN

Caste is a thorn in the body of our society. So, we have to use another thorn to remove this thorn. After its removal, we will discard both the thorns. We have lost all human rights due to the caste system. So, we must use the very caste to regain our human rights. Only after we regain all human rights can we think of the removal of caste.

The fact is, we (SC/ST/BCs) have no caste because we are not Hindus. As the original inhabitants of India, what we have are our ethnic identities, which are not caste. Our Editor is right. We are not Hindus. So, destroying caste is not our duty. It is the duty of Hindus.

While they go on strengthening their own evil caste, why are they interested in destroying our ethnic identities like the Pulaya (Pariah), Elava, etc.? This is the puzzle. The fear of the upper castes is that our caste consciousness may help us regain our lost human rights. That is why they advise us to destroy our caste (ethnic identities). For this, they want to destroy our “subcastes” first, which are our ethnic identities. When they use the word “subcaste,” they make us think that we are a part of the Hindu caste system. They know that when we destroy our “subcaste,” we will lose our identity, join the Hindu caste system, and become their most obedient slaves.

INNOCENT DALITS MISLED

Some innocent Dalits also join this Hindu anti-caste campaign. For this, they want us to give up our “sub-caste” first and unite all subcastes in the name of “Dalit.” But can they destroy our identity? Never. Is it a true solution to get our human rights? No. Babasaheb says:

“But assuming that the fusion of subcastes is possible, what guarantee is there that the abolition of subcastes will necessarily lead to the abolition of castes? On the contrary, it may happen that process may stop with the abolition of subcastes. In that case, the abolition of subcastes will only help to strengthen the castes and make them more powerful and therefore far more mischievous. This remedy is, therefore, neither practicable nor effective and may easily prove to be a wrong remedy.” (W&S Vol. 1, p. 67).

Here Babasaheb says that if we abolish the subcastes, it will only help to strengthen the caste system and make the Hindus more powerful.

That means, when we strengthen the subcastes, the Hindu caste system will be destroyed and Hinduism itself will be abolished. That is why the savarnas call upon us to destroy our caste, meaning our ethnic identity, so that enslaving the entire indigenous Dalits and BCs becomes easy.

Some Dalits may have a genuine doubt that when we strengthen our subcaste identity, our people may get divided and fight, which in turn may destroy the very “Dalit concept” and “Dalit unity.” If our people are fighting each other even now on the basis of subcastes, it is not because of these subcastes but because they are Hinduised. They also think that they are Hindus. That is why each subcaste thinks that it is “superior” to other subcastes.

The fighting is not because of our subcastes but because of this wrong notion of superiority or inferiority that they copied from Hindus.

When we educate our people on Ambedkarism and Buddhism, remove the “Hindu mind” from their brains, they will know that we are all different but equal. Each community should recognise the human rights of other communities.

Strengthening the “caste identity,” without proper education, will be a dangerous thing for the Dalits and BCs.

KERALA SCENE

How do we ensure the human rights of each and every subcaste? The good old democratic principle is by giving adequate representation to every subcaste in every field. Otherwise, only the powerful subcaste will gain everything at the cost of other weaker subcastes.

In Kerala, the Pulaya subcaste is the biggest of all other Dalit subcastes. The word “Pulayan” means the owner of the land, peasant, intellectual, etc. Now, as they have lost all their lands, the meaning of the word Pulaya is landless people. They have become the most depressed class in Kerala. The Paraya (Pariah) subcaste is also depressed and landless. They were scavengers in Kerala. Pulaya, Paraya, Valluva, Nayadi, and Chakliyas are the most depressed classes in Kerala. All these subcastes have no adequate representation in the governance of the state.

In Kerala, there are 68 subcastes in the list of Scheduled Castes.

In this list, there are so many subcastes that should actually have been included in the BC list because they are socially and economically forward.

K.R. NARAYANAN IS FORWARD

Recently, I examined the reservation list of some educational institutions, especially in MBBS and Engineering. I could find hardly two or three SC candidates who actually hail from the most downtrodden people of Kerala, i.e., Pulaya, Paraya, Chakliya, etc. Even the MLAs and MPs from reserved constituencies are actually from the forward communities but included in the SC list. This is a serious injustice to the SCs.

President K.R. Narayanan belongs to the Parava community (not Pariah). This community should have been included in the BC list. The Paravas were not unseeables but only Untouchables like the Elavas of Kerala. The hereditary occupation of the Parava women was washing, and hence they were not Untouchables.

In my area, the Paravas behave like the savarnas and discriminate against the Pulayas, Parayas (Pariah), and other Untouchables. They will not even invite these communities to their marriages. There are so many communities in the SC list who behave like the savarnas. They treat the SC people with contempt. In a fight between an SC and a savarna, they side with the savarnas. And yet, they are having all facilities, including reservations, in the name of SC. But at the same time, they will not join us in our struggle for our human rights. The original SC people are fighting and fighting without gaining anything. The benefit goes to other people who oppose and insult them in society. I have no doubt that if the original SC people understand these facts, they will demand adequate representation for each subcaste.

I can tell you that among those who are in the forefront of the “caste annihilation campaign,” we can find many such touchable SC castes. Hindus use these touchable SC subcastes to criticise our Editor’s “caste identity” thesis.

So, to end these problems, each and every subcaste must get proportional representation in every field according to its population in the governance of the country.

On May 31, 1936, Babasaheb organised a Mahar conference in Bombay. Does it mean that he hated other subcastes? What we should build between different subcastes is fraternity (brotherhood). When we fight for our human rights, we cannot oppose the human rights of other communities. This is what our Editor means when he advocates “caste identity.”

All over the world, we can see thousands of ethnic identities. None is interested in destroying its identity. Then, why should we alone destroy our identity?

However, our ethnic identities are not jati or caste. Our people are imitating the Hindus, thinking that they are Hindus. That is why some innocent, unthinking Dalits demand the destruction of our caste.

CASTE SYMBOLISES IDENTITY

What we want to destroy is the casteism of Aryans and also non-Aryans. Destroying our identity means destroying our soul. So, we must think and talk about caste, whether it is Aryan or non-Aryan.

If the upper-caste people do not use their caste identity, how can we identify them, whether it is a cobra or a rat snake? Without identifying our Enemy first, we cannot fight the Enemy.

So, ask, think, and talk about caste for liberation. Remember, as we strengthen our identity, we should also enlighten our people on Ambedkarism and Buddhism.

Our upper-caste rulers acquired everything by their communal thinking. We also can have everything in the same way. So, we too must be communalists.

That means we must love our people.

The savarnas advise us to love the enemy. We must know the trap behind this advice. They know very well that we consider them our Enemy. That is why they ask us to love the enemy. How can we fight our enemy when we don’t hate this Enemy? If we don’t hate the Enemy, we cannot fight and secure our liberation. So, we must hate our Enemy. It is our right to hate and fight our enemy to win our liberation.

What the enemy hates, we must love, and what the enemy loves, we must hate.

Then only will we get a clear picture of the Enemy’s mind. That is why, when they ask us to destroy our caste, we say no. That is why, when they ask us to love our enemy, we oppose it.

The protests against the irregularities and paper leak in the NEET examination brought thousands of students, parents and supporters onto the streets. The scale of participation, including the visible presence of sections of the middle classes, public figures and artists, reflected a growing willingness to challenge institutions that many increasingly perceive as opaque and unaccountable. That widening participation deserves recognition. It signals that concerns over public education are no longer confined to those who have historically borne the burden of institutional failures.

Yet the state’s response once again demonstrated a familiar pattern. Lathi charges, water cannons, tear gas, detentions, surveillance and criminal cases against protesters indicate that even peaceful demonstrations continue to be treated through the language of policing rather than democratic engagement, no matter how much the protesters try to facilitate dialogue. The violence of the state is not merely reactive to dissent; it is constitutive of its authority and often pre-emptive in its operation. By acting before grievances can acquire wider political legitimacy, it seeks to cast suspicion upon and diminish the credibility of citizens’ claims. Such responses are not isolated excesses but part of a broader tendency in which coercive measures take precedence over any meaningful assessment of public grievances. This pattern is all too familiar for the Muslims, Dalits, workers, and other oppressed communities in the country now. It is no wonder that many of them continue to remain skeptical of this movement even as they lend their solidarity.

The protests have also unfolded within a now routinised political script. Peaceful public mobilisation quickly became an opportunity for the mainstream Godi media to manufacture misinformation, while the state treated the moment as another justification for expanded policing. The original concerns were steadily displaced in newsrooms by manufactured debates over alleged anti-nationalism and public disorder, even as protesters have taken to social media to repeatedly redirect attention to the issues that first brought them to the streets.

Recognising this reality, however, also requires asking difficult questions of protest movements themselves. Large numbers are not only a measure of organisational success; they are also a political responsibility. Every mass mobilisation creates a temporary public capable of imagining new forms of solidarity and new political possibilities. Leadership therefore involves more than maintaining order or ensuring that a demonstration appears respectable. It also involves shaping how participants understand the broader structures within which their immediate grievance exists. But the organisers from CJP have recently shown a remarkable abdication of this responsibility, even as they may be doing so with sincere efforts to protect the movement.

Over the last decade, many protests have come to treat the expression of dissent as an end in itself. In a political climate where public assembly is increasingly surveilled and criminalised, simply occupying the streets and making disagreement visible has acquired democratic significance. That impulse should not be dismissed. But if protests are to aspire to more than bearing witness, they must also confront the difficult question of what political consequences their strategies are intended to produce. The NEET protests, however, did not appear content with symbolic dissent alone. The CJP seems to have approached the movement through a strategic lens, making choices that they believed would improve its chances of achieving concrete outcomes. That is a welcome departure.

The question is whether that strategic calculation expands or contracts the political horizon of the movement. The current strategy of CJP and other organisers does not merely reduce immediate risk; it also diminishes what that movement is capable of becoming. The logic of this strategy leads us towards an ever-receding political horizon, where each concession made in the name of prudence leaves less space for political imagination than the one before. This is where the limitations of a politics centred primarily on respectability become apparent. In the effort to appear reasonable, the strategic moderation may ultimately concede more ground than it preserves. The state does not necessarily refrain from coercion because a movement carefully disciplines itself. Recent history offers little evidence for such confidence.

Many of the choices made reflect a strategic calculation about what constituted acceptable dissent. Expressions of solidarity with incarcerated activists such as Umar Khalid and other Muslims facing prolonged imprisonment were rejected. Attempts to build common cause with other democratic movements such as farmers coming to Delhi on 22 July were resisted, with suggestions that different protests remain physically and politically separate. Participants were instructed on which slogans were permissible, even as some of the approved slogans drew upon nationalist idioms that have, over the last decade, become closely associated with Hindutva politics. The movement also declined to articulate a broader political critique of fascism and majoritarianism or the present government’s treatment of democratic dissent. This was not simply an omission of rhetoric; it marked a refusal to locate the immediate crisis within the wider political conditions that shape how public institutions function and how protests against them are received. Its demands also remained underdeveloped at the structural level. The crisis invited a broader interrogation of the National Testing Agency as an institution and of the direction of educational reforms under the National Education Policy by this government. Instead, the movement largely remained confined to the immediate failures surrounding the paper leak. Many of these suggestions have been made by leftist members of the movement who have been foregrounding these demands for years.

The movement’s current demands combine institutional accountability and immediate relief. They have called for the resignation or dismissal of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, the immediate release of Sonam Wangchuk without restrictions on his movement, compensation of ₹1 crore for the families of NEET aspirants who died by suicide following the paper leak, and the withdrawal of all FIRs and legal action against those who participated in the July 20 protest. These are necessary demands, and each deserves to be pursued. But they cannot be mistaken for a sufficient response to the structural crisis of India’s education system. If these demands are achieved without an equally substantive agenda for what follows, the political leverage created by the protests risks dissipating before it can be translated into structural reform.

Equally troubling dynamics from the protest also must be interrogated. The willingness to hand over protesters deemed disruptive or excessively angry to the police without publicly articulating clear criteria for doing so is a decision that demands careful scrutiny. Any movement must protect participants from harassment and deliberate sabotage. But when those distinctions remain opaque, the police are effectively invited to regulate the boundaries of acceptable dissent within the protest itself. Expanding police discretion over who belongs and who does not, in a context of police violence, carries significant political consequences.

Similarly, symbolic gestures such as serving refreshments or showing kindness towards police personnel may reflect genuine human concern, and recognising the difficult conditions under which many lower-ranking officers work is neither unreasonable nor incompatible with criticism. Yet these gestures cannot obscure the structural reality that the police operate as instruments of state power and are institutionally equipped with resources and authority unavailable to ordinary citizens. Empathy for individual officers should not come at the cost of depoliticising the institution they serve.

None of this diminishes the importance of the NEET protests or the courage of those who participated in them, including the organisers, who transformed what began as a meme page into one of the country’s most significant student mobilisations in the recent past. On the contrary, their significance lies precisely in the possibility they opened. The question is whether that possibility ends with registering public anger or extends towards building broader democratic solidarities capable of confronting the structures that repeatedly produce such crises. Every protest is liable to become an opportunity for the police to exercise violence, for Godi media to manufacture misinformation, and for the government to expand its coercive powers. These are calculations movements cannot control. What they can control is whether their own strategies continually retreat before them, or instead expand the political imagination of those who have come together in hope.

Uttar Pradesh’s minimum wages remained unrevised for more than a decade despite statutory requirements for periodic revision, while consumer prices rose sharply and labour protections were progressively weakened through the implementation of the Labour Codes and state-level deregulation. Against this backdrop of stagnant wages and insecure work, workers across Noida’s industrial belt began peaceful demonstrations in April 2026 after Haryana substantially increased its minimum wages, leaving workers performing similar jobs across the state border with significantly lower pay. The mobilisation spread rapidly across dozens of factories through informal worker networks, reflecting long-standing grievances over wages, excessive working hours, insecure contracts and poor working conditions.

The demonstrations were met with an extensive police crackdown. Hundreds of workers, trade unionists, student activists and labour organisers were detained or arrested, multiple FIRs were filed, and authorities characterised the protests as the work of conspiratorial and “external” elements. Civil liberties organisations, lawyers and fact-finding teams have since documented serious concerns regarding arrests, detention procedures and the criminal investigation, while two activists were booked under the National Security Act.

Following the protests, the Uttar Pradesh government announced an interim increase in minimum wages for Gautam Buddha Nagar and Ghaziabad along with other labour measures. While this addressed part of the workers’ immediate demand, the revised wages remained below those in neighbouring Haryana and did not resolve broader concerns over working conditions and labour rights. At the same time, the government continued to pursue criminal cases arising from the protests. Civil liberties groups, lawyers and the defence campaign have argued that many of the FIRs and charges are fabricated, citing inconsistencies in the investigation, contradictory arrest records and a lack of credible evidence. Multiple accused remain imprisoned, while legal challenges to the investigation continue before the courts.

We stand in solidarity with the workers, trade unionists, students, artists and activists who continue to face criminalisation for asserting labour rights. The demand for fair wages, dignified working conditions and the freedom to organise cannot be treated as a law-and-order problem. We call for the release of those unjustly detained, the withdrawal of fabricated and politically motivated cases, and the protection of workers’ democratic and trade union rights. For readers seeking a fuller account of the events, chronology, legal proceedings and ongoing campaign, please follow:

The Campaign for Release of Workers and Activists of Noida – The Carwan 

By the time Maharashtra’s Revenue Minister Chandrashekhar Bawankule announced that the government was withdrawing the draft Maharashtra Devasthan Inam Abolition Act, 2026, the proposed legislation had spent barely a month in the public domain. Published on May 6 for comments and objections, it was presented as an attempt to address one of the state’s longest-running land disputes: nearly 5.5 lakh hectares of Devasthan Inam land, much of it under encroachment or contested occupation, and temple trusts that had struggled to recover property endowed over centuries. Within weeks, however, the government abandoned the draft and promised to begin again.

The reversal followed sustained opposition from temple trusts and organisations including the Maharashtra Mandir Mahasangh, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti. More than a thousand trustees reportedly joined the campaign, hundreds of representations were submitted to ministers and district officials, and delegations met Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde and other senior members of the government.

When the withdrawal was announced, temple organisations described it as the outcome of a collective struggle. The government, for its part, insisted that it was merely responding to concerns raised during the consultation process and that a fresh draft would be prepared after wider discussions.

According to the Revenue Department, the proposed law sought to create a statutory mechanism for recovering temple lands from illegal encroachments while protecting the rights of lawful occupants. Officials argued that temple trusts often lacked the administrative and legal capacity to reclaim endowed properties and that the state could provide a more effective framework. Bawankule repeatedly said that the proposal had been conceived on lines comparable to the legal framework governing Waqf properties, allowing the government to assist in protecting religious endowments rather than leaving trusts to pursue long and expensive litigation on their own.

Temple organisations read the draft very differently. The Maharashtra Mandir Mahasangh argued that provisions of the Bill would effectively abolish historical Devasthan Inam grants made by earlier rulers and weaken rather than strengthen temple ownership. It objected to clauses that it said recognised ownership claims of some long-term occupants, questioned restrictions on approaching civil courts, and criticised what it described as differential treatment between temple lands and Waqf properties.

Whether those objections reflected the actual legal consequences of the draft or apprehensions about how the law might eventually operate is a wholly different matter. The Hindu fold today perceives itself to be victimised in public discourse despite having been in power at the Centre for the last twelve years and mobilises moralised protest tactics that are often rooted in narratives of self-victimisation. Whatever the merits of those objections, they were enough to stop the Bill before it reached the Assembly.

The government never argued that temple lands should change hands. On the contrary, ministers repeatedly said the purpose of the Bill was to help temple trusts recover lands that had slipped into encroachment and to give those properties stronger legal protection. The resistance came from temple organisations that feared the proposed law would give the state greater control over how disputes were settled and how rights over Devasthan land would eventually be determined. Their objections were directed less at the objective than at the mechanism through which the government proposed to achieve it.

For all the talk of ideological unity, governing and movement politics do not always pull in the same direction. The Devasthan Bill became one of those moments when the seams briefly showed. Electoral alliances often make those differences easy to miss. Yet land has always been a source of authority as much as a form of property. Questions of who records land and who settles disputes have a way of exposing those tensions.

The BJP has spent much of the past decade presenting itself as the party of a strong, interventionist state. Governing through legislation inevitably extends the state’s reach into institutions that have long operated through inherited arrangements and local authority. Temple trusts may welcome stronger protection for their lands, but greater state involvement also means surrendering some control over how disputes are settled and property is administered. That is where governments and religious institutions can begin pulling in different directions. The fault lines are not entirely new. They surfaced publicly during the online battles between the so-called “raitas” and “trads” during the Bulli Bai app case, and the Devasthan Bill suggests that those disagreements extend well beyond social media into much wider political constituencies.

It is striking that the government defended the draft by invoking the legal framework surrounding Waqf properties. The comparison was meant to reassure temple trusts that similar protections could be extended to temple lands. Yet the politics around Waqf have unfolded very differently in recent years. Legislative changes affecting Muslim institutions have largely proceeded despite sustained objections from Muslim organisations. In Maharashtra, by contrast, the government withdrew its own proposal before it reached the legislature, reopened consultations and gave temple representatives a central role in rewriting the Bill.

Temple organisations opposed the draft before it entered the legislature, secured meetings with senior ministers, compelled the government to withdraw its own proposal and now have formal representation on the committee tasked with preparing a revised Bill. The committee, headed by Additional Chief Secretary Vikas Kharge, includes fifteen representatives from temple trusts alongside senior officials from the Revenue Department.

Governments routinely ask farmers’ organisations, workers’ unions, unemployed youth and communities affected by displacement to wait for departmental reviews or expert committees. Families pursuing justice after caste-based violence often confront years of administrative delay and prolonged litigation before receiving meaningful responses. Many Muslim organisations have found themselves responding to legislative changes only after they have already been enacted and have then faced criminalisation for protesting. Temple organisations, by contrast, intervened while the law was still being drafted and altered its course before it reached the legislature.

The debate has also left largely unexplored the people living on Devasthan Inam land. Public discussion has centred on temples, trusts and encroachments, while remarkably little attention has been paid to the social composition of those occupying or cultivating these lands. The category of “encroacher” can include very different histories: long-term agricultural tenancy, informal occupation, disputed ownership, commercial acquisition and settlement by landless households over several generations.

The Devasthan Bill was withdrawn after organisations within the broader Hindutva fold challenged a government that is often assumed to speak for them. The next draft of the Bill will answer some legal questions. It may also answer a political one: how much room the state still has to regulate institutions that are among its closest ideological allies.

DalitThinkerToday is an Chartered Accountant by profession from Sangli, Maharashtra who occasionally dabbles in thinking about politics when people in her oppressor caste majority office frustrate her. This is her pseudonym.

A report by Human Rights Watch has accused Indian authorities of forcibly expelling ethnic Bengali residents—predominantly Muslims—from West Bengal into Bangladesh without due process, leaving families stranded for days between the border forces of the two countries. According to the report, the Border Security Force (BSF) has, since early June, repeatedly attempted to push groups of people across the border, only for Bangladesh’s Border Guard (BGB) to refuse entry because no process of nationality verification had taken place. Families, including children and pregnant women, were reportedly left in the “zero line” between the two countries before some were eventually taken back by Indian authorities.

Several of those identified in the report were not recent entrants into India. They reportedly possessed Aadhaar cards, had lived in the country for decades and had participated in previous elections. Their detention followed the deletion of their names from West Bengal’s revised electoral rolls after the controversial voter-list revision that preceded the Bharatiya Janata Party’s victory in the state elections. In several reported cases, exclusion from the electoral rolls appears to have become the basis for detention and attempted deportation.

Over the last decade, citizenship has increasingly been determined through documentation rather than constitutional status alone. West Bengal is not the beginning of this story. The National Register of Citizens (NRC) exercise in Assam excluded nearly two million people from the final register, leaving thousands in prolonged legal uncertainty. Detention centres, foreigners’ tribunals and endless documentary verification, alongside the ethno-nationalist zeal with which these practices have been defended, have transformed citizenship from an assumed legal status into something that must be repeatedly established before the state. This is not to suggest that the pre-NRC order was free of structural violence, but the contemporary mutations mark a significant escalation in how citizenship itself is administered and contested. The current developments suggest that this administrative logic is no longer confined to Assam but is increasingly shaping citizenship practices elsewhere in India.

The political language surrounding these exercises follows a template that the Bharatiya Janata Party has steadily developed since the 1990s, drawing on older nationalist anxieties around borders. In West Bengal, where a shared Bengali identity historically complicated such narratives, that vocabulary has nevertheless gained political ground. Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari has openly defended a policy of “detect, delete and deport”, claiming that thousands of alleged Bangladeshi “infiltrators” have already been sent back, even as both the legality of these actions and the official figures cited remain open to serious question.

The Human Rights Watch report also raises questions about the apparent bypassing of established repatriation procedures between India and Bangladesh. Dhaka has repeatedly maintained that it will not accept individuals pushed across the border outside agreed processes of nationality verification. The consequence has been families stranded for days between two states, each refusing immediate responsibility for people whose legal status remains contested.

These events expose a larger weakness in India’s legal framework governing migration and displacement. India remains outside the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol and has no comprehensive refugee or asylum law. The principle of non-refoulement—the obligation not to return a person to a territory where they face persecution or other serious harm—therefore does not exist as a comprehensive statutory guarantee. Indian courts have, in some cases, extended Article 21 protections to non-citizens. Even so, refugee protection continues to depend largely on executive policy and judicial interpretation rather than a coherent legislative framework.

The people described in the Human Rights Watch report are not necessarily refugees in the legal sense. Many are individuals whose nationality itself is disputed. Ideally, constitutional safeguards and judicial oversight would protect such vulnerable populations. Instead, the higher judiciary has, over the years, increasingly retreated from that role in matters of citizenship, at times reinforcing rather than restraining the state’s exclusionary powers. Yet the absence of a clear legal framework leaves similar questions to executive discretion: who is heard, who is detained, who is deported and what procedural safeguards apply before those decisions are made.

The law says little about undocumented migrants whose labour sustains agriculture, construction, brick kilns, domestic work, manufacturing and much of the informal economy. Their work is absorbed into the economy while their precarious legal status leaves them vulnerable to wage theft, coercion, detention and deportation. Their labour is needed; their rights remain contingent.

The implications also extend to caste. Documentary citizenship has never operated on a socially level field. Landlessness, forced migration, displacement, informal labour and unequal access to education and state institutions have meant that documentary histories are themselves unevenly distributed. Communities historically pushed to the margins—including Dalits, Adivasis, denotified and nomadic tribes, migrant workers and many borderland populations—are often least equipped to satisfy expanding bureaucratic demands for proof. Administrative neutrality can therefore reproduce deeply unequal social outcomes without ever invoking caste explicitly.

That is why the current moment should not be viewed simply as a border issue or a dispute over illegal immigration. The expulsions are the endpoint of a much longer administrative process through which citizenship itself becomes uncertain. The border merely reveals a process that begins much earlier—in electoral rolls, identity databases, police verification, citizenship registers and executive discretion.

The expulsions at the India-Bangladesh border are not an isolated border episode. They reveal how questions of citizenship are increasingly being settled through administrative action before they are settled in law. Once belonging itself becomes contingent on documents that can be revised, withdrawn or disputed, the Constitution ceases to function as a guarantee and instead becomes something that citizens must repeatedly prove themselves entitled to.

Paresh Hate is a Bahujan queer researcher, writer, documenter and activist and the Lead Content Manager at Dalit Voice.

Nepal’s new government has done something no previous government was willing to do. In March 2026, it issued a formal apology to Dalits, acknowledging centuries of caste discrimination and exclusion. Soon after, Sita Badi became the first Dalit woman to hold a full cabinet position at the federal level, taking charge of the Ministry of Women, Children and Senior Citizens.

For a country where caste oppression has long been treated as a social problem rather than a political one, these developments carry weight. The Nepali state has publicly acknowledged that caste inequality was not simply a matter of social prejudice but a system sustained through institutions, laws and political power.

The apology, delivered in Parliament by Rabi Lamichhane, promised that no Nepali would again have to bow before caste hierarchy. Yet questions emerged almost immediately. The statement was expected to come from the President or Prime Minister as a formal act of the state. Instead, it came through the chairperson of the ruling party speaking on behalf of the government.

Dalit organisations have responded by focusing less on the language of recognition than on the machinery of reform. The Feminist Dalit Organisation (FEDO) has called for inclusive budgeting, stronger protections against violence, economic empowerment programmes, citizenship rights and greater participation in decision-making. It has also pushed for legislation to implement Article 40 of Nepal’s Constitution and for long-promised commitments on proportional representation. These demands are not new. Neither are most of the constitutional provisions involved.

The Nepali state did not discover caste discrimination in 2026. Dalit organisations, activists and movements have spent decades documenting exclusion, violence and underrepresentation. Constitutional guarantees already exist. National commissions already exist. Yet proportional representation remains incomplete, Article 40 remains only partially implemented, and Dalit organisations continue to press for reforms that have been discussed for years.

The government announced a 100-point reform agenda and promised key initiatives within 15 days. More than 55 days after the formation of the new Parliament, little progress had been made on many of those commitments.

Constitutional provisions can remain unimplemented for years even when legislatures are functioning. The deeper issue is political will. Successive governments have been willing to acknowledge caste discrimination, establish commissions and make commitments. They have been far less willing to spend political capital on reforms that would alter representation, budgeting priorities and institutional accountability.

Since the current parliamentary session began in May, lawmakers have spent weeks locked in disputes over Prime Minister Balendra Shah’s conduct, parliamentary procedure, dress codes, attendance and political remarks. Opposition parties have staged protests, boycotts and obstruction. Debates over the government’s policy programme and budget priorities have repeatedly been pushed aside. None of these disputes concern the constitutional reforms Dalit organisations continue to demand.

Nepal’s political class has found the language to acknowledge historical caste injustice while leaving many of the reforms demanded by Dalit organisations unresolved. Sita Badi’s appointment sits within the same political landscape. Her rise from the historically oppressed Badi community to the federal cabinet would have been difficult to imagine only a generation ago. For Dalit women in particular, her appointment breaks through a barrier that Nepal’s political establishment left standing for decades.

Civil society groups are now working with the National Dalit Commission to prepare a broader position paper on social justice, restoration and historical reconciliation. Nepal’s apology has opened a political opportunity. Dalit organisations have treated it as such. They have responded not with celebration alone but with demands, proposals and constitutional claims.

Paresh Hate is a Bahujan queer researcher, writer, documenter and activist and the Lead Content Manager at Dalit Voice.

The dubious delimitation attempt under the guise of women’s reservation during the special parliamentary session of April 16–18, 2026, was packaged as a routine constitutional necessity aligned with democratic principles of equal representation. It was rightly defeated in parliament because of its vastly inequitable and politicized approach. Yet, to prevent any future such mischievous exercise, any such lop-sided, ill-defined bill must be examined for its implications for India’s deeply stratified social structure, particularly the realities of Dalits, Adivasis, and OBCs. Doing so raises profound concerns about the future of political representation, social justice, and democratic equity for these sections of society. What was being framed as a neutral, population-based recalibration of parliamentary seats risks entrenching caste inequalities unless it explicitly addresses the historical and ongoing exclusion of these communities from political representation.

Formally, delimitation rests on the principle that each vote should carry equal weight; therefore, constituencies must be periodically redrawn to reflect population changes. India’s last delimitation was based on the 2001 Census, with a freeze on seat redistribution extended until after the first census post-2026. The forthcoming exercise, therefore, is expected to rely on updated demographic data—though notably, the absence of a recent census since 2011 introduces significant ambiguity.

As per the 2011 Census, India’s population was 1.21 billion, but contemporary estimates place it at approximately 1.47 billion, leaving around 250–260 million people outside the ambit of representation – a majority of them from the Dalit Bahujan, Tribal and Adivasi communities. This gap is not merely technical; it has direct implications for communities whose demographic weight is substantial but whose political visibility remains limited.

Dalits (Scheduled Castes) constitute approximately 16.6% of India’s population, while Adivasis (Scheduled Tribes) account for about 8.6%, based on 2011 data. OBCs, though not officially enumerated in that census, were widely estimated by the Mandal Commission and are considered by subsequent studies to comprise between 40% and 52% of the population. Taken together, these groups form an overwhelming majority—often described as the Dalit-Bahujan social bloc. Yet, their numerical strength has not translated into proportional political representation, particularly at the national level. While the Constitution provides for reserved constituencies for SCs and STs in Parliament and state assemblies, these reservations are tied to outdated population data and do not extend to OBCs in Parliament.

This structural imbalance affecting DBA communities becomes more pronounced in the context of delimitation. A purely population-driven redistribution of seats is expected to increase the parliamentary weight of northern states such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana and Rajasthan. These states already account for about a 33.89% share of Lok Sabha seats and projections using the 2011 census suggest that their share would rise by approximately 43.97% for a total of 48.97% in an expanded House of around 850 members (see chart 1). These numbers would further increase if the current population estimate of 1.47 billion is considered. Similar rises (see Chart 2) are indicated in states like Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Odisha where the combined Dalit and Tribal population exceeds 40%.

Chart 1 - North Indian States

Chart 2 - Tribal Population Dense States

Superficially, these changes might appear beneficial for Dalit-Bahujan communities, given their large presence in these states. Uttar Pradesh, for instance, has one of the highest concentrations of Scheduled Castes in the country, with Dalits comprising over 21% of its population. Bihar’s OBC population is estimated to exceed 50%, while Adivasi populations are significant in states like Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.

However, the critical issue is not merely where these populations are concentrated, but how political power is distributed within these regions. Electoral representation and outcomes in these states have historically been shaped by dominant caste coalitions, often marginalizing Dalit-Bahujan voices despite their numerical strength. The expansion of seats, therefore, risks amplifying existing patterns of dominance unless accompanied by structural safeguards ensuring equitable representation.

The absence of political reservation for OBCs in Parliament is particularly significant in this context. Despite constituting nearly half of India’s population, OBCs do not have reserved constituencies at the national level, unlike SCs and STs. This exclusion is compounded by the lack of updated caste data. The Socio-Economic and Caste Census (SECC) conducted in 2011 collected extensive data, but its caste findings have never been fully released or integrated into policymaking. Without a comprehensive caste census, delimitation proceeds in a data vacuum that obscures the actual social composition of constituencies. This effectively perpetuates historical inequalities, allowing representation to be recalibrated based on aggregate population figures while ignoring internal disparities.

For Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, the situation is equally complex. The number of reserved constituencies is determined by their share in the population, but this share is based on outdated data. If the actual proportion of SCs and STs has changed over the past decade and a half—as is most likely—then the current framework under-represents their presence. Moreover, delimitation could alter the geographical distribution of reserved constituencies in ways that dilute the political influence of these communities.

For example, if SC populations are dispersed across multiple constituencies rather than concentrated in specific areas, the number of reserved seats may not adequately reflect their demographic weight.

Adivasi communities face additional challenges. Concentrated in forested and resource-rich regions, they have long experienced displacement, land alienation, and administrative neglect. While ST-reserved constituencies exist, they do not necessarily guarantee effective representation, particularly when political and economic power remains external to these communities. Delimitation that does not account for the socio-economic vulnerabilities of Adivasis risks reinforcing a pattern in which territorial representation exists without substantive empowerment.

The linkage of delimitation to the implementation of women’s reservation further complicates the picture. The Constitution (106th Amendment) Act, 2023, which mandates 33% reservation for women in Parliament and state assemblies, has been widely celebrated as a landmark reform. However, its implementation is contingent upon the completion of a fresh census and subsequent delimitation. This conditionality effectively delays the realization of women’s representation, potentially by several years.

For Dalit-Bahujan women, who face intersecting forms of marginalization based on caste, class, occupation and gender, this delay is particularly consequential. Without explicit provisions ensuring representation for SC, ST, and OBC women within the broader quota, there is the risk that the benefits of women’s reservation will be disproportionately captured by upper-caste women. At the same time, the government has been noted to ignore calls by Dalit transgender activists for horizontal reservation for transgender persons even as BJP has sought to introduce exclusionary amendments to the existing Transgender Act.

Data from local government institutions, where reservations for women and OBCs are already in place, provides important insights. Studies have shown that while women’s reservation in Panchayati Raj institutions has increased female participation, the distribution of benefits is uneven. In many cases, women from dominant social groups are more likely to occupy leadership positions, while Dalit and Adivasi women continue to face barriers such as social discrimination, limited access to resources, and proxy representation. Extending this pattern to Parliament without corrective measures will reproduce similar inequalities at scale.

The federal dimension of delimitation has attracted considerable attention, particularly the potential shift in political power from southern and western states to the northern Hindi belt. Southern states such as Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh have achieved population control, higher literacy levels, and better health outcomes compared to many northern states. Consequently, their population growth has stabilized, while their share of parliamentary seats is likely to decline in relative terms—from around 23.8% to approximately 20.2%, even if the absolute number of seats increases from 129 to 172 (see Chart 3) purely on the basis of population.

Chart 3 - South India States

While this shift is framed as a question of regional imbalance, it also has implications for Dalit-Bahujan communities. Southern states have historically implemented more robust social justice policies, including reservations for OBCs in education and employment, welfare schemes targeting marginalized communities, and relatively stronger institutional frameworks for addressing caste discrimination. A reduction in their political influence at the national level could weaken the policy emphasis on social justice, affecting the oppressed caste populations across the region.

At the same time, the expansion of representation in northern states does not automatically translate into improved outcomes for marginalized communities. These regions continue to face significant challenges in terms of poverty, education, healthcare, and social inequality. According to National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) data, indicators such as child malnutrition, maternal mortality, and access to sanitation remain worse in several northern states compared to the national average, with Dalit-Bahujan communities disproportionately affected. Without targeted interventions, increased political representation at the state level will not lead to substantive improvements in their socio-economic status.

The method by which delimitation is being introduced further raises concerns about social justice and democratic practice. Rather than being debated as an independent issue, it has been embedded within the operational framework of women’s reservation, limiting the scope for independent and broader scrutiny. This approach mirrors a broader pattern of policymaking in which significant structural changes are introduced with limited consultation and legislative debate. For communities that have historically been excluded from decision-making processes, such methods exacerbate existing deficits in representation.

The delay in conducting the census adds another layer of social justice complexity. A census is not merely a statistical exercise; it is the foundation upon which policies related to representation, resource allocation, and social justice are built. The absence of up-to-date data undermines the credibility of the delimitation process and raises questions about its fairness toward oppressed communities. For Dalit-Bahujan communities, whose claims to representation are often contested or minimized, the lack of reliable data is particularly detrimental.

Experts have suggested alternative approaches that incorporate indicators such as fiscal contribution, socio-economic development, and human development outcomes alongside population. Such models could help balance the principle of equal caste representation with the need to ensure equitable participation of Dalit-Bahujans in governance. However, these proposals have not been considered, and the insistence on a purely population-based approach that suggests a preference for a framework that aligns with existing political advantages of dominant communities.

Ultimately, delimitation is not just a technical exercise; it is a reconfiguration of the political landscape that will shape distribution of power for decades. For the broader Dalit-Bahujan population, the stakes are particularly high. Without explicit safeguards, updated data, and inclusive policymaking, the process risks reinforcing the very inequalities it should seek to address.

Democracy, at its core, is about ensuring that those who have historically been excluded are meaningfully included in decision-making. A delimitation process that prioritizes numerical redistribution without addressing structural inequities falls short of this ideal. In its current form, it risks transforming demographic strength into political invisibility, leaving Dalit-Bahujan communities as passive participants in a system that continues to marginalize their voices and political equality.

The question, therefore, is not whether delimitation should occur, but how it should be conducted. A just and equitable process must begin with a comprehensive caste census, ensuring that the social composition of the population is accurately reflected. It must include provisions for OBC political representation, recognizing their demographic significance. It must update and strengthen SC/ST reservations based on current data, ensuring that these communities are neither underrepresented nor misrepresented. It must incorporate intersectional safeguards to ensure that Dalit-Bahujan women are not excluded from the benefits of gender-based reservation. And above all, it must be conducted through a transparent, consultative process that includes the voices of those most affected.

Without these measures, delimitation risks becoming an instrument of consolidation for the dominant castes rather than democratization—a mechanism that redistributes seats while leaving power structures intact. For a country that has long struggled with the legacies of caste and inequality, such an outcome would represent not progress, but regression.

*Data based on analysis merging figures from Census of India 2011, Election Commission of India, Times of India and numbers in the Delimitation proposal of 131st Amendment Bill.

Oliver D’Souza is a former journalist and an author.

On 13 March 2026, the Freedom of Religion Bill was tabled in the Maharashtra State Assembly — the eleventh state that may have such legislation since independence. Ten similar laws in the states of Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, and Haryana have already been enacted; one in Tamil Nadu has been repealed. Two others in Arunachal Pradesh and Rajasthan were never enacted despite formulation. Home Minister Amit Shah has made an election promise that the law would be enacted in the State of Punjab as well. The stated purpose is a familiar trope: preventing conversions obtained through force, fraud, or inducement. The language is legal and respectable. The real targets are Dalits and other oppressed castes.

These laws have nothing to do with coercive religious practice. They are instruments designed to prevent the emancipation of oppressed castes from dominant castes’ hegemony — and to ensure that the dominant caste establishment’s social, economic, and civilizational hegemony, which that order has sustained for two millennia, remains intact.

Caste is not merely a social phenomenon. It is a religious system of control, encoded in the Manusmriti as a spiritual, social, and economic order and sanctified by Brahminical Hinduism for two millennia. It has structured every material dimension of life: occupation, property, education, marriage, and public space. Spiritual inequality was the foundational condition from which all socio-economic deprivation followed. The Dalit-Bahujan communities did not merely occupy the bottom of a social hierarchy — they were theologically assigned to it. Any faith that rejected that assignment was, therefore, not merely a spiritual alternative. It was a structural threat to those who benefited from the arrangement.

That is the context in which every anti-conversion law, which includes conversion to any faith, must be read.

The legislative history begins not in 1967, when Odisha enacted India’s first anti-conversion law, but in 1950, when the Presidential Order quietly excluded converts to minority faiths from the reservation protections established under Article 341 of the Constitution. The Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950, originally limited SC status to those professing Hinduism, and later extended it to Sikhism and Buddhism. Converts to Christianity and Islam, which form the bulk of non-Buddhist converts, lose SC status under this order, as affirmed by recent Supreme Court interpretation citing the 1950 Presidential Order in a case pertaining to Andhra Pradesh, even as a petition concerning reservation benefits for Dalit Muslims and Christians has been pending before a three-member bench of the Supreme Court since January 2011.

In 1950, this was not debated. It was not declared. It was done quietly, and widely attributed to K. M. Munshi, a Constituent Assembly member with known Manuwadi leanings, who openly opposed extending reservations to those who left the Hindu fold. The purpose was malignant.

The most consequential test of that logic came six years later. On 14 October 1956, B. R. Ambedkar — the man who had written the Constitution those same dominant caste legislators are now subverting — converted to Buddhism along with approximately half a million of his followers in Nagpur. Ambedkar had spent decades arguing that caste could not be reformed from within Hinduism because it was not an aberration within Brahminical theology but its direct product. Conversion was not apostasy. It was the exercise of the precise freedom the Constitution guaranteed. The 1950 Presidential Order had already moved to penalise that choice economically. Had these state anti-conversion laws existed in 1956, Ambedkar’s event at Nagpur — the largest mass act of religious self-determination in modern Indian history — would have required prior government approval under the very constitutional order he had designed. The extension of SC status to Navayana Buddhism only happened in 1990 under the V. P. Singh government. That is not an irony, it is the point. These laws are aimed, in their structure and intent, at preventing socio-economic outcomes exactly like what Ambedkar fought for in that spiritual and social context.

Christianity’s presence in India is not a colonial imposition. St. Thomas arrived on the Malabar Coast in the first century AD. Catholicism spread along India’s western coast after the Portuguese conquest of Goa in 1510, and later inland, focusing on the emancipation of oppressed castes, even as they had their own interests in doing so. During colonial rule, Protestant missionaries added to the work Catholics were doing — running schools and hospitals where none existed and agitating against oppressive caste practices, among them the requirement in parts of South India that Dalit women leave their breasts uncovered as a mark of caste subordination. The tangible improvements these missions delivered to Dalits are documented. The Savarna response to those improvements has also been documented, including in the form of every anti-conversion law that followed.

The rhetorical device used to delegitimise this history is the accusation of “ricebag Christians” — the claim that conversions were purchased with food rather than chosen in conscience. When people are starving, providing food alongside a theology that affirms their equality before God is not inducement. It is the practical application of that theology that responds to social reality.

In 1956, the Madhya Pradesh government appointed a committee under Hindu nationalist former judge M. B. Niyogi to examine missionary activities in the state. The Committee was formed in response to the Bharatiya Jana Sangh’s “Anti-Foreign Missionary Week” protest. Set up by a Congress government, it recommended legally prohibiting conversions that were not fully voluntary, but the proposal was not implemented at the time, as it would have been difficult to enforce without violating constitutional religious freedoms. The Niyogi Report was not an inquiry. It was a brief for the prosecution, prepared in advance of charges not yet formally filed. It catalogued missionary schools, hospitals, orphanages, and social service institutions — and then attributed to all of it a calculated programme of conversion through inducement. It did not disprove the emancipatory value of these institutions to oppressed castes. It simply recast that value as evidence of conspiracy. The Niyogi Report provided the ideological and legislative scaffolding for the Odisha anti-conversion law of 1967, and its logic has been reproduced in every state law enacted since.

The constitutional foundation for these laws was established by the Supreme Court’s 1977 ruling in Rev. Stanislaus v. State of Madhya Pradesh, which held that the right to “propagate” religion under Article 25 does not include a right to convert another person. This distinction, applied carefully, is reasonable. Applied as it has been in practice, it is not. The right to convert another person was never what the church claimed.

By constructing its judgment around the prevention of an act that was not in dispute, the Court gave legislative cover to restrict the proclamation of faith itself — and since the state now determined what constitutes illegitimate persuasion, any message compelling enough to move oppressed caste persons toward a different understanding of their own worth can be prosecuted as inducement. The Allahabad High Court has recently reaffirmed the right to propagate and proclaim one’s faith, which amounts to an implicit rebuke of how the Stanislaus judgment has been operationalised.

With the BJP’s rise to national power in 1999 and its consolidation under Narendra Modi in 2014 — whose political formation within the Sangh Parivar is defined by the goal of a Hindu Rashtra, which implicitly requires the maintenance of the caste hierarchy that Brahminical Hinduism produced — seven additional states enacted anti-conversion laws. Each successive iteration grew more elaborate in its administrative requirements.

The most recent versions require prior government approval, inserting a state official between a citizen and a decision of personal conscience in direct tension with Article 21 of the Constitution. An oppressed caste person who wishes to leave the faith that theologically sanctions their subordination must now obtain permission from an apparatus largely controlled by the communities that have historically benefited from that subordination.

The Tamil Nadu precedent is sometimes cited to argue that anti-conversion legislation crosses party lines. In 2002, the AIADMK government enacted a similar law. This requires little explanation: the AIADMK was then a coalition partner in the BJP-led NDA government and enacted the law to sustain that alliance. Tamil Nadu has one of India’s oldest and most rooted Christian populations. The law was repealed in 2004 when the UPA came to power, under pressure from Christian communities — confirming that it had no independent political logic in the state and was adopted purely as a coalition obligation. Nonetheless, this signals the state’s willingness to compromise constitutional freedoms for political expediency.

When the complete sequence is examined together — the 1950 Presidential Order, the Niyogi Report, the Stanislaus judgment, and the cascade of state laws — the pattern is coherent and consistent. The RSS, Jana Sangh, Janata Party, and BJP share an unbroken ideological lineage rooted in a Brahminical Hindu nationalist vision, combining a project of social dominance over internal subaltern communities with a resistance to religious influences perceived as external threats.

Over seventy percent of India’s population — the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Other Backward Classes combined — belong to communities that Christian social and educational institutions most consistently serve. It is precisely the emancipation of these communities — economic, educational, and spiritual — that strikes at the material interests of the Savarna establishment that has historically thrived on their exploitation. The Mandal Commission’s implementation dismantled the Savarna monopoly over state employment and political power. The Church in India, through civil society institutions, has been eroding their civilisational dominance for far longer. Anti-conversion laws are the establishment’s response to both.

The Church is not above scrutiny in this account. Caste has penetrated Christian institutions in India in ways that contradict the theology that made those institutions work for oppressed caste communities in the first place — separate cemeteries, separate seating, upper-caste dominance of church hierarchies still continue in diminishing measures, with Dalit theology now in vogue in seminaries, gradually dissipating these anomalies. That contradiction is real and must be named.

Yet this does not change the fact that the laws are designed not to reform Christian institutions from within, but to prevent oppressed caste communities from accessing them at all. The internal failures of the Church are a problem the Church must answer for. The anti-conversion laws are a problem the state must answer for. Conflating the two serves only those who drafted the legislation.

There is a reason no central anti-conversion law has been passed at the national level: it would face a full constitutional bench and would not survive the judicial test. The state laws function as instruments of attrition — they harass clerics and communities, deter others from exercising their rights, create a climate of legal uncertainty, and signal to oppressed castes that the price of emancipation will be as high as the state can make it. Their authors are not constitutionally naive. They know better than to invite a definitive national ruling.

The multiplication of these laws since 1999 is evidence that they are not impeding Christian emancipation efforts. If oppressed castes had stopped choosing emancipation, new laws would be unnecessary. If earlier laws had effectively blocked the exit, elaboration would be redundant. The inclusion of administrative approval requirements in the most recent iterations — including the Maharashtra Bill now passed in both the Houses and awaiting Governor Jishnu Dev Varma’s assent — confirms that those prosecuting this project are aware it is failing socially and are escalating in response. Escalation in the face of failure is not a sign of strength. It is a sign that the outcome they feared is continuing regardless.

A nation that directs its legislative energy toward preventing the emancipation of the majority of its population — the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Other Backward Classes who together constitute over seventy percent of India’s people — in order to protect the privileges of numerically smaller Savarnas at the top cannot expect that arrangement to produce equitable development. The evidence is already visible in the widening gap between India’s claims to being the world’s fifth-largest economy and the material conditions of the oppressed castes whose labour has always underwritten that economy.

The courts will, hopefully, eventually confirm what the constitutional record already shows: these laws were not enacted with confidence in their constitutionality. They were enacted with confidence in political impunity to impede the emancipation of oppressed caste communities. That foundation is far more fragile than it appears.

The emancipation of oppressed castes is not a process that can be permanently arrested by administrative procedure. Ambedkar understood this. The six hundred thousand people who walked with him in Nagpur in 1956 understood it. The millions who have followed in the decades since understand it. History does not offer a single example of a project designed to lock human beings into inherited degradation that finally succeeded. The architects of this one will find no exception to that record.

Oliver D’Souza is a former journalist and an author.

When Parliament passed the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act in 1989, it was acknowledging a basic truth: caste violence was not an aberration but a structure. Ordinary criminal law had proven incapable of addressing it. Atrocities were not simply crimes between individuals. They were acts meant to discipline entire communities. The Act attempted to name that reality and create stronger legal consequences for it.

More than three decades later, the Act remains one of the most powerful legal instruments available to Dalit and Adivasi communities. Yet it also exists within a criminal justice system that often neutralizes its force. This contradiction sits at the heart of the law’s history. The Atrocities Act represents both a recognition of caste violence and a reminder of how limited legal remedies are in a society structured by caste power.

Upward mobility and backlash

The sociologist Dag-Erik Berg offers a useful way of thinking about the relationship between law and caste violence. He describes the Dalit experience in modern India through what he calls a recurring pattern: upward mobility coexisting with enduring atrocity.

The expansion of education, reservation policies, and political representation has enabled sections of Dalits to challenge older hierarchies. Yet each moment of assertion has also produced violent backlash. Many of the most brutal caste massacres in recent decades have targeted communities that were asserting new social or economic claims.

The Atrocities Act emerged from this historical dynamic. It was not simply the product of humanitarian concern but the outcome of decades of Dalit struggles that forced the state to acknowledge caste violence as a structural problem. Earlier laws, such as the Protection of Civil Rights Act, focused mainly on untouchability practices like temple entry. They proved inadequate for addressing organized violence, social boycotts, and collective punishment. The 1989 law attempted to respond to these realities. It listed specific offences tied to caste domination and created special procedures for investigation and prosecution. In doing so, it brought caste explicitly into the framework of criminal law.

But as Berg points out, the presence of such legislation does not automatically transform the social structures that generate violence. Reservation policies and atrocity laws operate within domains visible to the state, such as education, employment, and criminal punishment. Meanwhile, the deeper mechanisms through which caste reproduces itself remain largely untouched. Marriage practices continue to enforce caste boundaries. Land ownership remains deeply unequal across caste lines. Economic and social power in villages often rests with dominant castes. The law intervenes after violence occurs, but the social order that makes violence possible remains largely intact. This gap between structural inequality and legal remedy explains why atrocities continue even in a constitutional democracy that formally prohibits caste discrimination.

The everyday obstacles of justice

If the Atrocities Act represents recognition of caste violence, its implementation reveals how difficult it is to translate that recognition into justice.

Anthropologist Sandhya Fuchs traces what happens when survivors attempt to turn experiences of violence into legal cases. The journey often begins at the police station, where complaints must first be recorded. Here, the law encounters the everyday functioning of the criminal justice system. Police officers frequently reinterpret or dilute complaints in ways that prevent cases from being registered under the Atrocities Act. Acts of violence are reframed as ordinary disputes, family conflicts, or property disagreements.

Survivors may be pressured to withdraw complaints or accept informal settlements. Sometimes cases never reach the courts at all. Even when cases move forward, survivors must navigate a complex field of actors, including activists, lawyers, community leaders, and political intermediaries. Each of these groups may have their own ideas about how the law should be used.

Fuchs describes how atrocity cases can become sites where competing visions of justice, honor, and political strategy collide. Survivors themselves often make pragmatic choices within these constraints. Out-of-court compromises are common, even though many activists criticize them as evidence that the law is failing. For some families, however, the threat of legal action becomes a bargaining tool to secure compensation, protection, or a measure of dignity in hostile local environments.

These negotiations reveal something important about the law’s role. The Atrocities Act is not simply a legal instrument. It has also become a symbolic resource that marginalized communities use to challenge dominant caste power, sometimes inside the courts and sometimes outside them. Yet the same processes that allow creative uses of the law also expose its fragility. Police bias, political pressure, and social intimidation constantly shape whether justice is possible.

Evidence, memory, and the burden of proof

The obstacles do not end once a case reaches court. Legal procedures themselves often place heavy burdens on survivors and witnesses.

Legal scholar Achintya Anita Gurumurthy highlights this problem through the example of the Test Identification Parade, a procedure used during criminal investigations to confirm whether eyewitnesses can identify suspects. In theory, such procedures are meant to strengthen evidence. In practice, they can be used to discredit survivors. Courts sometimes treat minor inconsistencies in witness testimonies as signs of unreliability. Delays in conducting identification parades or technical procedural lapses can weaken cases, even when violence is widely known within local communities. In atrocity cases, this evidentiary framework often collides with the realities of trauma, fear, and social pressure faced by Dalit witnesses.

The result is a pattern in which the credibility of survivors becomes the central issue, while the broader structure of caste power fades into the background. The legal process turns into an examination of memory rather than an inquiry into domination.

Gurumurthy argues that evidentiary practices cannot be treated as neutral procedures. They operate within social hierarchies. When police investigators, prosecutors, and judges overwhelmingly come from dominant castes, the interpretation of testimony inevitably reflects those power relations.

Recent legal developments have not fundamentally altered this situation. The Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, which replaced the colonial-era Evidence Act in 2023, largely preserves existing evidentiary structures, including the continued reliance on identification procedures like the Test Identification Parade. The formal language of reform has therefore not significantly transformed how evidence functions in caste atrocity cases.

For survivors, this means that the struggle for justice often involves confronting not only perpetrators but also the institutional habits of the legal system itself. Despite sensitive case law in Malkhansingh v. State of Madhya Pradesh and Kulwinder v. State (NCT of Delhi), which reflects the work of Dalit lawyers and activists, much more remains to be done in criminal justice reform if the goals of the Atrocities Act are to be realised.

Contestation and dilution

The Atrocities Act has always faced political resistance. Dominant caste organizations have repeatedly portrayed it as a law prone to misuse. This narrative gained national attention during the controversy surrounding a 2018 Supreme Court judgment that introduced restrictions on arrests under the Act, citing concerns about false cases. Dalit protests across the country forced Parliament to amend the law and restore its original provisions. The episode demonstrated both the vulnerability of the Act and the power of collective mobilization.

Such struggles are part of a longer history. Every expansion of legal protection for marginalized groups has been accompanied by attempts to dilute it, delay its implementation, or reinterpret it in ways that limit its reach. The Atrocities Act is no exception.

At the same time, the law has become deeply embedded in Dalit political consciousness. Activists, lawyers, and community organizations have built networks around it. Survivors often approach the law not simply as a technical instrument but as a statement that their suffering deserves recognition.

This dual character explains why the Act can appear both powerful and fragile, as Fuchs calls it. It is powerful because it names caste violence explicitly and creates legal consequences for it. It is fragile because its effectiveness depends on institutions that remain shaped by the very hierarchies the law seeks to challenge.

What law can and cannot do

For many survivors of atrocities, the most painful realization is that law alone cannot transform social relations. As Fuchs shows through her study of rural Rajasthan, families affected by brutal violence sometimes describe the law as something distant. Court cases may continue for years without changing the attitudes of the communities that carried out the violence.

This does not mean the law is meaningless. Legal action can bring compensation, punishment, or recognition. It can create new networks of solidarity and political mobilization. It can signal that caste violence is not a private dispute but a public injustice.

But law operates within a society where caste remains deeply embedded in everyday life. Courts cannot reorganize land ownership. Police procedures cannot dismantle endogamous marriage networks. Criminal punishment cannot eliminate the desire for status that sustains graded inequality. The persistence of caste therefore exposes the limits of relying solely on legal remedies.

Beyond the courtroom

The history of the Atrocities Act makes one thing clear: law has rarely initiated social transformation in India. More often, it has been forced into existence by movements that refused silence. Dalit and Adivasi struggles compelled the state to recognise caste violence, defend the law when it was diluted, and push institutions to act when they would rather look away.

Seen from this perspective, the Atrocities Act is not the source of justice but one instrument within a larger political struggle. It provides language, leverage, and sometimes protection. But the force that gives the law meaning lies outside the courtroom.

The fight against caste atrocities has never been won by statutes alone. It has been sustained by collective resistance, by communities that organise, testify, and refuse the social order that treats their lives as expendable. When the law works at all, it is usually because those struggles have compelled it to.

Paresh Hate is a Bahujan queer researcher, writer, documenter and activist and the Lead Content Manager at Dalit Voice.

This piece, adapted from Chapter 2, “Annihilation of Caste,” in Caste – A Nation Within the Nation, has been abridged, edited, and selectively rephrased to highlight the conjoined conceptual rigor and moral conviction that animate V. T. Rajshekar’s writing. The purpose of this version is to reveal the enduring force of his argument and its continued relevance to the present moment of caste politics and thought. In this essay, Rajshekar dissects caste as the central ideological and structural principle of Indian society—an all-encompassing system that determines not only social hierarchy but also access to political power, knowledge, and morality. He argues that caste cannot be dismantled through moral persuasion or partial reform because it is the very grammar of Hindu social order. Drawing from Ambedkar yet extending beyond him, Rajshekar exposes how religion, law, and politics work in concert to preserve Brahminical dominance. For him, annihilation means confrontation: a total break with the social, spiritual, and epistemic order that legitimizes caste. The essay stands as both critique and declaration, demanding not reconciliation but the assertion of Dalit consciousness as the ground for any true democratic transformation.

However, Rajshekar’s forceful framing also opens up crucial points of tension worth registering. His deployment of the language of “nation” and “national minorities” for Bahujans—though strategically potent—risks reproducing the very nationalist grammar that has historically absorbed, redirected, or neutralized anti-caste energies. The presumption that “nationhood” is a stable or emancipatory horizon for Bahujans overlooks how nationalism in the subcontinent has routinely demanded caste-erasure at the symbolic level while sustaining caste power in practice. A critique aligned with Ambedkar’s own caution would remind us that the nation is not automatically a vehicle of justice; rather, it has often operated as the ideological shield for Brahminical majoritarianism. Any appeal to national belonging must therefore be critically examined so that it does not reinscribe the homogenizing impulses it seeks to break.

Similarly, the text suggests a sharp opposition between caste-bound villages and propaganda-driven cities, as though the former naturally preserve anti-Hindutva potential and the latter incubate Brahminical hegemony. This distinction, already unstable in Rajshekar’s time, is even less tenable today. Rural India has never been uniformly resistant to Hindutva, nor have urban centres been coherent sites of caste blindness. The circulation of media, the penetration of welfare networks, the transformation of local political economies, and the recomposition of rural–urban migration have all produced a far more entangled terrain. Village social order does not automatically protect Bahujan interests; it can reproduce the violence of caste more directly, even as it occasionally generates solidarities unavailable in urban anonymity. Any contemporary evaluation must abandon this binary and analyze how caste power now moves fluidly across both spaces.

Finally, Rajshekar’s argument that Hindutva remains a primarily Brahminical project does not fully anticipate the demographic restructuring of the Hindu Right. Today, its organizational strength and electoral reach depend heavily on OBC and non-Brahmin participation—not only as foot soldiers but as ideological and political actors within the movement. This does not invalidate Rajshekar’s critique of Brahminical dominance; rather, it complicates the picture by showing how caste power adapts, absorbs, and redeploys the aspirations of groups historically positioned outside the Brahminical core. Any contemporary reading must therefore account for how Hindutva now functions through a broadened social base, and why anti-caste politics must confront this expanded constituency rather than an imagined Brahmin minority alone.Taken together, these tensions do not diminish the power of Rajshekar’s intervention; they sharpen it by situating his insights within a transformed political landscape. The stakes of annihilation today demand both the fidelity to Ambedkarite confrontation and a critical rethinking of the categories—nation, village, caste bloc, majority/minority—through which the struggle has been historically articulated.

V. T. Rajshekar

Hindu Angle of ‘Caste Annihilation’

It is the Hindus who stand to gain most from the caste system, for caste is another name for Hinduism. If caste is destroyed, Hinduism collapses. Gandhi knew this and opposed any fight against caste, for his defense of “Varna Dharma” safeguarded Hindu order. No Hindu is prepared to give up caste; caste is the source of their power.

Why then have Hindus suddenly begun talking of “caste annihilation”? Are they ready to sacrifice their privileges? Some honest vaidiks, like the Puri Shankaracharya, openly declare that Bahujans are not Hindus and hence outcastes; we have no quarrel with such honesty. Our problem is with the deceitful “socialist” Brahmins who cloak themselves as Gandhians, Marxists, or nationalists while preserving caste.

Their “caste annihilation” means the abolition of caste-based reservations, not the destruction of caste itself. They want to preserve their superiority while preaching equality — taking Dalits into temples but never allowing them priesthood, welcoming them into Brahmin-owned hotels but never letting them own one. Their idea is to change form without changing content, to keep the power hierarchy intact. They advise the scavenger to take pride in cleaning toilets instead of demanding liberation. This Gandhian hypocrisy, perfected by institutions like Sulabh International, is what they call “caste annihilation.”

Bahujan Angle of ‘Caste Annihilation’
For Bahujans, annihilating caste means destroying the power structure itself. Ambedkarites understand caste as an ascending scale of reverence and a descending scale of contempt. Gandhi’s temple-entry and inter-dining gimmicks never touched this structure. As Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar showed, the root of untouchability is the caste system; the root of caste is religion; and the root of that religion is Brahminical authority sustained by power.

Ambedkar sought to transform the very body of caste, not its surface symptoms. He knew that deprivation and humiliation were political, not moral, conditions. Unless the powerless are empowered, the powerful will never treat them as equals. The Ambedkarite view holds that social equality follows political and economic power. Reservation, therefore, is not charity but an assertion of human rights — a corrective to centuries of exclusion. When rights are restored, the oppressed gain power; when power shifts, equality begins.

Hindus wish only to soften the feelings emanating from caste while leaving the structure untouched. Bahujans aim to destroy its foundation. Hindus cure the symptoms of the disease; Bahujans aim to cure the disease itself.

Hindu Opposition to the Bahujan Angle
Hindus object that caste-based empowerment will strengthen caste, harm national integration, and endanger Hindu unity. Their real fear is that an empowered Bahujan consciousness will destroy the Hindu social order. When they call for caste annihilation, they mean the abolition of resentment among the oppressed — not the privileges of the oppressor. They fear that Dalit assertion will polarize society and lead to a “caste war,” which indeed would end the caste system and minority Hindu rule.

The Brahmins, masters of contradiction, understand Ambedkarism better than most Bahujans. They exploit caste divisions to protect Hindu supremacy. Many Bahujans, seduced by Brahminical media and “secular” rhetoric, fail to see that what the Hindus hate, they should love — and what Hindus love, they should question.

Ambedkarite interpretation of caste annihilation strengthens castes

The Hindu claim that caste-based reservations strengthen caste is only half true. It is true that caste must first consolidate before it can be dismantled. Caste-based representation requires the collective strength of each deprived group; it is a necessary stage in annihilating hierarchy. The Constitution itself recognizes caste as the basis for remedy, granting reservations to Scheduled Castes and Backward Classes. This recognition has empowered Dalits politically and psychologically, enabling them to become a force in national life.

Those who oppose caste identity while benefiting from reservation are deluded. Without caste identification, there would be no eligibility for justice. The so-called “creamy layer” debate further exposes the Hindu anxiety: upper castes resent any rise in Dalit or OBC power. Reservation has created a new confidence — a ladder the privileged now want to kick away.

Ambedkar sought to employ caste-based reservation to consolidate the oppressed as a political community capable of challenging Brahminical domination. Every assertion of caste identity among the marginalized weakens the monopoly of the Hindu minority. Gujarat’s caste wars of the 1980s proved this; Dalit anger, when misdirected against Muslims, only helped consolidate Hindu rule. The lesson remains clear — caste consciousness, not religious nationalism, is the path to equality.

Struggle and Identity
Every struggle for power begins with the assertion of a distinct identity. The oppressor always denies the separate existence of the oppressed to sustain domination. As Dr. Y. N. Kly observed in International Law and the Dalits in India, the Dalits form a distinct people, historically denounced as “outcastes” outside Hinduism. Their forced inclusion as “Scheduled Castes within Hinduism” after independence was a political act — to consolidate India under Hindu dominance. Recognition of Dalits as a separate national minority was deliberately erased from the Constitution.

The 1950 Presidential Order, by denying minority status to Dalits, imposed a Hindu identity on them. Such an identity is an aggression on self-respect. True emancipation requires its rejection. As Ambedkar argued through the Mahad and Nasik agitations, liberation demands independent representation and political power — not inclusion under Hindu paternalism.

Other oppressed peoples, from Eelam Tamils to Chechens, have shown that asserting distinct identity is the first step toward self-determination. Similarly, when SCs, STs, and OBCs demand caste-wise representation, they signal that they are not Hindus but distinct nations within India’s social geography. Their demand for power-sharing amounts to a declaration of self-rule — not secession, but autonomy in shaping their destiny.

This is why the Hindu minority fears caste consolidation. Bahujan identity is their greatest threat. Every move — from Gandhism to Marxism to Hindutva — has sought to dissolve that identity in a false national unity. But each has failed in the face of resurgent caste consciousness.

Failure of ‘Hindu Unity’
The Aryan bid for “Hindu unity” has repeatedly collapsed against India’s resilient village social order, which, though oppressive, remains immune to urban Brahminical propaganda. The BJP’s Hindutva thrives in cities where media and money rule, but it cannot easily penetrate caste-based village structures. Villages preserve both the oppression and the consciousness of caste — a double-edged reality.

When Hindu leaders attempt to dissolve caste distinctions under the banner of unity, they face resistance from the very structure they exploit. Their project depends on manufacturing an external enemy — historically the Muslim — to divert the anger of Dalits and Bahujans. In Gujarat, Dalit participation in anti-Muslim violence marked the tragic success of this manipulation, where caste pride was replaced by Hindu pride.

Yet the same Gujarat also showed that when Dalits fought upper castes, it exposed the core contradiction of Hinduism. Caste identity remains the best defense against Hindutva, the surest means to frustrate Brahminical rule through a silent, bloodless revolution. The villages of India, however unequal, remain fortresses of this social truth — that Hindutva cannot erase caste, and caste, once politicized, can dismantle Hindutva.

Our confusion lies not in the villages but in the cities. Urban Dalits and OBCs, intoxicated by Brahminical media, fail to distinguish between Ambedkar’s programme of caste annihilation and the Hindu deceit of the same name. True annihilation begins with self-respect and ends with equality of power — not with assimilation under Hinduism.

Conclusion

Caste annihilation cannot mean the erasure of caste identity while caste power endures. It must mean the destruction of the hierarchy that sustains it. The Bahujan path, grounded in Ambedkar’s vision, demands empowerment before erasure, equality before unity, and power before reconciliation.

The struggle for identity, dignity, and representation is not contrary to annihilation; it is its necessary condition. Only when the oppressed define themselves can they redefine the nation. Until then, every slogan of “Hindu unity” or “caste annihilation” from above is another mask of domination.

The road to freedom lies in consolidating Bahujan identity, transforming caste into a weapon of liberation, and reclaiming power from those who have ruled in its name. Caste, once the chain, becomes the site of struggle — and in that struggle lies the true beginning of its annihilation.