Methodological Prologue: Theory as Lens, not Template

To be able to think caste within the same analytical field of reference as Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci— two intellectual giants who have left an indelible impression upon his generation—whose long shadows loom large over the landscape of modern Europe, demands a first-order methodological clarification. It is an undeniable premise that caste is uniquely South Asian, a totalising social system with a distinct ontology around indigenous cosmologies of purity, pollution and hierarchal interdependency. Its thinking, its historical trajectory and the experience it embodies can be only partially understood through terms drawn from European history such as class or feudalism or racism, as people like Gopal Guru, Sundar Sarukkai and Dalit Studies thinkers have never tired of insisting. To apply these categories would amount to an act of epistemic violence, the imposition of an artificial reality onto a queasy and never quite-fitting architecture that illuminates nothing but dims what appears from Indian soil, reiterating the colonial knowledge systems that sought once to solidify and regulate caste under alien rubrics. Such as it is, the critique of Eurocentrism isn’t merely an afterthought but a disciplinary sensibility tout court.

So, I provide an inversion in this engagement with Foucault and Gramsci. I am not trying to “apply” their theories to the Indian “case” (as if it were a case of universal concern) in order to fit caste into the Procrustean bed of their local historical referents (the clinic, the prison, the European factory or the making of the Italian nation-state). Rather, I seize their essential methodological insights as adaptable analytical heuristics for shedding light on an essentially novel object. Foucault’s dialectic of the scene and the obscene is indispensable if not as an explanation of European épistémès, at least for its sophisticate analytic tool for understanding how power arranges seeing and saying, produces zones of authorized words and tactical silence, articulates a frontier between what is audible and inaudible. And, once again, Gramsci’s idea of hegemony is not used as a theory of European class making but as a dynamic way to grasp the securing of domination through the construction of “common sense” and the combined action between coercion and consent. Within such a machine, theory is no longer a master narrative so much as an array of precision tools. I do this by deploying these instruments to dismantle the historically specific materiality of caste from its sacred roots to its colonial codification and postcolonial mutations making it possible for the specificity of the phenomenon itself to interrogate and remould the theoretical tools. This essay is then a thought experiment of a critical, situated translation. It deploys Foucauldian and Gramscian optics in order to illumine caste’s internal architecture, its historical transmogrification, while insisting that the image at which one arrives is thoroughly, irreducibly Indian and needs also to conjure up its own vocabulary even as it speaks a global language of power. 

Introduction: The Architectonics of Invisibility

One of the most enduring and complex systems of social stratification in the world—India’s caste system (varna-jati)—is found in the Indian subcontinent. Its analysis requires tools that can penetrate not only its economic or political aspects, but its deep entrenchment in the spheres of knowledge production, body and space. Michel Foucault’s conceptually rich dyad of the “scene”, (what is made visible, sayable and governable) and the “obscene” (that structurally figured beyond but which in its beyond-ness constitutes the scene) provides a powerful prism. When coupled with Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, the means by which ruling groups achieve consent via an ideological “common sense”, this set-up reveals how power functions not just through suppression but through careful organization of social reality itself.

This paper opines that the history of caste has to be considered as a history involving managing (or mismanagement) of this scene/obscene border. The shift from premodern India to modern makes for a seismic change in such tactics of management: from an integral sacral-political scene to a fragmented modern settlement, where the official defacement of caste on real constitutional law and its attendant discourse on the public scene is the very condition for its raucous (albeit often underhand) existence in that social obscene. In it, the dominant scientific and technological discourses on which the ‘normalisation’ of modern society is based cohabits uneasily with remnants of an archaic and pre-modern social universe intricately woven into a powerful hegemonic discourse that systematically normalizes denial akin to what we have called here the hermeneutics of caste. The analysis draws from, among others, works by Nicholas Dirks (2001), Anand Teltumbde (2014) and Gopal Guru (2016) to map this transition showing that contemporary caste should be best understood as a sort of social schizophrenia driven by imaginative acts whereby power perpetuates itself through a convoluted hermetic legitimising act in India.

I. The Integrated Premodern Scene: Inscription, Spectacle and Sacral Hegemony

The caste hierarchy was a relatively coherent and explicit “scene” in the precolonial and early colonial environment. Its effectiveness was based on its thoroughgoing visibility and its cosmological basis. This can be felt clearly through the texts and inscriptions of medieval India.

Case of the Chola Temple Inscriptions and the Smritichandrika: The walls of the temples in Chola period (approx. 9th-13th centuries) are not just structural, but are public records of the social scenario. That act of reciprocation is documented in countless inscriptions which record the details of gifts but also control in great detail the spatial and ritual order: which castes could offer which kinds of gift, how close they might reside to the temple, and what the penal fines would be if they broke faith. At the same time, codified legal digests such as Devanna Bhatta’s 13th-century Smritichandrika continued to systematise dharma for a wide range of varnas and jatis, dictating clothing and ornaments suitable for narrow groups and stipulating edible diets or respectable partners in marriage.

They are performances of sovereign power. The law was not concealed in statute books but carved onto the holiest public edifices. That made the caste system, already a great monument to human pettiness and pride, permanently, monstrously visible. The elaborately clothed body of the Brahmin (instituted with the sacred thread, instringent in particular fabrics) contrasted with the regulated “nakedness” or coarse apparel of those belonging to “lower castes” was a wearable map of social arrangement- status could be read at once on bodies. “Conjugable” was not private, but public, scripture-regulated machinery for the perpetuation of biology and society.

This was an order that was not only maintained through coercion. It was the centre of agrarian economic and ritual life. Writing caste duties on the walls, the ruling powers (the Chola king, Brahmin sabha) attached social status to divine will and royal command. What it did was not to punish, but explain, rationalise and naturalise. It was polished over by embedding caste inside a sanctified “common sense” in which following one’s svadharma was identified with piety, social tranquillity and karmic reward. Consent was produced by the reaffirmation of ritual incorporation and cosmological tale.

An opulent calligraphy of gleaming inscriptions is what this glittering scene silences. The manual, waste-dirty work of temple purification, cleaning, and waste management, labour assigned to the lower (in caste hierarchy) communities, was the necessary but repelled root. There they were a required obscenity, consigned to literal geographical peripheries (the cheri outside the village) in order to keep unsullied, the jatra’s pure centre. The violence required to maintain this order, whenever necessary, was a public spectacle in its own right, a Foucauldian “scene” of sovereign punishment that reaffirmed the parameters of the permissible.

The coherence of this “scene” can be better appreciated, and the premodern character of it more clearly identified, by consideration to a ritual control of everyday practices that makes hierarchy in large measure visible and ever self-evident. The very access to water for instance worked as a micro-theatre of caste power. Shudras and untouchables were forbidden to draw water from a common source that the Savarna castes drank. The prohibition was not just economical or hygienic, it was dramaturgical. The distance at which awaiting castes waited to receive water from above the threshold through a high-caste intermediary enacted hierarchy as embodied choreography. Here, power did its work not by abstract law alone, but through disciplined gestures and spatial distance and the policing of touch. The practice of pollution was practised time and again on the body, making domination a matter of course.

Temple Restrictions of Entry Again, temple entry restrictions circumscribe how the holy solidified the sightedness of the field. As a condensation of the cosmic arena for legitimacy, these were the gatekeepers to those who could and could not come near divinity itself but whose mere presence would cause ritual chaos. Therefore, being kept out of temple space was not just  marginalisation but rather the ontological disqualification from the moral order which organized village life. The untouchable body was constitutively “ob-scene”, that which was vulgar so as to be excluded from the sacred frame, and thus a figure of purity in the visible scene. But this exclusion, counter-intuitively, verified centrality: the system needed what it banished. Carcass removal, tanning and sanitation-labour were materially integral to the agricultural way of life, and that the obscene was not external to power but its hidden basis.

This paradox has the kind of echo that Foucault will say later, that power creates what it seemingly excludes. The untouchable was, then, not simply oppressed but discursively produced as pollutant, essential to the symbolic unity of Brahmanical purity. Visibility and invisibility therefore comprised one and the same machine. Although his labour was required to be concealed in the sacred space of ritual, it was common for punitive violence against him to become hyper-visible. Public flogging, forced parade or head-shaving was used as exemplary scenes; measures which were not so much punishments for the individual violator but white lines re-drawn in the scene for all its observers. Acts of sovereign violence, in this respect, reconfigured ritual order by sporadic eruption into theatrical display.

But coercion alone cannot account for the endurance of this structure. Hegemony in Gramsci’s sense explains how domination hardened into “common sense.” The karmic reading of suffering converted structural inequality into a moral story: One’s birth deserved, one’s duty redemptive. Most importantly, this imagination was not the prerogative solely of the dominant castes. The participation of the subalterns in ritual hierarchies, through service function in festivals, acceding to hereditary occupation or practicing endogamy indicates to what extent voluntary and coercive approaches were complementary. This was not passive belief, but lived practice that was realised through kinship, worship and toil.

At the same time, however, that premodern scene was never perfectly sealed. Bhakti movements in various regions periodically disrupted the ritual hierarchy by emphasising devotional equality and vernacular expression. Literary figures like Ravidas or Nandanar made religious claims that transcended caste lines, briefly disturbing the visibility of the status quo. Even these challenges, however, were frequently absorbed (or re-absorbed), their radical potential domesticated within particularities of tradition. This ability to absorb demonstrates the strength of hegemonic formations: protest could be recognised symbolically without altering the material basis of hierarchy.

Here, the premodern caste order is not merely a system of hardened stratification but a staged totality through which space, body, work, force and belief converged aesthetically. The Foucauldian pairing of scene and obscene demonstrates the need for purity to be premised upon exclusion, as well as how visibility became a mode of discipline, while the Gramscian lens helps us understand that the long half-life was driven by moral internalization and quotidian consent. Together they reveal a system whose stability was founded on portraying hierarchy as both sacred and natural, a portrayal that subsequent historical developments would gradually start to undo, but not without enormous effort.

II. The Colonial Interregnum: Re-Scenography, Biopower and Taxonomic Hegemony

With the beginning of colonial governance, a significant change occurred. The British colonial state, a modern bureaucratic state at work, wanted to know, categorise and govern its subjects, effectively transforming the performance of caste.

Case of the 1901 Census and Risley’s Anthropometry: The Census, especially under Superintendent Herbert Risley, turned into one of the effective colonising projects. Risley tried to confer a “scientific” legitimacy on caste hierarchy through the use of anthropometry (the measuring of nasal indexes, skull shapes and other bodily features) to construct a racial taxonomy of Indian castes. This information was then used to generate all-India rankings for caste status. This was biopolitics in the pure, administrative state. Power worked in the colonial state by treating the Indian as an object to know, measure, and categorize. The caste became a fixed category rather than the fluid groups of jati relations that it had been, as well as an enumerated and pan-Indian taxonomy, a trope of colonial “governmentality” (Dirks 2001). The muddled local logic of purity/pollution was transformed into a clean, bureaucratic chart. This gave rise to a new all-India “scene” for caste: the statistical report, the ethnographic survey, the gazetteer. The ritual body became a racialised or datafied body.

This scene of bureaucracy had far-reaching hegemonic implications. In cataloguing (and ranking) castes so consistently, the Census rendered new identities that groups came to accept even as they fought them. It laid the groundwork for caste-based political organisation, as represented in the Non-Brahmin Manifesto of Madras (1916) or in the demands for separate electorates. The strategy of the colonial state was one of “divide and rule,” but it did so by offering the vocabulary, among the enumerated caste identity, through which political claims could be made. It fragmented older, more local solidarities and forced a re-configuration of the political terrain along these freshly rigidified lines.

In fact, this act of scientific observation ushered in an obscene that was entirely new. The native logic of purity/pollution, the “scene” which could be publicly declared is now called by the colonial “civilising” eye primitive, irrational and obscene to modernity. The colonial state could thus present itself as a modernising referee, underling proving to the world that it was not some backward social order the British had themselves rendered calcified. The “native obscenity” of caste practices became the rationale for the colonial mission, just as the colonial economy frequently solidified caste-based divisions of labour.

Colonial rule did not just “disperse” (de Kiewiet’s word) the prehistoric caste “scene”; it re-staged its appearance through its interventions in western technology of knowledge, and techniques of administration and surveillance. If the previous order was premised on ritual spectacle and cosmological legitimacy, colonial modernity made caste legible as an object of bureaucratic reason. Authority was transformed from the dramatic practice of impurity to its less conspicuous, but more far-reaching, work of sorting and classifying. In Foucauldian terms, there was a substitution of sovereignty for governmentality: the village stage of hierarchy was slowly but never entirely replaced by that of archive, census table and legal code.

And enumeration was central to this transformation. Colonial census, from the end of the 19th century onwards, attempted to freeze caste identities into universal pan-Indian categories. What had been a locally contingent and regionally flexible hierarchy became interpretable to the state through lists, schedules and ethnographic description. This act of naming was not neutral. In forcing the community to map onto certain fixed classificatory grids, the colonial state both reinforced and naturalised caste. The scene was not just spatial and ritual; it had turned statistical. From the village square, visibility moved onto the bureaucratic paper. The hidden ‘obscene’ here was not just secret labour, but the insecurity and indeterminacy of everyday caste relations, just what enumeration aspired to hide.

The law additionally re-fashioned the grammar of hierarchy. Colonial law did not assimilate such norms of Dhar­mashastras to create “Hindu Law” but the principles selectively codified in colonial jurisprudence and statutes, transformed Brahmanical textual traditions into enforceable legal standards. But this juridification introduced an unintended ambivalence. On the one hand, it consolidated some structures of endogamy or patrimonial inheritance and, on the other hand, made possible certain space for contestation. Instead, pursuing cases in court and challenging bureaucratic rulings or attempting legal reform created new sites for subordinated groups to express grievance. Power was less visibly violent, but more extensively inscribed in institutional procedure. Foucauldian discipline supplanted sovereign terror, at the same time as older types of social coercion remained a reality.

Meanwhile, colonial political economy transformed the economic basis of caste. Monetisation, commercialisation of agriculture and a new exposure to labour mobility disrupted hereditary occupations to an extent. Emigration to plantations, railways or cities created scenarios in which ritual oversight was diluted and anonymity expanded. These spaces didn’t eliminate caste, but they broke the hermetic unity of the premodern set. Hierarchy had to be re-made in unfamiliar landscapes, creating new solidarities along with new exclusions. The obscene, once exiled from the village borders, began to seep back in through developing public forms, often in submerged or indirect ways.

Gramscian hegemony likewise underwent mutation. The karmic “common sense” which previously helped to naturalize hierarchy faced rival ideological formations: missionary critiques, liberal ideas of equality, print-mediated reform movements and pre-modern anti-caste intellectual traditions. Cosmology alone could no longer determine consent, it had to be negotiated in the languages of rights, representation and progress. But hegemony did not disappear; it was transformed. Domination groups re-articulated caste privilege through discourses of tradition, community autonomy or social order that translated ritual authority into cultural capital in the colonial public- sphere. What emerged was not rupture but re-arrangement: An older hierarchy learned to speak new idioms.

More importantly, the colonial moment created conditions for a systematic anti-caste politics. Access to education, print circulation and associational life facilitated figures like Jotirao Phule and later B.R. Ambedkar to unveil the hidden underpinning of social order. Their criticisms made visible that which had been structurally hidden for so long, the historical making of caste inequality. In Foucauldian terms, new counter-discourses challenged the regime of truth supporting hierarchy; in Gramscian terms, subaltern groups revolted for moral-intellectual hegemony. The very scene itself became a battleground not one that was divinely settled.

Colonial modernity then should be neither mistaken for sheer continuity nor for simple break. It eclipsed spectacle with surveillance, ritual fixity with bureaucratic classification and karmic inevitability with ideological contest. But that dialectic of inside-outside, the mobile frontier between scene and obscene endured in the new guise. Caste lived by infiltrating modern institutions, even as the very same institutions nurtured the forces that would eventually question its legitimacy. The oneness of the pre-modern theatre was broken, and what followed was a much more complex and unstable stage for caste drama to develop.

III. The Postcolonial Modern: Schizophrenia, Eruptions and the Hegemony of Denial

The founding of the Indian republic was a script most thrillingly re-written of the scene/obscene dialectic. Inspired by liberal democracy and led by a modernising elite, this new nation-state wanted to make a complete break with the past. And India’s public, legal “scene” was dramatically re-scripted. The framework of the Constitution, authored under B.R. Ambedkar, a Dalit jurist deeply critical of caste, effectively banished it as obscene to the political-juridical order. Articles 15, 17 (which destroyed untouchability) and the guarantee of equality before the law erected a new platform that transformed individuals into citizen, rather than caste subject. The reservation policies (Articles 15(4), 16(4)) became a temporary, exceptional instrument in this stage, as corrective historical justice until achieving the final goal of “Join Casteless India”. The rhetoric of secular nationalism and, later, that of neoliberal meritocracy helped create a public sphere in which caste was meant to be sloughed off in the interests of national or consumer identity.

Caste, however, did not vanish. It had strategically migrated from the public-sacral scene to the privatised, affective, and social “obscene.” This obscene is no negative empty but a powerfully busy shadow stage. Endogamy would still be the strongest fortress. As sociologist G. Shah (2002) and others have shown, the “c­onjugable/u­nc­onjugable” binary flourishes in the private domain of family alliances, matrimonial ads, and community networks concealed from the law’s scrutiny. Purity/pollution practices can draw back into the private and daily life, who in principle may enter the kitchen, share a water glass, sit as an equal at a meal. These are not officially recorded, but they are vital to social reproduction. In contemporary institutions, the corporate office, the university, elite social clubs, caste operates as though it’s based on race and class, if by its own ecosystem of social capital and unspoken biases. The Dalit expert may be officially welcome on the corporate stage, but exclusion thrives in the obscene of informal circuits and cultural codes (such as hearing a last name). Anand Teltumbde (2010) calls this the “persistence of caste” in new, “camouflaged” versions in hitherto seemingly-casteless modern sites. Lynchings, social humiliations and caste-based rapes are not vestiges of a pre-modern past. They are modern obscene eruptions, as scholars such as Kalpana Kannabiran contend. They are frequently sparked, as others have also noted, by a perception of Dalits “overstepping” their bounds, owning land, riding horseback, sporting a moustache or falling in love across castes. Recorded on cell phones and disseminated through the social media, this violence is at once secret in its execution and hyper-visible in its sharing, revealing the brutal truth that the official scene seeks to deny.

The dominant casts in modern India have had a project: to naturalise the split. The new “common sense” is an aggressive discourse of the successful erasure of caste: “Caste doesn’t matter anymore,” “We are all casteless now,” “Only the backward castes talk about caste.” To talk about pervasive caste discrimination is characterised as “playing the caste card”, an obscene game of etching a primitive poison into the modern body politic. This is the hegemony that allows dominant caste persons to populate public spaces as generalised liberal individuals, free from caste bias while their social and intimate worlds are structured through caste power. It vulgarises the systemic character of caste to analysis, when it is reduced into ‘incidents’ alone or individual prejudices.

Case 1: The Khairlanji Massacre (2006): At Khairlanji town of Maharashtra wherein a Dalit family- the Bhotmanges—was lynched and women were sexually violated before they were murdered. The flash point was their testimony in a police case and the perceived social disobedience of owning property and being educated. Khairlanji is not a remnant of the archaic: it is a contemporary obscene explosion. The violence was not a spectacle of sovereign power but a secret, community-approved atrocity, later brought to light through the media and activism. It was a bid to violently re-assert a weakening local hegemony. By using the tools of modernity (courts, education, land titles), the Bhotmanges broke the “common sense” of Dalit acceptance by demanding subordination. The massacre was a demonstration to force a restoration of that “common sense.” The State’s initial reticence in using the PoA Act[1] was very much present. An alternate dialectic reveals: the progressive law (integral to constitutional scene) was subverted by the police, who were seeing it as a local arm of an obscene social order. The massive Dalit protests that followed were a counter-hegemonic gesture, dragging the obscene out of the closet and into the national eye-scape, compelling the official scene to abandon its hollow bromides and reckon with the violence it had rendered invisible.

Case 2: Corporate India and Duality of the Sabhya-Gavva: In the glass-and-steel offices of Bangalore or Gurgaon, it’s a different story. The office is a place of casteless modernity, it is run by HR (human resource) manuals and meritocratic ideology and professional dress codes. Here, caste is officially obscene; to mention it is a breach of professional etiquette. But it flourishes in the obscene of social capital (Teltumbde, 2010): weekend resorts gupshup, references and mentor chains; and crucially, ‘off-siting’ matrimonial alliances. Attempts to bring the Dalit professional into the elite corporate fold abound but they are not part of these obscene networks driving genuine career mobility and cultural identity. The hegemonic “common sense” is strong: “We don’t see caste here.” Such is the hegemony of caste, the many-layered monopoly by which privilege functions when you are a dominant caste, that it can reproduce itself updated to the gilled hilt with practised ease like no other marauding bandit – and all Dalit assertion of identity or complaint about bias can be counterpoised not as an obscenity but even better – since there’s always a reason why an obscenity cannot be effective enough in its monstrosity: casted as something that comes from ob-scoot-ated couches. This is the crowning achievement of modern caste schizophrenia: an absolute disconnection between the formal scene of liberal equality and the informal obscene of caste-reinforcing sociability.

Independence and the acceptance of a new constitution did not so much lead to the death of caste as to a transformation in the means adopted by it. If colonial modernity banished ritual spectacle in favour of bureaucratic classification, the postcolonial state ushered in a new grammar of visibility mediated by democracy, rights and representation. Caste was no longer publicly exalted in the form of sacred hierarchy; it now existed in the juridical idiom of egalitarianism and administrative calculus of reservations. The stage went from the village square and census archive to the courtroom, legislature, and electoral arena. But this transformation did not erase the old boundary of scene and obscene, it transformed it.

The explicit abjuration of untouchability and fundamental rights in the Constitution was a symbolic break with Brahmanical social ontology. In other Foucauldian terms, a new regime of truth was articulated: caste discrimination became something that it is illegal to speak about, but something that persists. That created a paradox of democratic visibility. Dalit presence in educational institutions, government bureaucracy, Parliament indicated an entry into the national scene, but leaves a lot of mediation through categories of injury, backwardness and compensatory justice. The reservation system, which is and was both re-distributive and emancipatory of caste identity, necessitated –for its operation– ongoing administrative naming of caste identity. By this, the very mechanism proposed to erode hierarchy itself re-inscribed caste within state knowledge. Visibility (to use the title of a good read) became two-edged: recognition and regulation.

This ambivalence is indicative of the larger movement from sovereign or disciplinary power toward what Foucault named bio-political administration. The post-colonial state manages its populations through welfare, quotas, development programmes and statistical surveillance. Caste in these instances is neither simply ritual nor only juridical, but becomes a demographic for techniques of governance. The obscene is no longer the occult labour that sustains ritual purity, but the residue of structural degradation that survives beneath the language of formal equality. Day-to-day violence—social boycott, atrocities, denial of access to housing or marriage networks—is frequented in a domain beyond the spectacular optics of national democracy, where it appears as exception rather than rule. What cannot be incorporated into this story of progress is relegated to the fringe of visibility.

Hegemony, as in Gramsci, thereby assumes a new form. The national promise of unity, development and democratic citizenship generates a strong ‘common sense’ that situates caste as a left-over social problem being slowly dissolved by the process of modernisation. This story line allows for some reform but overcomes more radical change. Dominant castes adjust by converting historical privilege into educational capital, bureaucratic power and management of local political establishments. Hegemony now moves away from ritual superiority to meritocratic language; inequality is no longer described using karma, but as the result of competition, culture, or efficiency. You win consent not so much by theology as by the aspirational rhetoric of the nation-state.

But the post-colonial picture is also one of an un-anticipated countervailing assertion. Dalit protests, Ambedkarite politics, literary publics and mass mobilizations turn humiliation into a collective critique. Public conversion ceremonies, acts of remembrance and symbolic appropriations of public space such as university campuses or spaces of atrocity re-perform the terrain from which Dalits were once confined. In Foucaldian parlance, subjugated knowledge systems explode into discourse questioning the neutrality of law and development. In Gramscian terms, these struggles are driven not only to inclusion but to moral-intellectual leadership capable of redefining the very order. Democracy doubles as instrument of regulation and terrain of insurgency.

This visibility is also complicated by both media and modern popular culture. Caste now whirls through television debates, digital activism, electoral rhetoric and bureaucratic documentation. The scene widens to a national and ever more virtual canvas. But growth is not the same as change. This is the realm of spectacular, and sometimes scripted, moments of outrage which can be simultaneous with banal indifference, giving rise to what could be termed a politics of intermittent visibility- caste appears dramatically in crisis and disappears back into normalcy. The obscene endures right in this several back and forth.

The postcolonial condition, then, is to be understood as a dynamic antagonism [rather than resolution]. Inherited hierarchy is contested by constitutional morality, but is also constantly re-articulated through social practice. Caste becomes subject to critique under democratic inclusion, even as administrative governance secures its categories. Power works less by oppressive and direct prohibition than by selective recognition; hegemony less by naturalised order than by promised development. It is not the distinction between scene and obscene that disappears, but rather becomes mobile, contested and historically contingent.

On this slippery ground, caste endures not as immobile tradition but as malleable entity materialised in modern institutions. Its strength is its adaptability; its weakness, the very visibility that democracy requires. The postcolonial stage then sets the stage for the contemporary moment, where neoliberal recalibration, digital moderation and new identity politics will once again realign what is visible, sayable and contestable in caste’s name.

IV. The Contemporary Neoliberal-Digital Scene: Circulation, Concealment, and Algorithmic Power

The late modern and early postmodern era represents another re-organization of caste’s scene of action, one related to neoliberal financialization, ever-faster urban transformation and digital communication. If the postcolonial constitutional order made caste visible in the languages of rights and welfare, neoliberal modernity deflects attention to markets, mobility, and privatised aspiration. Power increasingly functions by means of circulation rather than repression: capitalist, informational or affective flows transform social existence. In this terrain, caste does not vanish; it mutates, finding solace in infrastructures that seemingly are formal and neutral. The scene becomes diffuse, meshed and not entirely transparent.

Urban anonymity at first appeared to hold the promise of eroding inherited hierarchy. This was a society of skill, and with the migration to metropolitan labour markets, service economies now expanding, and meritocratic competition as the order of the business day it was implied a world governed by skill rather than by birth. But a closer look shows that caste does indeed change in response to these conditions through more subtle forms of recognition and exclusion. The segregation of housing in both the formal and informal real-estate markets, matrimonial advertisements coded by surnames and community markers, professional networks organized around kinship: All are reminders of how caste survives beneath the surface equality of contract. Free choice is, quite often, the cover for inherited social capital. In the Foucauldian sense, discipline becomes internalized as self-improvement: people structure their education, language and behaviour to mimic upper-caste cultural models. Power functions through aspiration.

This paradox of visibility and obscurity is only magnified by digital media. Social media, internet archives and digital journalism created, and continues to create, new Dalit self-presentation, memory-making and political mobilization. Stories of discrimination spread quickly and turn localised instances of pain into national or global conversations. Hashtag activism, digital memorialisation and virtual community building generate new counter-publics that challenge hegemonic narratives of caste vanishing. Subaltern knowledges gain a technological magnification, attempting to recall Foucaultian perceptions of the growth of discourse as a place for resistance.

Yet it is precisely these digital infrastructures that produce new forms of obscuration. Algorithmic sorting, datagov and platform economies all function through categories that look caste-blind even though they frequently reproduce historical inequality. Bandwidth access, linguistic capital, digital literacy, and social networks are variously unevenly distributed such that who can speak and what differences ultimately get heard is formed accordingly. Online anonymity can obscure caste identity, but it also opens the doors to a revival of abuse, harassment and symbolic violence stripped from responsibility. And so once more the obscene moves: not invisible work outside the ritual space, nor systematic humiliation under constitutional equality, but coded replication of hierarchy within seemingly neutral technological systems.

Neoliberal political economy also recasts Gramscian hegemony. Developmental nationalism is displaced by entrepreneurial individualism, with success recast in terms of personal realization rather than collective redistribution. This is an ideological shift that pulls the rug from under solidarity-based politics, while eclipsing structural constraint. Dominant caste privilege is reformulated as excellence, professionalism or global-competitiveness. Today, it is not through moral doctrine (as ideology) that hegemony functions but through desire: the desire for upward mobility within market society. Consent is obtained by promising the irrelevance of caste when in fact, material divisions remain.

Simultaneously, counter-hegemonic energies take on new shapes. Dalit entrepreneurship, trans-national mobilization, inter-sectional alliances, and cultural production in literature, film, and digital art re-invent dignity beyond the abjection of victimhood or what Geisser calls state-replaced recognition. Memory turns into political technology: archives of atrocity, commemoration of historical resistance, re-imagining Ambedkarite thought travel across geographies to confront neoliberal amnesia. These operations are not content with coming in from the outside: they want to redraw the lines of its deck, show us the hidden continuities between ritualized past and digital present.

The result is that the present period is one not of stability but rather of heightened contradiction. Caste is there and it is not; submerged in words while floating above them, crushed and dispersed in the personal but ominous in its structural totality, sundered across experience but knit tightly through data. The Foucauldian analysis shows that there is a move towards power as dispersed and infrastructural – algorithmic, not spectacular – while the Gramscian emphasises a hegemonic order built on aspiration, consumption and selective memory. The line between scene and obscene is constantly reconfigured by media circulation and political contestation.

In this neoliberal-digital formation, caste continues because it is able to occupy invisibility and exploit visibility: become visible when mobilised, disappear when asked. Its fate will rest on whether emerging counter-publics are able to change technological exposure into structure-changing possibilities, converting sporadic oppositional outcry’s to new moral-intellectual leadership. The drama of caste, far from being over, therefore moves on to a stage where power itself is more and more ethereal, and the fight to make inequality observable becomes the primary political act.

Anand Teltumbde’s analysis of caste’s “camouflaged” persistence provides a powerful lens for understanding the modern obscene. As he argues, “caste today is not what it appears to be. It has shed its religious garb and put on the secular attire of modernity” (Teltumbde 2010, 23). This insight resonates deeply with the Foucauldian scene/obscene dialectic: caste thrives precisely because it has migrated from the visible ritual scene to the hidden networks of social capital, professional networking, and matrimonial alliance. The corporate office that publicly celebrates meritocracy while privately excluding Dalits from informal mentorship networks exemplifies this schizophrenic condition. Yet Teltumbde’s Marxist commitments also remind us that this is not merely a matter of discourse or visibility: caste’s persistence is ultimately rooted in material control over land, capital, and labour. The scene/obscene dialectic, therefore, must be understood not as an alternative to materialist analysis but as a framework that reveals how power organises the visibility and invisibility of material exploitation itself.

V. Dalit Politics: Shattering the Proscenium Arch

It is possible to see the history of anti-caste resistance, from Jyotirao Phule’s radical philosophy through Ambedkarian revolutionary constitutionalism to today’s post-bahujan (radical) politics, as a prolonged struggle against this forced dialectic.

It may be noted that Dr. Ambedkar’s public burning of Manusmriti in 1927 was an archetypal act of shattering the sacred instrumentality constitutive of the old stage in scene making. In drafting the Constitution, he was seeking to reconstruct a new, fair scene from below. Dalit political and cultural assertion is, at bottom, a way of calling the obscene into the eye of the scene. The Bahujan political parties (such as the BSP party) emerging to prominence have put caste identity, previously considered a shame marker, on the national stage of the electoral politics for a source of pride and community mobilization. The taking of public space, a public scene which performs the exhibitionism of “dalitness” could be interpreted by authorities as a sign that dalits are trying to create some kind of counter-­public space. The “cattle meet festival” is striking in this regard, by publicly eating the meat deemed most polluting within Brahminical norms, activists force the unspeakable into public space, undermining the grammar of purity/pollution itself.

Dalit Studies, as it is being launched by veteran scholars such as Gopal Guru and others, does this important labour of theorising from the site of the obscene. It confronts the hegemonic “common sense” with a systematic recording and analysis of the lived experience of caste, not leaving it as anecdotal or passé.

VI. Synthesis and Conclusion: The Dialectic’s Enduring Grip and Its Cracks

The Foucauldian Gramscian analysis discovers that caste-modernity is not to be located in its end, but rather its strategic disintegration. Power circulates by keeping intact the gap between disavowing public scene and luminous private torque. The state’s role turns Janus-faced: progressive legislation that has made lives more livable and breathable in some ways, but that has also all too frequently, through institutional bias and political compromise, proved itself powerless to prevent obscene eruptions of violence.

This arrangement suits liberal democracy down to the ground, for it provides protection for the “private” sphere as an area beyond state interference and lets caste flourish there behind a screen of personal choice and cultural preference. It is also conducive to global capitalism, which can use caste-based social networks to control labour even as it floats a veneer of meritocratic neutrality.

But the dialectic is also an inherently unstable one. Every Khairlanji that turns into an issue of national interest, every corporate diversity report that whispers exclusion, every inter-caste marriage that invites ridicule is also a moment of rupture. In its varied avatars, it is Dalit politics that remains the sustained force challenging this division. The last struggle, as Ambedkar hoped, is not one for entry into the existing scene so much as to destroy the double stage itself, to establish a social order where the caste-based history and present are not some dirty secrets but an openly avowed basis for a common sense that is genuinely universalist and egalitarian. So long as that dialectic exists, caste in its morphed and schizophrenic form continues to survive.

(Note-An earlier version of this paper has appeared on SSRN E-Library, Elsevier.)

(The author teaches history at Shivaji College, University of Delhi. He can be reached at skandpriya@shivaji.du.ac.in)

References

Cohn, Bernard S. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge. Princeton University Press, 1996.

Dirks, Nicholas B. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton University Press, 2001.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage, 1977.

Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. International Publishers, 1971.

Guru, Gopal. Humiliation: Claims and Context. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Guru, Gopal, and Sundar Sarukkai. The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory. Oxford University Press, 2012.

Pandian, M.S.S. Brahmin & Non-Brahmin: Genealogies of the Tamil Political Present. Permanent Black, 2007.

Rao, Anupama. The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India. University of California Press, 2009.

Rege, Sharmila. Writing Caste/Writing Gender: Narrating Dalit Women’s Testimonios. Zubaan, 2006.

Risley, H.H. (Sir). Census of India, 1901. Vol. I, India. Part I, Report. Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1903.

Teltumbde, Anand. The Persistence of Caste: The Khairlanji Murders and India’s Hidden Apartheid. Zed Books, 2010.

The Smritichandrika of Devanna Bhatta (Trans. J.R. Gharpure). 1948.

South Indian Inscriptions (Vol. III, Chola Inscriptions). Archaeological Survey of India.

[1] Prevention of Atrocities Act (1989)

Related:

The Anatomy of Humiliation: Defining caste violence in the Constitutional era

It is religion-based politics that refuses to root out caste: Baba Adhav in conversation with Teesta Setalvad

Caste and community creations of human beings, God is always neutral: Madras HC

The post The Double Stage: Caste’s Schizophrenic Modernity between Spectacle and Shadow appeared first on SabrangIndia.

At the centre of the controversy are two distinct but intertwined developments:

1. AISA women leaders alleging verbal sexual abuse and threats inside and outside a police station. There are videos of this abuse circulating online
2. YouTuber Ruchi Tiwari claiming she was attacked by a mob of nearly 500 people while covering the protest.

As FIRs have been registered and political leaders have entered the fray, the struggle has increasingly shifted from what happened on campus to who controls the narrative of victimhood.

The Protest: UGC equity regulations and campus tensions

The protest on February 13 was organised by the All India Students’ Association (AISA) and allied groups demanding implementation of the University Grants Commission’s (Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations, 2026.

The regulations — intended to strengthen safeguards against caste discrimination affecting SC, ST and OBC students — were recently stayed by the Supreme Court of India, which observed prima facie concerns of vagueness, particularly in the definitional scope of caste-based discrimination, and directed that the 2012 framework would remain in force pending further hearings.

Details may be read here.

Students supporting the regulations have emphatically argued they are essential to address structural caste bias within higher education. Opponents –many who have led aggressive and violent protests against their implementation –claim certain provisions are “vulnerable to misuse.”

This mobilisation was framed as part of a broader “Adhikar” campaign asserting dignity and institutional accountability.

The Flashpoint: Ruchi Tiwari’s presence and the confrontation

According to reports in The Print, tensions escalated when Ruchi Tiwari, who runs the YouTube channel Breaking Opinion, arrived at the site to cover the protest.

Tiwari describes herself as an “independent ground reporter”. Her channel, which has over 59,000 subscribers and more than 460 uploaded videos, frequently features a privileged caste lens depicting confrontational campus coverage, particularly around reservation, caste debates and identity politics. One of her recent YouTube Shorts is titled: “They want reservation but say don’t indulge in casteism.”

She has alleged that before she could begin reporting, individuals began calling out her name, asking her full identity and caste, after which a crowd surrounded and assaulted her. In statements to ANI (an agency that has increasingly been called out for its right-wing bias) , she claimed nearly 500 people attacked her, that she was held by the neck and arms, subjected to rape threats, and that there was an attempt to push her into a vehicle with its door open — which she described as an attempted abduction and “mob lynching.”

Videos online show pushing and scuffling. However, the full sequence remains disputed.

AISA’s Counter-Version: Provocation, altercation and selective framing

AISA has rejected Tiwari’s allegations as “false and motivated.”

According to statements cited by The Print, AISA leaders allege that the confrontation began when Tiwari engaged in provocative questioning and allegedly made casteist remarks referencing the Mahad Satyagraha led by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. AISA further claims she harassed a Dalit journalist named Naveen and attempted to snatch his camera.

Some circulating videos, according to AISA, show Tiwari striking Naveen and later pushing or punching AISA activist Anjali during the confrontation. Another clip shows activists holding Tiwari while attempting to escort her toward police presence.

AISA has argued that several clips being widely shared omit audio or preceding events and therefore reshape public perception.

It is at this point, AISA claims, that the narrative began to shift — from a protest demanding caste equity to a viral storyline of a “woman journalist attacked by Left mobs.”

Another video from the February 13 incident at Delhi University exposes the conspiracy of Sanghi-Casteist-Feudal goons against students demanding equity and social justice. These goons threatened AISA activists and DU students with vulgar abuses inside the Maurice Nagar Police… pic.twitter.com/ObROzq3H4r

— CPIML Liberation (@cpimlliberation) February 14, 2026

Condemn the right-wing assault and hooliganism against Comrade Anjali in DU! Today, AISA DU Secretary Anjali was physically assaulted by a right wing group. Despite the heavy presence of Delhi Police and CRPF, the attackers were given a free hand.

This violence is the clearest… pic.twitter.com/0AS2xYOyIZ

— CPIML Liberation (@cpimlliberation) February 13, 2026

Statement of Communist Party of India -Marxist Leninist- Liberation:

The Police Station Incident: Allegations of sexualised abuse

The most serious allegations, however, concern what happened later at Maurice Nagar Police Station.

AISA leaders Anjali and Neha allege that when they went to file complaints, a right-wing mob gathered outside the police station premises. According to AISA, the crowd swelled from dozens to hundreds, shouting slogans and issuing rape and death threats.

AAP MP Sanjay Singh publicly condemned the episode on X, sharing a video and alleging that in the presence of police personnel, AISA women leaders were abused with explicit insults directed at their mother and were told to “remove their clothes.”

देश की राजधानी दिल्ली में थाने के अंदर, पुलिस वालों के सामने AISA की महिला नेता अंजली और नेहा को मां की गाली देते हुए कहा गया, “कपड़े निकाल।” एक बिहार की बेटी, दूसरी उत्तराखंड की — दोनों सवर्ण हैं, लेकिन वंचितों के हक की आवाज उठाना उनका गुनाह हो गया। अगर यह घटना पंजाब या बंगाल… pic.twitter.com/JgRZ9cgf99

— Sanjay Singh AAP (@SanjayAzadSln) February 15, 2026

Singh questioned how such an incident could occur in the national capital and linked it to broader concerns about women’s safety. He alleged that the targeting of the two women leaders was connected to their vocal advocacy for marginalised communities.

AISA has termed the episode “state-sponsored hooliganism,” alleging that activists were effectively confined inside a room for hours while threats were issued outside. Anjali was reportedly taken for a medico-legal examination.

Delhi Police, according to ANI, has registered two FIRs — one based on Tiwari’s complaint and another based on a complaint by a female AISA student — under sections relating to assault, voluntarily causing hurt, wrongful restraint and common intention under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita.

UGC का समर्थन कर रही दिल्ली यूनिवर्सिटी कि छात्राओं को दिल्ली पुलिस के सामने थाने में भद्दी-भद्दी गालियां दी जा रही हैं। UGC के नए प्रावधानो का महत्व इसी बात से लगाया जा सकता है कि दलित और पिछड़ों के हुकूक का उलंघन ना हो… pic.twitter.com/Qs8e7eew71

— Ashraf Hussain (@AshrafFem) February 15, 2026

ABVP, DUSU and administrative responses

The Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) has maintained that Tiwari was present in her professional capacity and was attacked for asking questions. Its Delhi state secretary described the episode as an attack on media freedom and characterised Left-affiliated campus politics as violent.

Aryan Maan, President of the Delhi University Students’ Union, condemned the alleged assault on Tiwari and called for a fair and impartial investigation. DUSU leaders have stated that violence has no place in campus politics.

Meanwhile, Vice-Chancellor Yogesh Singh described the incident as a matter of concern and urged the university community to maintain social harmony. He confirmed having spoken with student and teacher groups as well as police authorities.

मैं दिल्ली विश्वविद्यालय के सभी शिक्षकों और विद्यार्थियों से अनुरोध करता हूं कि वह आपस में सौहार्द बनाए रखें। कोई भी ऐसा काम न करें जिससे आपसी मनमुटाव बढ़े और राष्ट्र व विश्वविद्यालय की छवि को नुकसान हो।

दिल्ली विश्वविद्यालय में कल जो घटना हुई वह चिंता का विषय है।…

— University of Delhi (@UnivofDelhi) February 14, 2026

The Larger Question: When violence becomes a narrative weapon

What unfolded at Delhi University is no longer simply a dispute about who pushed whom in a scuffle.

It is a case study in how protests over caste equity are rapidly reframed into spectacles of disorder; how women activists alleging sexualised abuse must compete for credibility against viral video clips; and how digital ecosystems determine which injury becomes the “real” one.

At stake is not merely the credibility of AISA or the veracity of Ruchi Tiwari’s claims. It is the deeper question of whose victimhood travels faster, and why.

When allegations of rape threats and sexualised slurs inside or outside a police station struggle to command sustained outrage — while a competing claim of assault dominates headlines within hours — it reveals something structural about public discourse. Gendered abuse against politically inconvenient women often dissolves into “partisan noise.” Caste-based mobilisation is quickly recast as mob aggression. And campus politics becomes content.

This is not to prejudge the outcome of the FIRs. Due process must determine individual liability. But focusing exclusively on the procedural neutrality of “both sides have filed complaints” risks obscuring the larger asymmetry: narrative power in the digital age is unevenly distributed.

A protest demanding the restoration of equity regulations meant to protect SC, ST and OBC students has been displaced by a battle over viral footage. The structural issue — caste discrimination in higher education — has receded behind the spectacle of confrontation.

This shift is not accidental.

Related:

Campuses in Revolt: How the UGC Equity Stay and Criminalised Dissent Have Ignited Student Protests Across India

The stay of UGC Equity Regulations, 2026: The interim order, the proceedings, and the constitutional questions raised

Higher Education: How Centre is Undermining State Autonomy & Politicising UGC

‘Diluted Existing Rules’: Rohith Vemula, Payal Tadvi’s Mothers Slam UGC’s Draft Equity Regulations

Academic Freedoms at Risk: Federalism and autonomy challenged by UGC’s VC appointment guidelines

The post UGC Guidelines 2026: AISA Protest at Delhi University followed by sexual abuse allegations amid police presence appeared first on SabrangIndia.

— Rohith Vemula

It has been ten years since Rohith Vemula’s institutional murder.^[1] That emptiness is not his alone. It is the lingering feeling many from marginalised communities carry with them when they enter India’s so-called “elite” institutions –- IITs, IIMs, NITs, and Central Universities.

A 2022 survey in the Quint conducted at IIT Bombay following the Institutional Murder of Darshan Solanki found that one in every three SC/ST students had been asked about their caste identity.

Faculty spaces in these institutions reflect a similar imbalance. Despite constitutionally mandated reservations for SC, ST, and OBC communities, faculty positions continue to be dominated by those from the general category, as reported by The Hindu.

Under representation in these institutions

Under-representation is not incidental; it is structural. In at least two IITs and three IIMs, nearly 90% of faculty positions are held by individuals from the general category. In six IITs and four IIMs, the figure ranges between 80–90%, according to a report by The Wire, based on an RTI filed by Gowd Kiran Kumar, National President of the All India OBC Students Organisation.

The culture of exclusion within India’s elite institutions is not declining. It has been firmly entrenched.

Source: MHRD Data and a report in Quint, November 28, 2019

Faculty recruitment across IIMs has witnessed a significant decline between 2019 and 2026.

OBC, SC, ST – FACULTY IN IIM’s

This was first put out on social media. Verifying this we found that, according to a report in The Print on “The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education, Women, Children, Youth and Sports titled “2025–26 Demands for Grants of the Department of Higher Education” as of January 31, 2025, 28.56 percent of the total sanctioned teaching faculty positions (18,940) remained vacant across IITs, National Institutes of Technology (NITs), Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISERs), Central Universities, and other higher education institutions.

The data further reveals that 17.97 percent of the 11,298 Assistant Professor positions (entry-level posts) are vacant, 38.28 percent of the 5,102 Associate Professor positions (mid-level posts) remain unfilled, and an alarming 56.18 percent of the 2,540 Professor positions are currently unoccupied.

The question then is stark: Why are SC, ST, and OBC positions left unfilled even when institutions have vacancies and eligible candidates are available?

When questioned about their recruitment processes, many institutions claim to follow a “flexi” system. When asked why reservation policies are not implemented, some have anonymously stated that hiring is done purely on “merit”. This raises a troubling question, does “merit” imply that candidates from marginalised communities are deemed intellectually unfit to teach in elite institutions? It is also frequently argued that an “adequate talent pool” is unavailable.

The experience of Subrahmanyam Sadrela illustrates the deeper structural problem. After completing his M.Tech and PhD from IIT Kanpur, Sadrela joined the institute as an Associate Professor in the Aerospace Engineering Department in January 2018. Soon after his appointment, colleagues reportedly remarked that his selection was “wrong”, that he did not deserve to be a faculty member, that his English was inadequate, and that he was mentally unfit. In April 2019 nearly a year after he raised allegations of caste-based discrimination on campus, he was accused of plagiarism in his thesis and threatened with the revocation of his PhD degree, as per a report in ­the Times of India. A detailed investigation by the Directorate of Civil Rights Enforcement (DCRE) and reported by the Mooknayak said that the corroborated allegations of caste based discrimination inside IIM – B made by an associate professor Dr Gopal Das were vaild.

A significant portion of the 2025 data is not available online. Most publicly accessible information is from 2023–24, with limited material from early to mid-2025. This absence itself is telling, particularly as the pace of erosion of transparency –by institutions under the union government–appeared to accelerate in 2025, as per a report in the Wire.

RTI data from 2024 revealed that no SC, ST, or OBC faculty members were recruited in 2023 at IIT Bombay. Further, 16 departments at IIT-B did not admit a single student belonging to the ST community in the 2023–24 academic year. Shockingly, in five departments at IIT-B, no ST student had been admitted in the last nine years. This data was shared by the Ambedkar Periyar Phule Study Circle (APPSC), a student group at IIT Bombay, based on an RTI response received on February 6, 2025. In a post shared on X (formerly Twitter) on 9 April, the group alleged that IIT Bombay “Is violating reservation norms despite the MMR (Mission Mode Recruitment) announcement.”

Notably, no information was put out by the Circle regarding 2025 data on PhD enrolments or faculty recruitment. The Circle, which had consistently been active in raising questions of injustice, appeared to fall silent on these figures. Speculations can be made that the voice of the student group was curbed by the institute. Established in 2017, the Circle had positioned its X account as a strong voice responding to issues affecting students within and beyond IIT-B. 

The death of Darshan Solanki, a Dalit student at IIT-B, further intensified concerns. His father claimed that caste-based harassment led to his son’s suicide. However, the committee constituted by the institute concluded that the suicide was linked to poor academic performance, stating that none of Darshan’s close associates had reported instances of caste-based harassment. It must be noted that the committee did not include a single external member; it comprised only IIT staff. The inquiry was entirely internal. To many, it appeared a complete white wash.

Similar patterns of hostility have surfaced in other premier institutions. Students at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC), Delhi, reported that casteist messages such as “SC/ST leave the campus” and “Jai Parshuram” were circulated by fellow students on unofficial WhatsApp groups. Memes targeting Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar were also shared.

When anonymous complaints were submitted, the institute’s director and faculty reportedly responded that since the complaint had been made anonymously, it could not be entertained. This was conveyed by a senior official on the condition of anonymity.

If students are made to feel this unwelcomed within these institutions, why would they not drop out? Why would faculty members not resign? 

The dropout rates of SC, ST, and OBC students in these elite institutions are often attributed to financial difficulties or “excessive academic pressure.” Yet, the lived experiences of students suggest a far more troubling reality.  Following Darshan Solanki’s death, a survey was conducted at IIT Bombay. Students were asked a series of questions about campus climate and discrimination. One such question, along with several responses, is reproduced here. These responses reveal the brutal reality of a systemic failure—one that institutions attempt to downplay or conceal, even when exposed by the deaths of students like Darshan.

1.  What Has The Survey Revealed?

• On being asked if anyone has hurled “caste/tribal slurs or abuses or discriminated against you on campus,” 83.5 percent students said ‘No’.
• While 16.5 percent students said that they had, in fact, witnessed such instances, 70.4 percent students said that they had not witnessed anyone else being discriminated against on campus
• Nearly 25 percent, or one in every four students, said that the fear of disclosing their identity has stopped them from joining an SC/ST forum or collective.
• As many as 15.5 percent of students said that they have faced mental health issues arising from caste-based discrimination.
• Nearly 37 percent of students said that they were asked their Joint Entrance Exam (JEE)/ Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE)/ Joint Admission Test for Masters(JAM) /Undergraduate Common Entrance Examination for Design (U)CEED rank by fellow students on campus in a bid to find out their (caste) identity.
• 26 percent of students were asked their surnames with the intention of knowing their caste.
• 6 percent, or one in every five students, said that they feared backlash from the faculty if they talked back against caste discrimination.
• 2 percent, or one in every three students, said that they feel SC/ST Cell needs to do more to address casteism on campus.
• Nearly 25 percent of the 388 students, that is one in every four students, did not attend an English-medium school in class 10.
• Nearly 22 percent of students are first-generation graduates from their family.
• Nearly 36 percent of students foretell that open category students perceive their academic ability as ‘average’. This is in contrast to 51 percent SC/ST students perceiving the academic ability of open category students as ‘very good’. (Source: the Quint)

There is a powerful story from the Solomon Islands that when people wish to uproot a tree, they gather around it and hurl abuses at it until the tree withers and dies. Whether or not this myth holds true for plants, its metaphor is painfully relevant in the context of India’s elite institutions.

An unwelcoming, hostile environment does not merely push students to drop out; it drives faculty members to resign as well.

Vipin V. Veetil resigned from IIT Madras in July, 2021. He had joined in 2019 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) in August the previous year. In his resignation email to the institute’s authorities, Veetil stated that his sole reason for quitting was caste-based discrimination allegedly faced from senior Brahmin faculty members within the department. However, the committee constituted by IIT Madras concluded that there was “no evidence of decisions being biased due to caste discrimination,” reasoning that most faculty members had “hardly interacted” with Dr. Veetil.

This was not the first instance. In January 2022, Veetil had also resigned after rejoining the institute in August 2020.

In another case, K. Ilanchezhian, a senior assistant director at the institute, filed a complaint alleging that his office space had been shifted to a students’ hostel, while his original office was allotted to an ‘upper’ caste research assistant.

Similarly, the Director of the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT), Chennai, was booked at the Taramani police station under the SC/ST Act following allegations of caste discrimination against a colleague.

In 2024, an FIR was registered under various provisions of the SC/ST Act and the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita by the Bengaluru Police in a case alleging caste-based atrocities and systemic discrimination at IIM Bangalore. Eight individuals were named, including the institute’s Director and seven professors. The Directorate of Civil Rights Enforcement (DCRE), in its investigation findings dated December 20, 2024, confirmed systemic caste-based harassment faced by Associate Professor Gopal Das, a globally acclaimed Dalit scholar at IIM Bangalore, as per a report in the Mooknayak.

These cases represent only the tip of the iceberg.

Data on PhD enrolments in these institutions reveals that only a small number of students from SC, ST, and OBC communities have been able to secure admission into these prestigious doctoral programmes

Source: Table showing the 2022 PhD admission data of 13 IIMs obtained by RTI filed by APPSC IIT Bombay, The Wire

Scholarships for SC, ST, and OBC students are delayed and the students often get the amount after the end of their semesters. It has become an annual tradition for students to receive their scholarships after the end of their academic semester as reported in The Hindu. Minister Subhas Sarkar in this winter session of the Lok Sabha presented statistics that reveal the harrowing figures about dropouts by marginalised students studying in central universities, Indian Institutes of Technology, and Indian Institutes of Management.

In response to a question raised by BSP Member of Parliament (MP), Ritesh Pandey in 2023, the government disclosed that over the preceding five years, a staggering 13,626 SC, ST, and OBC students had discontinued their education.

The data further revealed that in Central Universities alone, 4,596 OBC students, 2,424 SC students, and 2,622 ST students had dropped out during this period. In the IITs, 2,066 OBC students, 1,068 SC students, and 408 ST students discontinued their studies. Similarly, in the IIMs, 163 OBC, 188 SC, and 91 ST students dropped out, reported SabrangIndia.

As stated before, no data for 2025 is accessible as of now, online.

Background

The Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT), the nodal central government agency on matters relating to reservation, issued an order in 1975 exempting certain scientific and technical posts from the reservation policy.

Siddharth Joshi, an IIM Bangalore doctoral alumnus and researcher who co-authored a paper with IIMB Professor Deepak Malghan on caste bias in IIMs, noted: “In 1975, an exemption was granted to IIM Ahmedabad by the Department of Personnel and Training with respect to reservation in faculty positions. While IIM Ahmedabad had expressly sought this exemption, other IIMs simply assumed that they were also exempt and began not implementing reservations in faculty recruitment.”

Institutions have frequently justified the marginal representation of SC and ST faculty by arguing that there is a lack of a sufficiently qualified applicant pool, as reported by the Quint.

However, marginalised communities remain underrepresented in these institutions both as students and as faculty. They are subjected to grave mental harassment on the basis of caste identity, by peers, by authorities, and by colleagues. At the same time, institutions routinely deny the existence of discrimination and attempt to curb voices that raise these concerns.

The deeper truth is this: people from marginalised communities are seldom truly accommodated within these spaces. They are rarely made to feel that they belong. They are otherised – their culture, language, and food practices subtly or overtly looked down upon. In these elite institutions, they continue to remain “they,” never fully accepted as “us.”

UGC Guidelines: Context, Counter-revolt and protest 

It is in this overall context of entrenched exclusion and othering that recent developments around the much-needed UGC guidelines 2026 need to be understood. Brought in following a rigorous human rights battle in the courts –spearheaded by the mother of Rohith Vemula and Payal Tadvi—they evinced visceral reactions from sections of the privileged caste elite. The union government, without putting up a spirited defence of its own enacted guidelines capitulated in its arguments of caste elite organisations in the Supreme Court. The Court too was prompt to stay implementation of these measures that would go a long way in addressing entrenched exclusion. Dozens of campuses across the country have seen spirited protests against this capitulation. Chandrashekhar Azad of the Bhim Army party even held a demonstration at Jantar Mantar on February 11 demanding that the 2026 Guidelines be implemented without change. Read references to this issue here, here and here.

Conclusion

“One out of three SC/ST students reported being asked about their caste,” revealed an IIT Bombay survey conducted in 2022.

Many students from the general category have reportedly hurled casteist abuses at SC/ST students. These elite institutions increasingly resemble exclusive spaces of savarna dominance. Yet, reports such as Caste-Based Enrolment in Indian Higher Education: Insights from the All-India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) are published, claiming that nearly 60% of seats in higher education institutions are occupied by students from marginalised communities (p. 11 of 26).

While the AISHE data indicates a rise in enrolment from marginalised communities in recent years, it fails to answer a fundamental question: which institutions are being counted? Are these Tier 2 and Tier 3 colleges in urban peripheries, or institutions located in remote rural areas? Or are we speaking of IITs, IIMs, NITs, AIIMS, and Central Universities, the institutions that command prestige, resources, networks, and opportunity?

The distinction matters. A BSc degree from IIT Bombay can open doors to high-paying corporations and global opportunities. A BTech degree from an under-resourced college in a remote district often cannot. Access to elite institutions translates into access to power.

Meanwhile, over 13,000 SC, ST, and OBC students have dropped out of higher education in recent years. In Central Universities alone, approximately 4,500 OBC students, over 2,400 SC students, and nearly 2,600 ST students discontinued their studies. In the IITs and IIM’s, India’s premier institutes of learning — renowned not only for academic excellence but increasingly for caste discrimination and student suicides – around 2,000 OBC students, 1,000 SC students, and 408 ST students dropped out. At the IIMs, 163 OBC, 188 SC, and 91 ST students discontinued their education reported SabrangIndia.

The disbursal of fellowships and scholarships is frequently delayed, often reaching students only after the semester has ended. Students are made to feel undeserving and unwelcome—by faculty and by peers alike. They are shunned for their caste identities. They are made to feel like outsiders, as though these institutions belong only to certain classes and castes. Even their food practices are policed and mocked, as has been reported in several IITs. Sabrangindia has frequently reported on this alienation and discrimination.

Faculty positions in these institutions are overwhelmingly occupied, often 80 to 90 percent—by those from the general category. Those who dominate these spaces frequently go on to hire within the same social circles, reproducing exclusion in the name of “merit.” It becomes a vicious cycle. Even when scholars like Gopal Das or Subrahmanyam Sadrela manage to reach the other end of this black hole, the system finds ways to pull them back.

Nearly 79 years after Independence, sections of our people continue to be treated as second-class citizens within spaces that claim to represent the pinnacle of knowledge and progress. India prides itself on constitutional morality, yet its elite institutions often operate within what increasingly resembles an internal apartheid.

How long will this continue? How long will students like Rohith Vemula, Payal Tadvi, Darshan Solanki, and countless others be pushed into a system so steeped in humiliation and mental harassment that death appears to them more bearable than a life stripped of dignity?

That is the question we must confront.

(The legal research team of CJP consists of lawyers and interns; this resource has been worked on by Natasha Darade)

[1] A suicide born of distress, mental and other torture and alienation at the Hyderabad Central University (HCU) on January 17, 2026 inspired the Dalit students movement to coin the term “institutional murder” as this was the last of many and the beginning of several such deaths with institutions of higher learning in India

Related:

Campuses in Revolt: How the UGC Equity Stay and Criminalised Dissent Have Ignited Student Protests Across India | SabrangIndia

A Long Battle, A Swift Stay: The Fight for Equitable Campuses | SabrangIndia

My birth is my fatal accident, remembering Rohith Vemula’s last letter

Rohith’s death: We are all to blame

To Live & Die as a Dalit: Rohith Vemula

The post Cementing exclusion: What the numbers say about SC, ST, OBC presence in India’s elite institutions appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The 2025 Intervention Tracker:

• NCSC: 2 Complaints
• NCM: 6 Complaints
• NHRC: 2 urgent memorandums
• Police/Administration: 6 Complaints
• Preventive Actions: 2 pre-emptive Complaints

1.  National Commission for Scheduled Castes (NCSC): Battling caste-based atrocities

In early January 2025 (January 8), CJP approached the NCSC to highlight a troubling spike in atrocities against Dalit communities across Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Uttar Pradesh. These complaints, detailing incidents from late 2024, emphasised that such violence is rooted in a deeply ingrained discriminatory mind-set. CJP’s intervention sought to move the Commission beyond mere observation toward active enforcement of the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989.

CJP is dedicated to finding and bringing to light instances of Hate Speech, so that the bigots propagating these venomous ideas can be unmasked and brought to justice. To learn more about our campaign against hate speech, please become a member. To support our initiatives, please donate now!

“Dignity for All”: a national mapping of 30 critical atrocities across 9 states

On June 24, CJP further filed a major formal complaint documenting 30 distinct incidents of violence across nine states, ranging from horrific sexual assaults on minors to the murder of a 10-year-old boy in Etah (Uttar Pradesh). Invoking Article 338 (5) of the Constitution, CJP sought an urgent probe into these crimes, which included social boycotts and the denial of cremation rights.

Widespread crimes against SCs violating the PoA Act and Civil Rights

CJP Stated in its complaint that, these incidents directly contravene the spirit and letter of the Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955, and more critically, the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 (SC/ST PoA Act), which specifically aims to prevent atrocities against Scheduled Castes and to provide for special courts for the trial of such offenses and for relief and rehabilitation of the victims. The recurring nature of these incidents, especially the multiple instances of sexual violence and physical attacks, reveals a severe lapse in the implementation and enforcement of these crucial legislations.

Targeted crimes against SCs, a pattern of abuse

Through this complaint, CJP highlights that systemic, widespread incidents of caste-driven oppression that are prevalent countrywide, across states governed by different political dispensations pointing to a deep-rooted societal malaise that has not only acquired a frightening level of ‘normalised violence and oppression’ but also is ‘allowed because of structured levels of immunity’.

CJP also stated in its complaint that as per the NCRB report, there are a total of 70,818 cases of atrocities against SCs and 12,159 against STs that remained pending for investigation at the end of the year 2021. A total of 2,63,512 cases of SCs and 42,512 cases of STs were placed for trial in the courts. At the end of the year, more than 96 percent of the total cases were still pending for trial. Though the charge-sheeting percentage was more than 80%, but the conviction rate remained below 40%.

Why did CJP intervene?

CJP stepped in because these atrocities were no longer isolated crimes but had become the “new normal” of daily humiliation and violence revealing spiralling trends. When local police failed to register FIRs or provided “structured immunity” to dominant-caste perpetrators, it became clear that only a high-level constitutional push could break the deadlock. CJP’s intervention was necessary to force the NCSC to address the systemic collapse of the PoA Act and protect the basic human dignity of the marginalised communities.

1.  National Human Rights Commission (NHRC): CJP’s Memorandum 

On May 31, 2025, CJP submitted a memorandum to the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) regarding a major human rights crisis in Assam. In memorandum CJP reported that between May 23 and May 31, the Assam Border Police conducted secretive night raids across 33 districts, detaining at least 300 individuals, primarily Bengali-speaking Muslims, without warrants or legal paperwork. While some were eventually released, approximately 145 people remained untraceable, leading to fears of illegal “pushbacks” across the Indo-Bangladesh border.

The memorandum highlighted that many detainees were already involved in ongoing legal cases or had lived in India for generations. CJP argued that these actions bypassed the rule of law and violated constitutional rights under Articles 21 and 22. CJP has asked the NHRC to demand a full report from the government, set up a fact-finding committee, and ensure the immediate safety and return of those unlawfully detained or expelled.

On June 4, 2025, CJP submitted a supplementary memorandum to the NHRC providing harrowing first-person testimonies of illegal night detentions and forced expulsions in Assam. This submission followed the initial May 31 memo and documented a systematic campaign where the Assam Border Police allegedly bypassed all judicial sanctions to deport Bengali-speaking Muslims, including the elderly, the chronically ill, and individuals protected by court stay orders.

The memorandum included testimonies from survivors like Hajera Khatun and Sona Bhanu, who described being blindfolded, fingerprinted without consent, and abandoned in “no-man’s land” swamps under the cover of darkness. Families reported finding their missing loved ones only through viral social media videos filmed in Bangladesh. Notably, CJP revealed that individuals previously released from detention centres through legal efforts—such as Doyjan Bibi and Abdul Sheikh—were re-detained and forcibly removed despite complying with all bail conditions. CJP has urged the NHRC to launch an independent inquiry, summon top officials, and ensure the safe return of all those subjected to these extra-legal deportations.

Rationale of CJP’s Intervention

This crisis demanded CJP’s intervention because the state was operating entirely outside the law, conducting what looked more like abductions than legal detentions. By disappearing people in the dead of night and “pushing” them across borders, the administration bypassed the entire judicial system, including the Supreme Court’s own stay orders. CJP acted to stop this “stealth purge” and ensure that no person is rendered stateless through secretive, extra-legal executive actions.

III. National Commission for Minorities (NCM: Stemming Organised Hate

Throughout 2025, CJP acted as a constitutional vanguard, filing six major complaints with the National Commission for Minorities (NCM).

• “Dharma Sansads” and 2. “Trishul Deekshas”

The beginning of the year 2025 was marred by high-decibel events like “Dharma Sansads” and “Trishul Deekshas” in regions like Delhi, Rajasthan, and Himachal Pradesh. These gatherings were marked by explicit calls for economic boycotts and physical violence against Muslims and Christians. CJP’s complaints to the NCM detailed how speakers propagated baseless conspiracies such as “love jihad” and “land jihad” and these events created an atmosphere of deep fear and uncertainty. Consequently, we urged the Commission to hold those responsible accountable by ensuring FIRs are filed under the new Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) 2023

• Complaint over hate speech at Trishul Deeksha events

On January 29, CJP had filed a formal complaint with the NCM, raising alarm over a series of Trishul Deeksha events held in December 2024 across Punjab, Delhi, Himachal Pradesh, and Rajasthan. Organised by far-right groups such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), Bajrang Dal, and Antarrashtriya Hindu Parishad (AHP), these gatherings featured openly inflammatory rhetoric, hate speech, and mobilisation against minority communities, particularly Muslims and Christians.

• Complaint against hate speeches at ‘Dharma Sansad’ events

On January 22, CJP filed a complaint with the NCM regarding a series of hate speeches delivered at ‘Dharma Sansad’ events on December 20, 2024, led by Yati Narsinghanand and other right-wing figures. Despite being denied permission to hold the event in Haridwar, the gathering proceeded at another location, where inflammatory and violent rhetoric was once again espoused, targeting Muslims and calling for a Hindu-only nation. The speeches at the event included derogatory language and explicit calls for physical violence against Muslims, promoting a vision of a society devoid of religious diversity.

• The Hindu Sanatan Ekta Padyatra: a ten-day mapping of fear

On December 2, 2025, Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP) submitted an exhaustive complaint to the National Commission for Minorities (NCM) regarding the Hindu Sanatan Ekta Padyatra, a massive 10-day mobilisation led by Dhirendra Krishna Shastri. Traversing 422 village panchayats across Delhi, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, and Madhya Pradesh, the march was documented by CJP as a systematic campaign of “othering” that weaponised religious identity. CJP’s detailed mapping of speeches Categorised the rhetoric into direct hate speech and high-intensity fearmongering, notably demographic conspiracy theories claiming Hindus were on the “brink of becoming minorities.”

The yatra featured exclusionary slogans such as “Jo Ram ka nahi wo kisi kaam ka nahi” and explicit calls for the economic boycott of Muslims and Christians. CJP highlighted how speakers used their spiritual authority to normalise “bulldozer justice” and incite historical resentment, such as invoking the Babri Masjid demolition to demand the reclamation of other religious sites. Warning that such organised campaigns, involving an estimated 3,00,000 participants, could trigger real-world violence, CJP urged the NCM to launch a fact-finding mission. Crucially, the organisation prayed for the appointment of nodal officers as per the Tehseen Poonawalla guidelines to protect vulnerable communities from the volatile atmosphere generated by the padyatra’s rhetoric.

1. Targeting Bengali-origin Muslims

In late September (September 30, 2025), submitted a comprehensive complaint to the National Commission for Minorities (NCM), highlighting what it described as an “alarming and coordinated escalation of hate speech” across India. The complaint documents how Bengali-origin Muslims, many of whom are lawful Indian citizens, are being systematically vilified as “Bangladeshis” and “ghuspaithiye” (infiltrators) in election rallies, public protests, and online campaigns. CJP’s submission to the NCM Chairperson requested a full inquiry and preventive directions to curb vigilante activity, emphasising that such rhetoric directly contravenes Supreme Court directions on hate crimes.

• CJP’s key demands to the NCM

The complaint called upon the Commission to:

• Take legal cognisance under the NCM Act and initiate an inquiry.

• Direct registration of FIRs against individuals and organisations spreading hate.

• Curb vigilante activity by outfits like Bir Lachit Sen and All Tai Ahom Students’ Union.

• Ensure police compliance with Supreme Court orders on suo motu action.

• Enforce preventive measures, such as videographing rallies and banning repeat hate offenders.

• Urge social media platforms to remove hateful content.

• Launch a fact-finding mission on the profiling, harassment, and eviction of Bengali-origin Muslims nationwide.

• CJP’s key intervention in systemic targeted harassment and hate-motivated violence against Christians in Rajasthan (September, 2025)

On October 8, 2025, CJP filed a formal complaint with the National Commission for Minorities (NCM) regarding a surge in targeted harassment and hate-motivated attacks against the Christian community in Rajasthan throughout September 2025. The complaint highlights a series of disturbing incidents following the introduction of the Rajasthan Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Bill, 2025. Key flashpoints included a police raid on a children’s hostel in Alwar on September 3, the coercive interrogation of believers in Kotputli-Behror on September 9, and the forceful closure of St. Paul’s Hostel School in Dungarpur on September 11. Most notably, on September 21 in Jaipur, a mob of 40–50 activists assaulted a private prayer meeting, injuring eight people.

CJP urged the Commission to take immediate cognizance of these events, which they describe as a “coordinated campaign” involving vigilante violence and administrative bias. CJP requested a time-bound investigation into police misconduct and the registration of FIRs under BNS Sections 196 and 299. They further called for the implementation of Supreme Court guidelines from the Tehseen Poonawalla case to ensure accountability and the protection of constitutional rights under Articles 14, 21, and 25.

Action Taken by NCM: Following the formal complaint lodged by CJP, the National Commission for Minorities (NCM) initiated official proceedings on October 14, 2025, by issuing a directive to the Chief Secretary of the Government of Rajasthan. In its formal communication, the Commission stated that “The complainant should be apprised of the action taken in the matter and the Commission should also be informed.”

• The rise of extra-legal vigilantism and “Identity Policing”

On December 18, 2025, CJP formally approached the National Commission for Minorities (NCM) to report a surge in vigilante violence and state-led targeted evictions. The comprehensive complaint documents a disturbing pattern of incidents occurring between September and November 2025, primarily targeting Muslim and Christian communities across multiple states. CJP highlighted five critical areas of concern as physical vigilantism involving cow protection and moral policing; economic intimidation through informal boycotts of minority-owned businesses; disruption of Christian prayer meetings under the guise of preventing conversions; coercive identity policing; and large-scale demolitions that disproportionately affect vulnerable populations without adequate rehabilitation.

The central theme of the CJP’s complaint is the emergence of “self-appointed enforcers” who act with a perceived sense of impunity. CJP argued before the NCM that these are not isolated events but a recurring pattern that erodes constitutional guarantees of equality and religious freedom. The organisation expressed grave concern over selective law enforcement, noting that police often act upon vigilante complaints while ignoring the initial unlawful acts of the perpetrators. CJP has urged the NCM to demand action-taken reports from state governments, ensure the impartial application of criminal law, and safeguard the livelihoods and dignity of minority groups against normalisation of such violence.

Action Taken by NCM: On January 23, 2026, the National Commission for Minorities (NCM) has officially taken cognizance of the representation submitted by CJP on December 18, and has registered the case. Acting on complaint, the Commission formally forwarded a copy of the complete representation to the Home Secretary, Ministry of Home Affairs, North Block, New Delhi, for urgent consideration and appropriate intervention.

III. Police Authorities: Demanding Neutrality & Accountability

In 2025, CJP filed 5 major collective complaints with police and administration, across several states, to demand accountability, immediate preventive action, and a strict adherence to the rule of law.

“In the line of Crossfire”: when CJP demanded authorities to Act

Throughout February and March, CJP filed multiple state-wide complaints against BJP MLA and Minister Nitesh Rane for inflammatory speeches delivered in Pune, Sindhudurg, and Ratnagiri. CJP contended that as an elected representative in a position of significant influence, Rane bore a heightened legal and ethical responsibility to maintain communal harmony. Invoking the Supreme Court’s landmark Amish Devgan judgment, which distinguishes between free speech and harmful incitement, the organisation filed a series of formal complaints to demand that law enforcement act decisively against rhetoric that threatened the state’s social fabric.

1.  Nanijdham, Ratnagiri – On March 28, 2025, CJP approached the Superintendent of Police and the District Magistrate of Ratnagiri regarding a speech delivered by Rane during a public felicitation. The complaint documented how Rane propagated baseless conspiracy theories like “love jihad” and “land jihad,” utilising Islamophobic slurs and specifically targeting religious sites such as Mazars and Dargahs. CJP argued that this inflammatory language was a direct attempt to stir fear and mistrust toward the Muslim community, citing the Amish Devgan standard that such speech serves no legitimate purpose other than to sow division and provoke social discord.
2.  Wagholi, Pune – On March 18, 2025, CJP approached the Additional Director General (Law & Order) and the Pune Police regarding a contentious speech delivered at a temple in Wagholi. In this instance, Rane openly advocated for housing discrimination, urging Hindus to rent properties exclusively to fellow Hindus and warning that renting to even one “Aslam” would lead to a demographic takeover. CJP asserted that this rhetoric incited segregation and violated Articles 14 and 15 of the Constitution. Furthermore, Rane’s fabrication of a coordinated plot to turn India into an Islamic nation by 2047 was flagged as a dangerous exploitation of public anxiety designed to dehumanise an entire community.
3.  Sindhudurg District – On March 7, 2025, CJP filed a joint complaint with the SP and Collector of Sindhudurg addressing speeches delivered in Kundal and Sawantwadi. These events, organised by right-wing outfits, featured Rane warning locals about “Islamisation” and issuing explicit threats. In Sawantwadi, Rane reportedly told the audience to contact him directly to “settle” matters if anyone “kept an evil eye” on his religion, pointedly remarking that he would ensure such individuals would not return to their place of worship on Fridays. CJP highlighted this as a clear incitement to communal violence and a violation of Supreme Court mandates that require police to take suo moto action against hate speech regardless of the speaker’s political standing.
4.  Nagpur City –  On April 24, 2025, Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP) filed a formal complaint with the Additional Director General of Police (Law & Order), Maharashtra, and the Nagpur Police Commissioner regarding a divisive speech delivered by right-wing influencer Kajal Hindustani (Kajal Singhala). The speech, delivered during a public “Shivjanmotsav” event in Nagpur on February 19, 2025, targeted the Christian and Muslim communities through inflammatory narratives and baseless conspiracy theories.

CJP’s submitted that Hindustani’s rhetoric—which characterised conversions as being traded for “a sack of rice” and utilised the “Love Jihad” trope—meets the definition of hate speech as established in the Supreme Court’s Amish Devgan vs. Union of India (2021) 1 SCC 1 ruling. The complaint argues that such statements serve no purpose other than to sow mistrust, demean minority religious practices, and dehumanise marginalised sections.

Partisan conduct by Jagaon Police: CJP’s intervention

CJP intervened in October 2025 following a distressing breach of professional conduct by the police in Jalgaon. CJP filed a comprehensive complaint with the Director General of Police (DGP) of Maharashtra and the Superintendent of Police in Jalgaon, calling for immediate disciplinary action against officials from the Jamner Police Station. This demand for accountability arose after police personnel were observed publicly participating in a communal procession organised by Shiv Pratisthan Hindustan—the very organisation whose members are accused in the brutal August 2025 lynching of 20-year-old Suleman Pathan.

The complaint, which was also marked to the Maharashtra Home Department and the National Human Rights Commission, contends that such conduct is a blatant violation of the police oath of office and the Maharashtra Police Conduct Rules. CJP argued that the participation of investigating officers in a rally organised by a far right group linked to the accused is not just an ethical failure, but a total collapse of the constitutional principle of neutrality. Such actions severely compromise the integrity of criminal investigations and shatter the public’s—particularly the victim’s family’s—faith in the fairness of the legal process.

In its pursuit of justice for the Pathan family, CJP has demanded the immediate suspension of the concerned officers and the transfer of the Suleman Pathan investigation to an independent agency. Furthermore, the organisation has pressed for a state-wide directive to reaffirm the necessity of police impartiality in all communal and hate-crime cases.

Curbing market vigilantism: the Malabar Hill incident

In late November (November 25, 2025), CJP moved against a former political leader who conducted unauthorised “Aadhaar checks” of Muslim vendors at Mumbai’s Malabar Hill. CJP identified this as an unlawful assumption of policing functions and religious profiling intended to disrupt the livelihoods of minority communities. By demanding identity documents and instructing Hindu vendors to display saffron flags, these actors attempted to enforce a system of visible segregation. CJP’s complaint urged the police to protect the vendors’ right to trade and to register FIRs against the vigilante actors.

Action Taken by NCM: Pursuant to the CJP’s complaint submitted on November 25, 2025 against Raj Saraf, the National Commission for Minorities (NCM) has taken cognisance of the matter and forwarded the complaint to the concerned authorities for appropriate inquiry and action. The complaint was received from the office of the National Commission for Minorities, Malabar Hill, Thane, and was thereafter transmitted to V. P. Marg Police Station for further investigation. The police authorities have acknowledged receipt of the complaint and have initiated the process of inquiry in accordance with law.

1.  Preventive Action against Hate-filled Gatherings

CJP’s proactive stand against the proposed communal mobilisation in Pune and Goa

In January, CJP proactively filed two complaints with the Pune and Goa Police to halt “Hindu Rashtra Jagruti” events. Highlighting the track record of the organising outfits in promoting Islamophobia and economic boycotts, CJP urged authorities to invoke Sections 130 and 132 of the BNSS, 2023 to prevent cognisable offences. CJP emphasised in its complaints that allowing such gatherings would violate fundamental rights and contravene Indian criminal law, particularly by inciting communal tensions in otherwise peaceful regions.

• When CJP asks Pune Police to halt right-wing’s ‘Hindu Rashtra Jagruti Andolan’ event

On January 4, 2025, CJP filed a formal complaint with the Pune Police seeking immediate preventive action against the “Hindu Rashtra Jagruti Andolan” scheduled for the following day. Organised by the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti (HJS), the event raised alarms due to the group’s history of inflammatory rhetoric regarding “Love Jihad,” economic boycotts, and religious conversions. CJP argued that such gatherings stoke communal tensions and violate constitutional rights, citing a Mumbai precedent where a similar rally was denied permission to preserve social harmony.

• CJP seeks preventive action against HJS’s Goa event

On January 22, 2025, CJP further filed a formal complaint with the Goa Police, seeking immediate preventive action against the “Hindu Rashtra Jagruti Sabha” event scheduled for January 25 in Sanguem. Forwarded to the Inspector General and Superintendent of Police, the complaint highlighted the potential threat posed by the organiser, Hindu Janajagruti Samiti (HJS), a group with a documented history of hate speech and divisive rhetoric. CJP raised a sharp alarm, noting that the HJS frequently propagates baseless conspiracies like “Love Jihad” and calls for economic boycotts against minorities, which could ignite communal tensions in a diverse region.

Rebuilding faith in the Rule of Law

CJP’s 2025 interventions were not just about reporting crimes; they were about providing a blueprint for administrative action. Through the distribution of our handbook, “Towards a Hate-Free Nation,” CJP equipped police and district administrations with the latest jurisprudence from the Supreme Court. We maintain that combating hate is a collective responsibility, and our relentless intervention with the NCM, NCSC, NHRC & other constitutional bodies/authorities and state police/administration remains the frontier of this effort to reclaim the secular and democratic fabric of India.

Related

Fighting Hate in 2024: How CJP Held Power to Account

2024: CJP’s battle against communal rallies before and after they unfold

Holding power to account: CJP’s efforts to combat hate and polarisation

The post Turning the Constitution into Action: CJP’s year against a rising tide of hate appeared first on SabrangIndia.

मुंबई के संजय गांधी नेशनल पार्क, बोरिवली में अवैध अतिक्रमण हटाने पहुंची वन विभाग और पुलिस की टीम पर स्थानीय निवासियों ने पथराव कर दिया, जिससे माहौल तनावपूर्ण हो गया। अदालत द्वारा गैर‑आदिवासी अतिक्रमण हटाने का आदेश दिए जाने के बाद जब कार्रवाई शुरू हुई, तो वहां रह रहे परिवारों ने… pic.twitter.com/RtxetyZZFV

— NDTV India (@ndtvindia) January 26, 2026

Meanwhile Anish Gavande, activist has, in an open lettrer to Ganesh Naik, Maharashtra Minister for Forests, appealed for the immediate halt in demolitions and protection of their life and property. This letter was made public at 6 p.m. on Monday, January 26. (NCPSP/NS/AG/27012026/001 Date: 27 January, 2026)

Quoting credible reports, Gavande states that “multiple Adivasi hamlets are facing demolition from January 19 this year without completed surveys, verified resident lists, or the lawful conclusion of the Forest Rights Act (FRA) process. Proceeding with evictions is a direct violation of Sections 4(1) and 4(5) of the Forest Rights Act, 2006, which explicitly prohibit eviction until all individual and community claims are verified through the Gram Sabhas. Eviction notices have been pasted late at night, with incorrect names and without field verification, denying residents a fair opportunity to seek legal remedy.”

Gavande also states that “equally concerning is the withdrawal of essential services. Electricity has been cut, BEST bus services suspended, and community facilities shut, with children being unable to attend school…..The justification that action is limited to so-called “re-encroachers” ignores the structural failure of rehabilitation. For Adivasi families whose livelihoods depend on land, livestock, and forest ecology, relocation to small SRA flats is neither viable nor lawful rehabilitation. This reality cannot be erased through administrative labelling. Conservation cannot be pursued by bypassing the law, particularly when large infrastructure projects continue within the same forest landscape.”

He has urged for the immediate halt all demolition activity, restore essential services, and ensure that no eviction proceeds until all FRA claims are lawfully settled through the Gram Sabha process. Failing timely intervention, affected communities and those supporting them will have no option but to intensify democratic protest and pursue all available legal and constitutional remedies.”

The letter may be seen here.

Finally the pressure worked and the demolitions were halted.

At 6.30 p.m. on January 27, IANS reported that Minister Ganesh Naik says, “The thing is that National Park is sensitive. Honorable High Court has ordered them to vacate the park. But still, without informing people it is not right to remove them. We have given houses to many people, but still they are not going. So, to find out whether it is true or false, a meeting is being held. I will inform you again after the meeting…”

Mumbai, Maharashtra: On Stone pelting situation in Borivali National Park Minister Ganesh Naik says, “The thing is that National Park is sensitive. Honorable High Court has ordered them to vacate the park. But still, without informing people it is not right to remove them. We… pic.twitter.com/k9yeJ6tYJJ

— IANS (@ians_india) January 27, 2026

Related:

Mumbai: Hundreds of people displaced after demolitions in Jai Bhim Nagar

Demolitions in Mumbai’s Behrampada before Eid

BJP MLA Nitesh Rane leads Hindutva Rally in Govandi, demands demolition of “illegal Masjids and Madrasa”

Govandi slum demolition: Temporary halt after protests outside BMC office by residents, those rendered homeless to rebuild their homes at the same site

The post Demolition of Adivasi homes at Sanjay Gandhi National Park on Republic Day appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Historical practices underscore the institutional roots of this humiliation, which are alarmingly mirrored and even innovated upon in contemporary India. Accounts from the Peshwa rule describe how untouchables were prevented from using public streets due to the polluting effect of their shadow; in Poona, they were forced to wear a broom attached to their waist to sweep away their footprints. Visuals of such a humiliating practice has been immortalised by Dalit writers and poets (Dalit shahirs)—performers in the late 19^th and 20^th centuries—that created a body of literature and theatre known as Dalit jalse.[1] Such ritual enforcement of segregation persists today in modernised forms of humiliation. This includes incidents where a 12-year-old Dalit boy died by suicide after being locked in a cowshed and shamed for accidentally entering an upper-caste house in Himachal Pradesh (October 2025), or the horrific case of a 14-year-old Dalit child forced to consume his own faeces (July 2020).

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The continuance –in the 21^st century — of these ritualistic forms of violence, seven decades after India’s independence, confirms a profound failure of the constitutional promise of equality. The violence is often preceded by symbolic degradation—the imposition of dominant caste thought and perception—which acts as a necessary pre-condition for the subsequent material and physical violence. This structural denial of humanity maintains the cultural and ritual authority of the caste system, fundamentally resisting constitutional mandates.

In 1950, the Constitution of India promised a radical rupture: the abolition of untouchability (Article 17), equality before the law (Article 14), and a vision of dignity that sought to transcend birth-based hierarchy. Even then, as Indians celebrated a vision of equality and non-discrimination, there was vocal resistance (in the Constituent Assembly) to a complete and total abolition of Caste itself at the time of the Constituent Assembly debates; finally, as a compromise, Article 17 was enacted. Seven decades later, the persistence and intensification of violence against Dalits across regions and institutions suggest that even the limited promise remains incomplete.

In recent years, this crude form of violence and exclusion has acquired new visibility — and new legitimacy. Incidents of caste humiliation no longer remain confined to villages or agrarian conflicts; they permeate public spaces, reflective of the re-legitimisation of this othering by the dominance of the political ideology ruling at the Centre and over a dozen states: Schools, cities, social media, and even the judiciary’s symbolic space have been breached: it is as if a shrill messaging is being broadcast of the casteist majoritarian regime in power; that caste exclusion and hierarchy is not simply justified but will be violently imposed. When an advocate of India’s apex court “dares” flinging a shoe at the present Chief Justice of India (CJI), a Buddhist and this is followed by singular racial abuse online, it shatters the comforting belief that institutional achievement insulates against stigma. Such episodes illuminate a wider social truth: caste not only continues to function as India’s deepest grammar of power, adapting to modern structures rather than disappearing within them. Caste resurgence is the order of the day, being re-imposed, brutally by this dispensation. What India is witnessing is the classic form of counter-revolution.

This article maps this regression. Mostly drawing upon recent incidents documented in 2025 —including those in Thoothukudi, Panvel, Meerut, and Madhya Pradesh—it reconstructs what can be termed the “new architecture of caste attacks.” Major incidents before 2025 have also been included to show a pattern. Violence and exclusion today occur through overlapping arenas: the village, the city, the school, the digital sphere, and the state itself. Each arena reveals how caste’s social logic survives despite constitutional guarantees.

Notably, all the incidents referred to in this piece has been provided in detail in a separate document below:

The Ascending Hierarchy of Attack: From ritual to institutional apex

Dr. B.R. Ambedkar envisioned the Constitution as a path towards both a moral and social revolution. The formal abolition of untouchability was meant not merely to criminalise discrimination but to destroy its social roots. Yet Ambedkar warned in the Constituent Assembly that “political equality” without “social and economic equality” would leave democracy vulnerable to caste hierarchy’s return.

The decades following independence saw significant legislative advances—the Protection of Civil Rights Act (1955), the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act (1989)—but these were accompanied by obdurate police and administrative non-application and followed by a persistent social backlash. Caste privilege adapted: open exclusion gave way to subtler forms of humiliation and violence disguised as defence of “tradition,” “honour,” or “religion.”

The post-2014 political climate added a new layer. In 1999, India had already experienced a glimpse of what was in store to come, when the National Democratic Alliance (in its first form) had the RSS-inspired Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) only as a minority. Yet, following the 2002 Gujarat pogrom, the ghastly lynching of five Dalit men in the village of Dulina, Jhajjar district, Haryana, after being falsely accused of cow slaughter, on October 15, 2002, shook the nation. A spate of such crimes continued and were documented.[2] The complicity of the police and the alleged involvement of far right organisations like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) was part of the details recorded.

The ascent of cultural majoritarianism, the mainstreaming of “Sanatani” rhetoric, and the weaponisation of social media have together normalised casteist discourse while weakening institutional checks. The result is not the re-emergence of caste, but its reconfiguration through new technologies, idioms, and legitimations.

The analysis of caste violence must recognise its escalating and diversifying trajectory. The attacks are no longer confined solely to remote rural pockets but have ascended a hierarchy of space and institution, moving from localised ritual control to sophisticated psychological control in urban institutions, and finally culminating in explicit political and ideological confrontation with the nation’s highest constitutional offices.

The sheer volume of reported cases underscores the crisis. According to National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data, in 2023, 57,789 cases of crimes against SCs were registered, a slight 0.4% increase from 57,582 cases in 2022. Looking at a wider period reveals a substantial escalation. A study by the Dalit Human Rights Defenders Network noted a 177.6% rise in crimes against SCs between 1991 and 2021.

This violence is not exclusive to villages; urban centres exhibit alarming rates. As per the statistics, Uttar Pradesh (15,130 cases) reported the highest number of crimes against SCs, followed by Rajasthan (8,449), Madhya Pradesh (8,232), and Bihar (7,064). Despite these statistics, the true incidence is severely underreported. Research suggests that only about 5% of assaults are officially recorded, often due to police indifference, bribery demands, or outright dismissal of complaints, particularly rape reports.

The structural progression of violence can be categorised across distinct spheres, illustrating the systemic nature of exclusion in the modern Republic.

Table 1: Typology of Caste Atrocities: The continuum of humiliation

 Ground Zero: Traditional sites of visceral violence (village to street)

Despite rapid urbanisation, the village remains the most enduring theatre of caste violence. In rural Madhya Pradesh, Dalit families were beaten and their seeds confiscated for cultivating common land (July 2025); in Chhatarpur, twenty families faced social boycott for accepting prasad from a Dalit neighbour (January 2025). Similar patterns appear across Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Bihar.

1. Controlling the Essentials: Land, water, and ritual space

In rural India, the primary mechanisms of caste control revolve around denying access to essential resources and ritual spaces, thereby enforcing physical and ritual segregation. Access to water, a non-negotiable human right, remains violently conditional upon caste status. The case of the 8-year-old Dalit boy in Barmer, Rajasthan, who was severely beaten and hung upside down for touching a water pot intended for upper castes, is a visceral demonstration of this control (September 2025). Similarly, the suicide of the 12-year-old Dalit boy in Himachal Pradesh was a direct consequence of humiliation for trespassing on upper-caste property (October 2025).

Ritual spaces, intended to be public, are often violently guarded to enforce untouchability. Dalits have been barred from offering prayers at a Durga Puja Pandal in Madhya Pradesh (September 2025) and violently assaulted for attempting to enter a temple during a religious procession in Churu, Rajasthan (September 2025). The Madras High Court was recently compelled to intervene and issue instructions to the Tenkasi administration regarding the equitable distribution of water due to persistent caste bias, highlighting how essential services are used as weapons of caste control (July 2025). The requirement for police to guard a Dalit wedding in Gujarat, sometimes using drones, underscores the fragility of civil rights protection when faced with entrenched local hierarchy (May 2025).

2. Policing Dalit Assertion: Rites of passage and mobility

Caste violence is inherently triggered not just by deviation from purity codes but by the assertion of equality and self-respect. This is most vividly manifest in attacks aimed at policing Dalit mobility and rites of passage, particularly wedding processions (baraats).

The act of a Dalit groom riding a horse, traditionally reserved for dominant castes, often leads to violence. Incidents across Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan involve grooms being pulled off their horses and guests being attacked (February 2025). This violence becomes ideologically intensified when Dalit identity is asserted. In Mathura, a Dalit baraat was attacked with stones and sticks after the Thakur community objected to the playing of songs related to Dr. Ambedkar and the Jatav community (July 2025). This deliberate suppression of public visibility and self-respect confirms that the violence is preventative, aimed at suppressing any public display of Dalit parity, thereby revealing the fundamentally anti-democratic nature of caste control.

Furthermore, intimate choices that threaten the integrity of caste endogamy are met with brutal force. Honor killings and extreme violence against inter-caste relationships are widespread. A Dalit youth in Tamil Nadu was hacked to death over an inter-caste relationship, with his girlfriend implicating her own family. In another incident, a Dalit boy in Tamil Nadu was stripped, beaten, and subjected to caste slurs for meeting a Vanniyar girl. (July 2025) The alleged honour killing of a Dalit man in Pune over his marriage to a Maratha woman, characterised by his family as a caste murder, confirms that this policing of reproductive choices transcends the rural-urban divide (February 2025).

3. The geography of forced servitude and political disobedience

Economic empowerment and political participation by Dalits are routinely met with retributive violence designed to re-establish feudal control. Violence often flares up when Dalits refuse forced labour or assert their rights over agricultural resources. In Madhya Pradesh, a Dalit youth was brutally beaten and his house set ablaze for refusing to work as a labourer (August 2025). Other attacks have involved dominant caste men snatching seeds and assaulting Dalit families cultivating their land (June 2025).

The targeting extends explicitly to Dalit political empowerment. A Dalit woman Sarpanch and her husband in Rajasthan were attacked with an axe over disputes regarding MNREGA road work (June 2025). This illustrates that achieving political mobility through constitutional offices is tolerated only as long as it does not challenge the economic and social dominance of local power structures. When a Dalit woman attempts to administer public projects (MNREGA), the challenge to local caste authority is met with physical terror, fundamentally linking economic development to caste subjugation.

The Modern Crucible: Institutionalised discrimination (city to school)

Cities were once imagined as caste’s antithesis—sites of anonymity and merit. Yet attacks on Dalit wedding processions in Agra and Meerut, and stone-pelting during Ambedkar-Jayanti rallies in Rajasthan, show that urbanity merely relocates caste antagonism.

Public celebrations become battlegrounds for visibility. The sight of a Dalit groom on a horse, or the sound of Ambedkarite songs, is treated as provocation. The violence is performative: it polices who may occupy the street, who may celebrate publicly, and which forms of joy are legitimate. In several districts, local authorities have begun escorting Dalit weddings with police and drones—an image at once tragic and telling.

Urban caste violence underscores how modern citizenship collides with inherited status. It also demonstrates the selective nature of state protection: preventive deployment rather than structural reform, treating equality as an event to be managed, not a norm to be lived.

1. The Cost of Merit: Caste in elite academia

Caste discrimination has infiltrated the highest echelons of Indian society, shifting the site of exclusion from the village field to the university lecture hall, resulting in a disturbing incidence of student suicides. Elite educational institutions, far from being meritocratic safe spaces, operate under a constant atmosphere of systemic, psychological violence against marginalised students. This structural violence is enacted through ridicule, ostracism, administrative bias, and academic sabotage.

Between November and December 2025 itself, three deaths of Dalit students across India underscored the lethal intersection of caste discrimination, institutional neglect, and structural exclusion in educational spaces. On November 6, a 19-year-old Dalit student of Deshbandhu College, Delhi University, and sister of JNUSU presidential candidate Raj Ratan Rajoriya, was found dead in her Govindpuri rented flat, with BAPSA alleging grave procedural lapses by the police, absence of medical personnel and female officers, and broader “institutional apathy” by Delhi University, including its failure to provide adequate hostel accommodation for marginalised students, forcing them into unsafe and isolating housing conditions. On November 20, an 18-year-old Dalit student, S Gajini, from Government Arignar Anna Arts College in Villupuram, succumbed to injuries ten days after attempting suicide, allegedly driven by caste-based abuse and assault by men from a dominant caste following a road altercation; despite an FIR under the SC/ST Act, the accused remain unidentified. On December 12, a 17-year-old Dalit student at a DIET institute in Kurnool died by suicide after prolonged distress linked to her struggle with English-medium coursework, highlighting how language barriers, caste location, and lack of institutional academic support continue to disproportionately burden first-generation and marginalised learners.

The environment becomes hostile because of the active weaponisation of meritocracy. Dalit students are frequently taunted as “non-meritorious” or “quota products”. This psychological assault on their intellect and dignity constitutes epistemic violence, a modernised replacement for ritual pollution, turning academic spaces into sites of structural harassment.

Case studies vividly illustrate this pattern:

• Rohith Vemula, 2016 (Hyderabad University)[3]: Vemula’s administrative exclusion, which forced him and four others to sleep in a makeshift “Dalit ghetto,” was recognised by his peers as a modern form of villevarda. While his death sparked a national political movement, the later police closure report attempted to undermine the caste-based motivation by questioning his Scheduled Caste status, thereby reinforcing the pernicious stigma of “fake merit”.
• Darshan Solanki, 2023 (IIT Bombay)[4]: Solanki died by suicide after allegedly facing ostracisation and ridicule from peers for asking basic questions in technical subjects. The institutional response from IIT Bombay, which prematurely denied any caste discrimination before a full inquiry was completed, exemplified institutional denial and refusal to confront endemic caste bias.

This environment of toxic exclusion is responsible for widespread trauma, with reports indicating that 80% of suicides in seven IITs were committed by Dalit students. Furthermore, the bias extends beyond performance, affecting administrative representation. Ten Dalit professors at Bangalore University resigned from their administrative roles, citing discrimination. The perpetuation of this violence reveals a fundamental rigidity: caste acts as a boundary that professional success cannot breach.

Table 2: Manifestations of exclusion in educational institutions

2. Invisible Barriers: Urban exclusion and professional glass ceilings

For Dalits who successfully navigate the hostile academic environment and achieve high professional status, the violence persists, though it adopts subtler, institutionalised forms. This reality demonstrates that economic independence does not translate into the annihilation of caste.

The suicide of Dalit IPS officer Puran Kumar, who questioned unfair promotions and postings, tragically illustrated that rank and wealth do not grant immunity; caste prejudice penetrates the highest echelons of bureaucracy (October 2025). Similarly, a Dalit Assistant Professor at SV Veterinary University was subjected to public humiliation when his chair was allegedly removed, forcing him to perform his duties while sitting on the floor (June 2025).

Discrimination is also structural in the dynamic urban private sector. Research indicates that job applicants with a Dalit name face significant discrimination, having approximately two-thirds the odds of receiving an interview compared to dominant-caste Hindu applicants with equivalent qualifications. This demonstrates that social exclusion is not a rural remnant but is actively practiced in the most modern sectors of the economy. This systemic sabotage of upward mobility means that educational and professional achievements merely shift the form of violence from physical assault to debilitating psychological and institutional harassment.

3. The digitalisation of hate and incitement

The rise of digital media has provided a new, pervasive medium for the normalisation and amplification of caste hatred. Based on a 2019 report by the human rights organisation Equality Labs, caste-based hate speech was found to make up 13% of the hate content reviewed on Facebook India. This digital sphere has facilitated the de facto normalisation of caste-hate speech and is recognised as a medium for oppressing and humiliating Dalits.

This toxic online envionment is actively utilized by right-wing extremist organisations, which have grown in prominence, sometimes using platforms like Instagram to promote hateful content and even fundraising. Major digital platforms demonstrated a historical disregard for addressing this issue, taking years to incorporate “caste” as a protected characteristic in their hate speech policies, and often failing to list it as an option in their reporting forms.

This digital rhetoric creates a climate of ideological validation that can incite physical violence. Harassment campaigns against high-profile Dalit figures, such as the Chief Justice of India, function as a coordinated form of symbolic violence intended to normalise the rejection of constitutional equality and test the boundaries of legal impunity.

The Politicalisation of Caste Warfare: The current regime context

Beyond violence lies symbolic appropriation. Dalit culture—its festivals, songs, and icons—is increasingly commodified or sanitised within a homogenised “Sanatani” narrative. The exclusion of India’s tribal President from the Ram Mandir inauguration exemplifies this politics of selective inclusion: representation without recognition.

In West Bengal, the “vegetarianisation” of Durga Puja since 2019 reflects a subtler transformation. Non-Sanatani groups, including many Dalit and Bahujan communities, are labelled “non-sattvic,” their rituals cast as impure. This recoding of religiosity transforms caste into cultural hierarchy.

At the same time, Ambedkar’s image is everywhere—on posters, statues, and government programmes—yet his emancipatory thought is domesticated. The appropriation of Ambedkar without the politics of equality amounts to symbolic capture: a neutralised memory that conceals continuing oppression.

Cultural exclusion thus performs two contradictory gestures—erasure and incorporation—both of which depoliticise Dalit assertion while reaffirming upper-caste control over meaning.

1. The Rise of Neo-Traditionalism: Sanatana dharma and exclusion

The period following 2014 has been marked by a significant ideological shift, where the ruling party’s emphasis on Hindu nationalism has provided an explicit political and cultural sanction for traditional caste principles. The concept of Sanatana Dharma has become a central ideological tool. Critics argue that this philosophy inherently justifies and maintains the rigid caste hierarchy, contrasting sharply with the constitutional ideals of liberty and equality. Any critique of caste discrimination, such as those made by Udhayanidhi Stalin regarding the system prevalent in Sanatana Dharma, is immediately framed by the dominant political ecosystem as an attack on Hinduism, aimed at polarising the electorate.

This ideological polarisation was directly responsible for the attempted shoe attack on Chief Justice B.R. Gavai (October 2025). The attacker, Rakesh Kishore, specifically shouted, “Sanatan ka apmaan nahi sahenge” (We will not tolerate the insult of Sanatan Dharma). This action linked a perceived anti-Hindu judicial stance (related to the Khajuraho deity ruling) directly to the caste identity of the judge. The incident functioned as an ideological declaration: constitutional morality, when used by a Dalit judge to challenge majoritarian religious claims, is deemed an “insult” that must be violently resisted, placing religious tradition above constitutional law.

2. Selective appropriation of Ambedkar and Hindutva strategy

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its political affiliates have engaged in a sustained and deliberate political strategy to appropriate the legacy of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, primarily to secure electoral gains and neutralise the profound ideological threat his philosophy poses to the foundational principles of Hindutva.

This strategy involves selectively invoking aspects of Ambedkar’s life, such as his conversion to Buddhism, while simultaneously minimising or ignoring his radical denunciation of Hinduism as being incompatible with democratic values. The attempt is to portray Ambedkar as a “Hindu social reformer” rather than a foundational critic of the caste system, thereby drawing Dalit politics into a unified, but hierarchical, “Hindu” fold. This co-option strategy is further highlighted by political attempts to link Ambedkar to RSS founders, despite historical evidence to the contrary.

The tactical use of Ambedkar’s image is often contradicted by ground realities. For instance, symbolic gestures are performed alongside reported policy failures, such as the denial of scholarships to 3,500 Dalit students in Uttar Pradesh, forcing public condemnation from Dalit leaders (June 2025). This gap between rhetoric and action confirms that the strategy is one of symbolic integration designed to neutralise dissent, rather than a genuine commitment to substantive social justice.

3. Symbolic constitutional exclusion

The pattern of exclusion extends to high constitutional functionaries from marginalised communities. The noticeable absence of President Droupadi Murmu, an Adivasi (Scheduled Tribe) and the constitutional head of state, from the inauguration of the highly politicised Ram Mandir in Ayodhya was widely criticised by opposition leaders, who connected it to her earlier exclusion from the Parliament building inauguration.

Although President Murmu belongs to the Adivasi community, the incident forms part of a larger pattern of ritual exclusion of marginalised constitutional authorities from highly faith-based state functions. The event, serving as a defining moment for the new majoritarian ideology, suggests a reordering of constitutional hierarchy. The exclusion of the head of state, particularly one from a marginalised background, implies that ritual purity and majoritarian religious identity are positioned to supersede constitutional hierarchy and the democratic principle of representation.

The Assault on the Constitutional Apex: Targeting the judiciary

1. The CJI Incident: From judicial remark to caste attack

The attempted shoe attack on Chief Justice of India B.R. Gavai stands as the most explicit act of caste-based political defiance directed at the core institutions of the Republic. The violence was ideologically motivated, following the CJI’s remarks during a hearing about a Vishnu idol in Khajuraho.

The caste dimension was immediately clear. The ideological defence of the attacker, Rakesh Kishore, who invoked Sanatan Dharma, and the support of influential right-wing figures like YouTuber Ajeet Bharti, who called Gavai a “lousy, undeserving judge” and accused him of “anti-Hindu sentiments”, establishes a crucial political point. The attack was not aimed at judicial competence but at the perceived “anti-Sanatan” judicial decision, rooted in the judge’s Dalit identity. This confrontation establishes that challenging ritual caste authority through constitutional interpretation is now publicly deemed an act of ideological treason.

2. Impunity and state response

The response of the state apparatus to the assault and subsequent incitement has set a dangerous precedent of selective justice. The attacker, Rakesh Kishore, was released shortly after questioning because the CJI declined to press charges. Kishore subsequently expressed no remorse for his actions.

Crucially, those who digitally incited further violence were also handled with remarkable leniency. YouTuber Ajeet Bharti, who made provocative remarks about the CJI and allegedly suggested actions such as spitting on the judge, was briefly taken in for questioning by Noida Police but was not arrested and was later released.

This lenient approach towards both the physical attacker and the digital instigator demonstrates a deep political hesitation to punish ideologically driven attacks rooted in majoritarian caste sentiment, even when directed at the highest judicial authority. This establishes a political environment that minimises the gravity of such threats, potentially intimidating the judiciary and compromising its ability to enforce social justice laws without fear of retribution.

Gendered Violence and Custodial Deaths: The deepest layer of impunity

Caste and gender intersect to produce some of India’s most brutal crimes. Dalit women continue to face disproportionate sexual violence, often as retribution for asserting dignity or property rights. Cases from Uttar Pradesh’s Sitapur district (2023) and Madhya Pradesh’s Sidhi forest region (2024) illustrate patterns where rape is both punishment and warning.

Custodial deaths compound the pattern. Dalit men arrested on minor charges have died in custody under suspicious circumstances, their families alleging torture. Investigations are often perfunctory, medical reports delayed, and officers reinstated. Such cases demonstrate how state power fuses with social prejudice, converting constitutional guardians into instruments of caste discipline.

The intersection of caste and gender is absent from mainstream criminal jurisprudence. The law individualises crime; caste violence is collective. Without recognising this collective dimension, justice remains procedural rather than transformative.

Regional Patterns: The southern paradox

Contrary to common perception, official data and recent reportage show high incidence of atrocities in southern states—Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Kerala—regions long celebrated for social reform. The Thoothukudi incident (2023) and the string of attacks in Tirunelveli district (over 1,000 cases in five years) reveal both persistence and visibility.

This “southern paradox” has sociological roots: assertive Dalit movements and higher reporting rates coexist with dominant-caste backlash. Greater literacy and media presence ensure documentation but not necessarily deterrence. The violence is thus both a measure of progress (assertion) and of resistance (repression).

The Post-2014 Inflection: Normalisation and silence

The last decade marks a qualitative shift. Three developments stand out:

1. Cultural majoritarianism: The language of “Sanatan Dharma” has become a political grammar through which caste is re-inscribed as divine order. Public discourse valorises hierarchy as heritage.
2. Digital propagation: Organised online ecosystems amplify caste-coded slurs and mobilise outrage with unprecedented speed.
3. Institutional silence: From police stations to ministries, selective inertia signals tacit endorsement. Silence becomes policy.

This triad—rhetoric, technology, and silence—has rendered caste violence socially negotiable. The constitutional ethos of equality competes with a cultural ethos of graded dignity.

The Constitutional Abyss: Implications for the Indian republic

1. The Failure of the SC/ST (PoA) Act: Legal protections as fiction

The rampant escalation of violence highlights the systemic failure of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 (PoA Act). Designed as a potent legal shield, the Act is continually undermined by institutional resistance and poor enforcement, leading to low conviction rates.[5]

Police inaction is endemic; research documents the prevalent practice of police failing to register FIRs or prematurely closing cases through “Final Reports”. Despite the Supreme Court’s, clear directive that FIR registration is mandatory for cognizable offenses, police show a “differential stance” on enforcing the PoA Act compared to other statutes, demonstrating systemic bias in justice delivery.

Moreover, the state apparatus frequently operates as an agent of caste oppression. Incidents include police custody deaths of Dalit individuals, police brutality against a Dalit woman in Haryana, and officers being booked for assaulting a retired Dalit official. This pattern demonstrates that the constitutional mandate to protect Dalits is often betrayed by the very instruments of state power, rendering legal protections fictional.

The SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989 and its 2015 Amendment remain India’s most potent instruments against caste violence, yet enforcement deficits persist. The act mandates immediate FIR registration, establishment of special courts, and protection of victims. Ground reports show chronic under-registration, downgrading of charges, and police bias.

Judicial interpretation oscillates between protection and dilution. The Supreme Court’s 2018 Subhash Kashinath Mahajan judgment introduced safeguards against “false cases,” effectively softening arrest provisions until partially reversed by Parliament. This episode revealed how institutional anxiety about misuse can overshadow concern for victims’ safety.

At stake is not merely criminal justice but constitutional morality—Ambedkar’s phrase for the ethical framework that must animate state action. When police or courts treat caste violence as routine, they erode that morality. The Republic then survives in form but not in substance.

2. The conceptual meaning of exclusion and humiliation

The pervasive violence is structurally maintained through exclusion, which is the combined outcome of deliberate deprivation and systemic discrimination, preventing Dalits from exercising full economic, social, and political rights.

Humiliation serves as a continuous psychological weapon, seeking to deny the basic humanity of the Dalit individual and enforce ritual hierarchy. Whether through being stripped and beaten, forced into humiliating acts, or subjected to taunts questioning their merit, the goal remains the denial of constitutional dignity. Dr. Ambedkar’s formulation established that democracy requires the foundational principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. The evidence suggests that when Dalits attempt to live a democratic life—by asserting social equality (riding a horse), achieving academic merit (joining an elite institution), or claiming high constitutional office (CJI)—they are met with structural violence and, frequently, death. This structural opposition confirms that the traditional social order fundamentally rejects the core ethical commitments of the Indian Constitutional Republic.

Conclusion: Safeguarding constitutional morality

Philosophers from Avishai Margalit to Axel Honneth define humiliation as the denial of recognition essential to personhood. Caste violence operates precisely through such denial. Its power lies not only in inflicting pain but in publicly authorising inequality. When a Dalit child is beaten for entering a temple, or when a Chief Justice is abused online, the message is continuous: certain bodies remain conditional citizens. Humiliation thus functions as pedagogy—teaching both victim and perpetrator the limits of equality. To counter it requires more than punishment; it requires re-socialisation—a transformation of cultural consciousness that law alone cannot produce.

The investigation into the hierarchy of attacks against Dalits, tracing the violence from ritual control in the village to ideological confrontation at the highest constitutional levels, confirms a severe crisis of constitutional morality in India. The nature of caste warfare has transitioned from covert rural brutality to overt, high-profile ideological confrontations in the urban and judicial spheres. This escalation is profoundly enabled by a political climate that prioritises majoritarian traditionalism over the egalitarian principles of the Constitution. The targeting of a Dalit Chief Justice, sanctioned by ideological rhetoric and met with institutional leniency, signifies that the foundational democratic tenet of equality is now under explicit, active threat.

To address this existential challenge, a set of structural and policy reforms is necessary to transform nominal guarantees into substantive equality:

1. Mandatory and independent police accountability: Legislation must be introduced to mandate the immediate and unconditional registration of FIRs under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act for all cognizable offenses, coupled with the establishment of independent police accountability commissions with the authority to prosecute officers who violate or fail to enforce the Act.
2. Criminalising institutional caste bias: Stringent anti-discrimination laws, backed by criminal penalties, must be implemented across all educational, corporate, and governmental institutions to address structural and psychological harassment, ending the systemic institutional denial of caste discrimination.
3. Digital accountability for incitement: Robust legal and regulatory measures are necessary to hold social media platforms accountable for the unchecked proliferation of caste-based hate speech and the incitement of violence, recognising it as a direct threat to public order and democratic principles.

The escalation of caste violence against Dalits—from the exclusion of a child from water access to the political assault on the Chief Justice—is a gauge of the Republic’s health. If the judiciary cannot be protected from attacks based on the caste identity of its leader, the entire legal and democratic framework built to secure social justice stands compromised.

More than seventy-five years after independence, the Indian Republic stands at a moral crossroads. Formally, it is a constitutional democracy; substantively, it remains stratified by caste. The incidents chronicled in 2025 itsef—stretching from rural Madhya Pradesh to the Supreme Court’s digital corridors—suggest not an aberration but a continuum.

The question is therefore not whether caste survives, but how the state and society have adapted to its survival. The new architecture of attacks—spanning villages, cities, institutions, and cyberspace—reveals that violence and exclusion now coexist comfortably with democratic form.

Ambedkar warned that “Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic.” The task ahead is to deepen the soil—to cultivate a culture where dignity is not negotiable, where equality is not episodic, and where the law’s promise finally becomes social reality. Until then, every assault on a Dalit body, image, or word remains an assault on the Constitution itself.

References

Indian colleges are hotbeds of casteism. How can they do better? – The News Minute https://www.thenewsminute.com/news/indian-colleges-are-hotbeds-casteism-how-can-they-do-better-176683

Caste and the Dalits: An Introduction – Global Ministries https://www.globalministries.org/resource/caste-and-the-dalits-an-introduction/

A clash of ideologies: Why Ambedkar and Hindutva are poles apart – The Polity https://thepolity.co.in/article/173

Hate Speech against Dalits on Social Media – Brandeis Library Open Access Journals https://journals.library.brandeis.edu/index.php/caste/article/download/260/61/1048

View of Hate Speech against Dalits on Social Media: Would a Penny Sparrow be Prosecuted in India for Online Hate Speech? https://journals.library.brandeis.edu/index.php/caste/article/view/260/61

Caste-hate speech – International Dalit Solidarity Network
https://idsn.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Caste-hate-speech-report-IDSN-2021.pdf

Atrocities on Dalits in Contemporary India Even After 75 Years of Indian Independence https://ijfans.org/uploads/paper/5af7bf7ae1851636fe726333533b1c8b.pdf

Dalit scholar’s protest exposes casteism in India’s higher education – FairPlanet https://www.fairplanet.org/story/dalit-scholars-protest-exposes-casteism-in-indias-higher-education/

IIT-Bombay Dalit student death | Senior says Darshan Solanki felt alienated by roommate, https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/iit-bombay-dalit-student-death-senior-says-darshan-solanki-felt-alienated-by-roommate/article66611752.ece

Attack on CJI: Union MoS Athawale seeks SC/ST Act charges as BJP does a tightrope walk https://indianexpress.com/article/political-pulse/shoe-attack-cji-mos-athawale-sc-st-act-bjp-10298249/

Ram Mandir Invitation: NCP Leader Raises Concerns about Draupadi Murmu’s Exclusion,

https://www.epw.in/engage/article/rohith-vemula-foregrounding-caste-oppression#:~:text=Between%202016%20and%202021%20itself,death%20sparked%20a%20political%20movement.

Rohith Vemula: Foregrounding Caste Oppression in Indian Higher Education Institutions, https://www.epw.in/engage/article/rohith-vemula-foregrounding-caste-oppression

IIT Student Suicides: Curse Of Caste On Campus? | Left, Right & Centre – YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhDhIhQiRWQ

How many lives will it take before India acknowledges dominant caste hegemony in educational institutes? – Citizens for Justice and Peace
https://cjp.org.in/how-many-lives-will-it-take-before-india-acknowledges-dominant-caste-hegemony-in-educational-institutes/

India’s caste system: ‘They are trying to erase dalit history. This is a martyrdom, a sacrifice’ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/24/student-suicide-untouchables-stuggle-for-justice-india

Suicide by Dalit students in 4 years – The Hindu https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Madurai/suicide-by-dalit-students-in-4-years/article2425965.ece

Unveiling The Tragic Link: Caste Discrimination And Suicides In Higher Education https://theprobe.in/stories/unveiling-the-tragic-link-caste-discrimination-and-suicides-in-higher-education/

Urban Labour Market Discrimination – GSDRC
https://gsdrc.org/document-library/urban-labour-market-discrimination/

Indian women, Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims face discrimination in earnings and jobs: Oxfam report https://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2022/Sep/15/indian-women-dalits-adivasis-muslims-face-discrimination-in-earnings-and-jobs-oxfam-report-2498476.html

An Introduction to Right-Wing Extremism in India – ScholarWorks at UMass Boston, https://scholarworks.umb.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1809&context=nejpp

For far-right groups in India, Instagram has become a place to promote violence, report shows – PBS
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/for-far-right-groups-in-india-instagram-has-become-a-place-to-promote-violence-report-shows

Online caste-hate speech: Pervasive discrimination and humiliation on social media, https://teaching.globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/resources/online-caste-hate-speech-pervasive-discrimination-and-humiliation-social-media

Udayanidhi Stalin’s Critique of Sanatana Dharma – Two Articles – Janata Weekly
https://janataweekly.org/udayanidhi-stalins-critique-of-sanatana-dharma-two-articles/

The Eternal Discrimination Of Sanatana Dharma – Madras Courier, https://madrascourier.com/opinion/the-eternal-discrimination-of-sanatana-dharma/

Dr.Ambedkar, Sanatan Dharma and Dalit Politics – Countercurrents, https://countercurrents.org/2023/09/dr-ambedkar-sanatan-dharma-and-dalit-politics/

(PDF) The attack on the CJI and the shadow of caste – ResearchGate https://www.researchgate.net/publication/396310357_The_attack_on_the_CJI_and_the_shadow_of_caste

Right-wing influencer Ajeet Bharti faces scrutiny online after ‘shoe attack’ on CJI Gavai, https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/after-shoe-attack-on-cji-right-wing-youtuber-ajeet-bharti-faces-scrutiny-online-101759830247046.html

RSS and Ambedkar: A Camaraderie That Never Existed – Janata Weekly, https://janataweekly.org/rss-and-ambedkar-a-camaraderie-that-never-existed/

From criticism to praise: How RSS changed stance on Ambedkar – Deccan Herald, https://www.deccanherald.com/india/from-criticism-to-praise-how-rss-changed-stance-on-ambedkar-3492843

Appropriating Ambedkar: Effort to merge Left and Ambedkarite politics – The Hindu, https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/appropriating-ambedkar-effort-to-merge-left-and-ambedkarite-politics/article8500076.ece

RSS At 100 And The Philosophy Of A Nation’s Unmaking – OpEd – Eurasia Review, https://www.eurasiareview.com/08102025-rss-at-100-and-the-philosophy-of-a-nations-unmaking-oped/

Who Is Ajeet Bharti? YouTuber Questioned After Controversial Comments On CJI Shoe Attack https://zeenews.india.com/india/who-is-ajeet-bharti-youtuber-questioned-after-controversial-comments-on-cji-shoe-attack-2969348.html

Why did Noida Police question Ajeet Bharti? What he commented on CJI BR Gavai after ‘shoe attack’ | Latest News India – Hindustan Times
https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/why-did-noida-police-question-ajeet-bharti-what-he-commented-on-cji-br-gavai-after-shoe-attack-101759894807122.html

Prof Abhay Dubey on Ajit Bharti Arrested for Inciting Violence Against CJI Gavai after Shoes Hurled – YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqpJ8s7HZhk

YouTuber Ajeet Bharti Taken in for Questioning After Remarks on CJI Shoe Incident, Released Later – LawBeat
https://lawbeat.in/news-updates/youtuber-ajeet-bharti-taken-in-for-questioning-after-remarks-on-cji-shoe-incident-released-later-1533340

‘Final Reports’ under Sec-498A and the SC/ST Atrocities Act | Economic and Political Weekly, https://www.epw.in/journal/2014/41/commentary/final-reports-under-sec-498a-and-scst-atrocities-act.html

Dalits and Social Exclusion: An Overview – International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR)
https://www.ijsr.net/archive/v8i7/ART20199584.pdf

India Exclusion Report 2013-2014 – Selected caste extracts
https://idsn.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/India-Exclusion-Report-2013-Selected-caste-extracts.pdf

The Death of a Dalit in a Democracy – Caste – The India Forum, https://www.theindiaforum.in/caste/death-dalit-democracy

[1] This body of work is also a major source for stories and protest songs (Qawwali) that focus on anti-caste movements and give voice to Dalit struggles wherein the broom and pot would be consistent imagery for this protest tradition.

[2] https://www.hrw.org/reports/2007/india0207/6.htm; https://frontline.thehindu.com/social-issues/article30193600.ece#:~:text=IN%20one%20of%20the%20most,presence%20of%20scores%20of%20onlookers.

[3] https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/we-all-failed-rohith/

[4] https://cjp.org.in/iit-mumbai-report-on-darshan-solanki-death-crucial-evidence-overlooked/

[5] https://sabrang.com/cc/archive/2005/mar05/cover.html

The post The Anatomy of Humiliation: Defining caste violence in the Constitutional era appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Protesters are mostly from the tribal communities of Palghar district. They had started their trek towards the collectorate, demanding better implementation of land rights, reinstatement of the MGNREGA, cancellation of the Vadhavan port and availability of water for drinking and irrigation purposes, among others. Accompanied by protest songs on microphones, striding purposefully with CPI-M flags and banners, chanting slogans, protesters reached the Collectorate office of Palghar on the evening of January 20, where they plan to camp until their demands are met – the most longstanding of which is the enforcement of land rights. Adivasis have been tilling forest and grazing land for centuries but still don’t own the plots they cultivate.

The Forest Rights Act, 2006, vests forest land and resource rights in Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest dwellers who have resided in such areas for generations. Gram sabhas initiate claims, verified through sub-divisional and district committees, protecting dwellers from eviction until their rights are settled. But most of the tribal farmers at the rally have not had their claims approved. The last time that farmers marched in their thousands was from Nashik to Azad Maidan in Mumbai, a stretch of 180 kilometres with several marchers barefoot.

Mass organisations All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS), Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA), Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI) and Student’s Federation of India (SFI) and Adivasi Adhikar Rashtriya Manch (AARM) have also joined this March in huge numbers. Beginning the long walk on January 19, the marchers have reached the Palghar Collectorate where they were denied permission for the dharna inside the Collectorate. Undettered they have begun the indefinite protests outside.

Citizens for Justice and Peace has long analysed national and international law on Farmers Rights. Some of these may be read here and here.

The March is being led by CPI (M) Polit Bureau member and AIKS National President Dr Ashok Dhawale, Polit Bureau member and AIDWA National General Secretary Mariam Dhawale, Central Committee member, state secretary and AIKS National Joint Secretary Dr Ajit Nawale, Central Committee member and CITU State Secretary Vinod Nikole, two-term MLA from Dahanu, State Secretariat member and AARM State Convenor Kiran Gahala, and many others. Later CPI (M) Polit Bureau member and AIKS National General Secretary Vijoo Krishnan also joined the March.

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According to Palghar Police officials, as reported in The Hindu, around 30,000 protesters joined the long march. The demands include full implementation of the Forest Rights Act, the Panchayats Extension to Scheduled Areas Act PESA, revival of the Jal Jeevan Mission scheme to provide work, cancellation of the smart meter scheme, appointment to all the vacant posts in the government service of Palghar district, providing the benefits of the Gharkul scheme, and cancellation of the development of Vadhavan and Murbe ports.

CPI (M)’s women wing State secretary Prachi Hatiwlekar told the newspaper, “This struggle is age-old, starting from bonded labour to now working for long pending issue of land ownership transfer. Central government is only trying to dilute the Forest Rights Act.”

The protesters are also articulate and vocal against the smart metres, media reports indicate. They want that the government reinstall old meters and instruct their officials not to impose smart meters. Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company Limited (MSEDCL) rolled out the smart meters in 2021, which automatically record real-time power consumption and send the data to the electricity distribution company. However, the device has been criticised for bill hike, no consent for installation, and poor awareness about tariff changes.

Read this story on smart metres here

The protest shows discontent among tribal communities over land ownership, large infrastructure projects in the district and changes to MGNREGA. All the protesters unanimously reiterated that unless and until “we don’t get all our papers stamped, we won’t go home”.

Related:

Kisan Long March ends with Fresh Promises to Farmers

The post 50,000 strong Adivasi, farmers march from Charoti to Palghar, hold indefinite dharna for land rights appeared first on SabrangIndia.

On January 3, 1831, 176 years ago Savitribai Phule, arguably India’s first woman teacher and forgotten liberator was born. With the first school for girls from different castes that she set up in Bhidewada, Pune (the seat of Brahmanism) Krantijyoti Savitribai as she is reverentially known, by the Indian Bahujan movement, blazed a revolutionary trial. There have been consistent demands to observe January 3 as Teachers Day. Without her, Indian women would not have had the benefits of education.

To mark the memory of this remarkable woman we bring to you her letters to life partner Jyotiba. Jyotiba and Savitribai were Comrades in Arms in their struggle against the emancipation of India’s disenfranchised people.

Translated from the Original Marathi with an introduction Sunil Sardar Reproduced here are the English translation of three important Letters – (originally in Marathi and published in MG Mali’s edition of her collected works, Savitribai Phule Samagra Wangmaya) – that Savitribai wrote to her husband Jyotiba in a span of 20 years.

The letters are significant as they write of the wider concerns that drove this couple, the emancipation of the most deprived segments of society and the struggle to attain for them, full human dignity and freedom.

This vision for a new and liberated society – free from ignorance, bigotry, deprivation, and hunger – was the thread that bonded the couple, arching from the private to the personal.

Theirs was a relationship of deep and shared concerns, each providing strength to the other. When large sections of 19^th century Maharashtrian society was ranged against Phule’s reconstructive radicalism, it was the unfailing and shared vision and dedication of his life partner that needs have been emotionally sustaining.  In our tribute to this couple and the tradition of radical questioning that they harboured, we bring to our readers these letters.

1856. The first letter, written in 1856, speaks about the core issue: education and its transformative possibilities in a society where learning, had for centuries been the monopoly of the Brahmins; who, in turn, used this exclusive privilege to enclave, demoralize and oppress. Away at her parental home to recuperate from an illness, Savitri describes in the letter a conversation with her brother, who is uncomfortable with the couple’s radicalism.

October 1856
The Embodiment of Truth, My Lord Jyotiba,
Savitri salutes you!

After so many vicissitudes, now it seems my health has been fully restored. My brother worked so hard and nursed me so well through my sickness. His service and devotion shows how loving he really is! I will come to Pune as soon as I get perfectly well. Please do not worry about me. I know my absence causes Fatima so much trouble but I am sure she will understand and won’t grumble.

As we were talking one day, my brother said, “You and your husband have rightly been excommunicated because both of you serve the untouchables (Mahars and Mangs). The untouchables are fallen people and by helping them you are bringing a bad name to our family. That is why, I tell you to behave according to the customs of our caste and obey the dictates of the Brahmans.” Mother was so disturbed by this brash talk of my brother.

Though my brother is a good soul he is extremely narrow-minded and so he did not hesitate to bitterly criticize and reproach us. My mother did not reprimand him but tried instead to bring him to his senses, “God has given you a beautiful tongue but it is no good to misuse it so!” I defended our social work and tried to dispel his misgivings. I told him, “Brother, your mind is narrow, and the Brahmans’ teaching has made it worse. Animals like goats and cows are not untouchable for you, you lovingly touch them. You catch poisonous snakes on the day of the snake-festival and feed them milk. But you consider Mahars and Mangs, who are as human as you and I, untouchables. Can you give me any reason for this? When the Brahmans perform their religious duties in their holy clothes, they consider you also impure and untouchable, they are afraid that your touch will pollute them. They don’t treat you differently than the Mahars.” When my brother heard this, he turned red in the face, but then he asked me, “Why do you teach those Mahars and Mangs? People abuse you because you teach the untouchables. I cannot bear it when people abuse and create trouble for you for doing that. I cannot tolerate such insults.” I told him what the (teaching of) English had been doing for the people. I said, “The lack of learning is nothing but gross bestiality. It is through the acquisition of knowledge that (he) loses his lower status and achieves the higher one. My husband is a god-like man. He is beyond comparison in this world, nobody can equal him. He thinks the Untouchables must learn and attain freedom. He confronts the Brahmans and fights with them to ensure Teaching and Learning for the Untouchables because he believes that they are human beings like other and they should live as dignified humans. For this they must be educated. I also teach them for the same reason. What is wrong with that? Yes, we both teach girls, women, Mangs and Mahars. The Brahmans are upset because they believe this will create problems for them. That is why they oppose us and chant the mantra that it is against our religion. They revile and castigate us and poison the minds of even good people like you.

“You surely remember that the British Government had organised a function to honour my husband for his great work. His felicitation caused these vile people much heartburn. Let me tell you that my husband does not merely invoke God’s name and participate in pilgrimages like you. He is actually doing God’s own work. And I assist him in that. I enjoy doing this work. I get immeasurable joy by doing such service. Moreover, it also shows the heights and horizons to which a human being can reach out.”

Mother and brother were listening to me intently. My brother finally came around, repented for what he had said and asked for forgiveness. Mother said, “Savitri, your tongue must be speaking God’s own words. We are blessed by your words of wisdom.” Such appreciation from my mother and brother gladdened my heart. From this you can imagine that there are many idiots here, as in Pune, who poison people’s minds and spread canards against us. But why should we fear them and leave this noble cause that we have undertaken? It would be better to engage with the work instead. We shall overcome and success will be ours in the future. The future belongs to us.

What more could I write?

With humble regards,

Yours,

Savitri

The Poetess in Savitribai

The year 1854 was important as Savitribai published her collection of poems, called Kabya Phule (Poetry’s Blossoms).
Bavan Kashi Subodh Ratnakar (The Ocean of Pure Gems), another collection of what has come to be highly regarded in the world of Marathi poetry was published in 1891. (The Phules had developed a devastating critique of the Brahman interpretation of Marathi history in the ancient and medieval periods. He portrayed the Peshwa rulers, later overthrown by the British, as decadent and oppressive, and Savitribai reiterates those themes in her biography.)
Apart from these two collections, four of Jyotiba’s speeches on Indian History were edited for publication by Savitribai. A few of her own speeches were also published in 1892. Savitribai’s correspondence is also remarkable because they give us an insight into her own life and into the life and lived experiences of women of the time.

1868. The Second letter is about a great social taboo – a love affair between a Brahman boy and an Untouchable girl; the cruel behavior of the ‘enraged’ villagers and how Savitribai stepped in. This intervention saves the lives of the lovers and she sends them away to the safety and caring support of her husband, Jyotiba. With the malevolent reality of honour killings in the India of 2016 and the hate-driven propaganda around ‘love jehad’ this letter is ever so relevant today.

29 August 1868
Naigaon, Peta Khandala
Satara
The Embodiment of Truth, My Lord Jotiba,
Savitri salutes you!
I received your letter. We are fine here. I will come by the fifth of next month. Do not worry on this count. Meanwhile, a strange thing happened here. The story goes like this. One Ganesh, a Brahman, would go around villages, performing religious rites and telling people their fortunes. This was his bread and butter. Ganesh and a teenage girl named Sharja who is from the Mahar (untouchable) community fell in love. She was six months pregnant when people came to know about this affair. The enraged people caught them, and paraded them through the village, threatening to bump them off.

I came to know about their murderous plan. I rushed to the spot and scared them away, pointing out the grave consequences of killing the lovers under the British law. They changed their mind after listening to me.

Sadubhau angrily said that the wily Brahman boy and the untouchable girl should leave the village. Both the victims agreed to this. My intervention saved the couple who gratefully fell at my feet and started crying. Somehow I consoled and pacified them. Now I am sending both of them to you. What else to write?
Yours
Savitri

1877. The last letter, written in 1877, is a heart-rending account of a famine that devastated western Maharashtra. People and animals were dying. Savitri and other Satyashodhak volunteers were doing their best to help. The letter brings out an intrepid Savitri leading a team of dedicated Satyashodhaks striving to overcome a further exacerbation of the tragedy by moneylenders’ trying to benefit.  She meets the local District administration. The letter ends on a poignant note where Savitribai reiterates her total commitment to her the humanitarian work pioneered by the Phules.

20 April, 1877
Otur, Junner
The Embodiment of Truth, My Lord Jyotiba,
Savitri salutes you!
The year 1876 has gone, but the famine has not – it stays in most horrendous forms here. The people are dying. The animals are dying, falling on the ground. There is severe scarcity of food. No fodder for animals. The people are forced to leave their villages. Some are selling their children, their young girls, and leaving the villages. Rivers, brooks and tanks have completely dried up – no water to drink. Trees are dying – no leaves on trees. Barren land is cracked everywhere. The sun is scorching – blistering. The people crying for food and water are falling on the ground to die. Some are eating poisonous fruits, and drinking their own urine to quench their thirst. They cry for food and drink, and then they die.

Our Satyashodhak volunteers have formed committees to provide food and other life-saving material to the people in need. They have formed relief squads.
Brother Kondaj and his wife Umabai are taking good care of me. Otur’s Shastri, Ganapati Sakharan, Dumbare Patil, and others are planning to visit you. It would be better if you come from Satara to Otur and then go to Ahmednagar.

You may remember R.B. Krishnaji Pant and Laxman Shastri. They travelled with me to the affected area and gave some monetary help to the victims.

The moneylenders are viciously exploiting the situation. Bad things are taking place as a result of this famine. Riots are breaking out. The Collector heard of this and came to ease the situation. He deployed the white police officers, and tried to bring the situation under control. Fifty Satyasholdhaks were rounded up. The Collector invited me for a talk. I asked the Collector why the good volunteers had been framed with false charges and arrested without any rhyme or reason. I asked him to release them immediately. The Collector was quite decent and unbiased. He shouted at the white soldiers, “Do the Patil farmers rob? Set them free.” The Collector was moved by the people’s plights. He immediately sent four bullock cartloads of (jowar) food.

You have started the benevolent and welfare work for the poor and the needy. I also want to carry my share of the responsibility. I assure you I will always help you. I wish the godly work will be helped by more people.

I do not want to write more.
Yours,
Savitri

(These letters have been excerpted with grateful thanks from A Forgotten Liberator, The Life and Struggle of Savitrabai Phule, Edited by Braj Ranjan Mani, Pamela Sardar)

Bibliography:

Krantijyoti : Revolutionary flame
Brahmans: Priestly “upper” caste with a powerful hold on all fairs of society and state including access to education, resources and mobility (spelt interchangeably as Brahmins)
Mahars:The Mahar is an Indian Caste, found largely in the state of Maharashtra, where they compromise 10% of the population, and neighboring areas. Most of the Mahar community followed social reformer B. R. Ambedkar in converting to Buddhism in the middle of the 20th century.
Mangs: The Mang (or Matang -Minimadig in Gujarat and Rajasthan) community is an Indian caste historically associated with low-status or ritually impure professions such as village musicians, cattle castraters, leather curers, midwives, hangmen, undertakers. Today they are listed as a Scheduled Castes a term which has replaced the former the derogatory ‘Untouchable’
Satyashodhak Samaj:  A society established by Jyotirao Phule on September 24, 1873. This was started as a group whose main aim was to liberate the shudra and untouchable castes from exploitation and oppression
Shudra: The fourth caste under the rigid caste Hindu system; these were further made more rigid in the Manu Smruti
Ati Shudra: Most of the groups listed under this category come under the untouchables who were used for the most venal tasks in caste ridden Hindu society but not treated as part of the caste system.
Jowar: The Indian name for sorghum

How the Education for girls was pioneered

The Phule couple decided to start schools for girls, especially from the shudra and atishudra castes but also including others so that social cohesion of sorts could be attempted in the classroom. Bhidewada in Pune was the chosen site, a bank stands there today. There is a movement among Bahujans to reclaim this historic building. When the Phules faced stiff resistance and a boycott, a Pune-based businessman Usman Shaikh gave them shelter. Fatima Shaikh Usman’s sister was the first teacher colleague of Savitribai and the two trained teachers who ran the school. The school started with nine girl students in 1848.

Sadashiv Govande contributed books from Ahmednagar. It functioned for about six months and then had to be closed down. Another building was found and the school reopened a few months later. The young couple faced severe opposition from almost all sections. Savitribai was subject to intense harassment everyday as she walked to school. Stones, mud and dirt were flung at her as she passed. She was often abused by groups of men with orthodox beliefs who opposed the education for women. Filth including cow dung was flung on her. Phule gave her hope, love and encouragement. She went to school wearing an old sari, and carried an extra sari with her to change into after she reached the school. The sheer daring and doggedness of the couple and their comrades in arms broke the resistance. Finally, the pressure on her eased when she was compelled to slap one of her tormentors on the street!

Once the caste Hindu Brahmanical hierarchy who were the main opponents of female education realized that the Phule couple would not easily give in, they arm-twisted Jyotiba’s father. Intense pressure was brought by the Brahmins on Phule’s father, Govindrao, to convince him that his son was on the wrong track, that what he was doing was against the Dharma. Finally, things came to a head when Phule’s father told him to leave home in 1849. Savitri preferred to stay by her husband’s side, braving the opposition and difficulties, and encouraging Phule to continue their educational work.

However, their pioneering move had won some support. Necessities like books were supplied through well wishers; a bigger house, owned by a Muslim, was found for a second school which was started in 1851. Moro Vithal Walvekar and Deorao Thosar assisted the school. Major Candy, an educationalist of Pune, sent books. Jyotirao worked here without any salary and later Savitribai was put in charge. The school committee, in a report, noted, “The state of the school funds has compelled the committee to appoint teachers on small salaries, who soon give up when they find better appointment…Savitribai, the school headmistress, has nobly volunteered to devote herself to the improvement of female education without remuneration. We hope that as knowledge advances, the people of this country will be awakened to the advantages of female education and will cordially assist in all such plans calculated to improve the conditions of those girls.”

On November 16, 1852, the education department of the government organised a public felicitation of the Phule couple, where they were honoured with shawls.
On February 12, 1853, the school was publicly examined. The report of the event state: “The prejudice against teaching girls to read and write began to give way…the good conduct and honesty of the peons in conveying the girls to and from school and parental treatment and indulgent attention of the teachers made the girls love the schools and literally run to them with alacrity and joy.”

A Dalit student of Savitribai, Muktabai, wrote a remarkable essay which was published in the paper Dyanodaya, in the year 1855. In her essay, Muktabai poignantly describes the wretchedness of the so-called untouchables and severely criticizes the Brahmanical religion for degrading and dehumanizing her people.

The post Love-Letters like no other appeared first on SabrangIndia.

December 13, 2025 also marks two decades (twenty years) of the passage of this historic law that was enacted after nearly a decade or more campaign by forest rights’ and Adivasi groups across the country. On this occasion of the 20th Anniversary of the Forest Rights Act, national campaign coordination organisations (like NRCCJ) have extended extend our heartfelt appreciation to all those, including, parliamentarians, intellectuals, and organisations whose collective efforts made this landmark legislation possible. The Act stands as a historic step to redress past injustices and to democratize forest governance and management, ensuring dignity, rights, and justice for forest-dwelling communities.

The FRA 2006 formally came into force on December 31, 2007, but initially excluded Jammu & Kashmir. Following the abrogation of Article 370, the Act was extended to the Union Territory on October 31, 2019 through the J&K Reorganisation Act, 2019. Formal implementation began in September 2021, and the State Forest Department was designated as the nodal agency. While the extension of the Act was welcomed by local groups and intellectuals, concerns were raised about entrusting implementation to the Forest Department, given its questionable historical role in restricting customary and traditional rights of forest dwellers.

Union of India’s contradictory stances over two decades

To recall these contradictory pulls, when the Government of India was drafting legislation to recognise tribal forest rights, the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change made several attempts to be the nodal ministry. However, the Campaign for Survival and Dignity—a coalition of tribal groups and intellectuals—strongly opposed this, arguing that a ministry associated with past injustices should not oversee the Act. Their advocacy led to the Ministry of Tribal Affairs (MoTA) being designated as the nodal ministry in 2006, through amendments to the Government of India (Allocation of Business) Rules, 1961.

Despite this, in many states and UTs, Forest Departments continued to act as shadow nodal agencies. The consequences have been stark:

• Out of 4.79 million Individual Forest Rights (IFR) claims, 1.47 million were rejected.
• For Community Forest Rights (CFR), the rejection rate stands at 9.56%, with states like Uttarakhand and West Bengal recording rejection rates above 90%.
• In states/UTs including Jammu & Kashmir, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Rajasthan, Karnataka, Bihar, and Madhya Pradesh, more than 50% of IFR claims have been rejected.

These figures highlight how the lack of awareness has enabled Forest Departments to dismiss or dilute claims, undermining the spirit of the Act.

In this context on the twenty years anniversary of this historic law, these steps by administration’s like Jammu and Kashmir (J and K) remain significant.

The Notification by the J and K administration may be read here

Letter dated December 3, 2025 by AIUWFP to District Magistrate Ms.Indu Kanwal Chib, District Bandipora J&K regarding the Implementation of Forest Rights Act in District Bandipora J&K may be read here. (https://dipr.jk.gov.in/Prnv?n=21737)

Related:

AIUFWP helps Dudhi villagers file Forest Land Claims under FRA

Forest Land Claims filed in Chitrakoot: AIUFWP and CJP make history!

Struggle for Forest Rights in India stretches from East to West

The post 20 years of FRA 2006, J and K appoints Tribal Ministry as Nodal agency appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Tharu Community and Dudhwa National Park

In the Palia Tehsil area of Lakhimpur Kheri district resides the Tharu community, known for its rich cultural heritage and deep-rooted connection to nature. Recognised as a Scheduled Tribe in 1967, most Tharu families depend heavily on forest resources for their livelihood, including bamboo, sugarcane, timber, and other forest produce.

The Tharu community inhabits around 40 villages situated in and around the Dudhwa National Park, which was established in 1977. The subsequent declaration of Dudhwa as a Tiger Reserve further intensified restrictions on land use and access to forest resources for local residents.

Section 2 of the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980 (Restriction on the de-reservation of forests or use of forest land for non-forest purposes) provides that:

“Notwithstanding anything contained in any other law for the time being in force in a State, no State Government or other authority shall make, except with the prior approval of the Central Government, any order directing—
(i) that any reserved forest (within the meaning of the expression ‘reserved forest’ in any law for the time being in force in that State) or any portion thereof, shall cease to be reserved;
(ii) that any forest land or any portion thereof may be used for any non-forest purpose.”

While this law was intended to prevent the diversion of forest land, its rigid implementation in Dudhwa effectively displaced the Tharu population from their traditional habitats. Following the creation of the National Park and Tiger Reserve, many Tharu villages found themselves enclosed within or adjacent to protected forest zones, leading to the loss of access to ancestral lands and essential resources.

Forest Rights Act, 2006 and Criminalisation of the Tharu Tribe

The Forest Rights Act, 2006 (FRA) (attached below) recognises and vests the rights of forest-dwelling communities by providing a legal framework through which they can claim ownership over land, forest resources, and livelihoods. It was enacted to undo the historical injustice faced by Adivasi and traditional forest-dependent communities who were excluded from forest governance for decades.

Section 4(2) of the FRA provides that:

“The forest rights recognised under this Act in critical wildlife habitats of National Parks and Sanctuaries may subsequently be modified or resettled, provided that no forest rights holders shall be resettled or have their rights in any manner affected for the purposes of creating inviolate areas for wildlife conservation.”

However, in practice, these provisions were ignored. The Tharu community was arbitrarily denied their forest rights, including the right to collect firewood, graze cattle, and access forest produce, despite fulfilling all statutory criteria. In 2012, when members of the Tharu tribe petitioned the court demanding recognition of their rights, the Forest Department responded by filing thousands of fabricated “forest crime” cases against them.

As reported by The Times of India, BJP MLA Romi Sahani from Palia constituency stated that “they filed cases not only against those who went into the forest, but also people who never left home, the physically incapable, and even the dead.”

Over the years, the Tharu community has continued to face bureaucratic harassment and administrative pressure, resulting in the systematic erosion of the rights guaranteed to them under the FRA. Seventy-year-old Badhana Devi recounts, “If we raise our voices or refuse to pay when officers come, we are threatened with new cases.”

In 2020, the District Level Committee (DLC) further rejected the Tharu community’s forest rights claims, disregarding the explicit provisions of the FRA, which confer rights irrespective of the revenue status of a village. (See CJP’s previous coverage: “Vested Rights under Threat: Tharu Tribe Petitions High Court against Administrative Harassment”)

These instances illustrate a clear misuse of statutory powers and administrative authority, effectively stripping the Tharu community of their constitutionally protected rights under the pretext of performing “official duties.” What was meant to be a restorative statute has instead become a tool of persecution, deepening the community’s marginalisation.

Misuse of Conservation Laws across India

Over the years, similar patterns of criminalisation of Adivasi and tribal groups have been witnessed across India. In Uttarakhand, for instance, the Van Gujjars were evicted from their homes as part of a drive to ‘clear encroachments on forest property’. They invoked their right to inhabit forest land under Section 3 of the FRA, 2006 (read below). Further, Section 4 of the Act clearly states that, in cases where these members are residing in critical wildlife areas and National Parks, it is important first to rehabilitate them, to provide them a secure livelihood.

The Uttarakhand High Court, through an interim order, upheld the Van Gujjars’ right to migrate to their summer homesteads and held that any attempt to evict them would violate Article 21 of the Constitution as well as their rights under the FRA, 2006.

In the Hoshangabad district of Madhya Pradesh, the Adivasi tribes such as the Korkus and Rajbhars have faced similar ordeals. At Itarsi, the Central Proof Range was established as a testing ground for armaments and ammunition, leading the government to acquire vast stretches of forest land and displace Adivasi and Dalit families. The concept of ‘protected forests’ was further expanded under Section 4(2) of the Forest (Conservation) Amendment Act, 2023 (attached below), to include land used for strategic or defence projects and paramilitary camps. These exemptions and definitional ambiguities are now frequently misused by the government to bypass conservation obligations and to criminalise local communities.

Perhaps the most alarming example lies in the implementation of the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972. Under the pretext of ‘conservation’, the Act has criminalised essential livelihood practices of forest dwellers, such as collecting mahua, grazing cattle, and fishing. Entry into these lands itself became a punishable offence. A report by the Criminal Justice and Public Accountability Project (CPA) reveals that most offences registered against Adivasi communities were categorised as ‘threats to ecological security and animal habitats’, often without any specific allegations.

Further, forest dwellers and Adivasis continue to face evictions through industrialisation and mining projects. The mineral-rich states of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Jharkhand are particularly affected. To facilitate mineral extraction, the standard state response has been to first declare forest land as ‘protected’ under the Forest (Conservation) Amendment Act, 2023, and then evict its inhabitants in the name of ‘conservation’. This systematic process not only undermines the FRA’s purpose but also perpetuates the cycle of dispossession and displacement of forest communities.

Legal Framework: Setting a Precedent for the Tharu Position

The judicial trajectory surrounding forest rights has consistently reinforced the constitutional legitimacy and welfare-oriented purpose of the Forest Rights Act (FRA), 2006. As seen in the preceding instances, from the Tharu community in Uttar Pradesh to the Van Gujars of Uttarakhand and the Adivasi groups in Madhya Pradesh, the administrative machinery has often undermined the FRA’s intent through procedural denials and criminalisation. However, Indian courts have, on several occasions, upheld the protective spirit of the FRA and reaffirmed the rights of forest-dwelling communities.

In Wildlife First v. Union of India, 2019 (read below),  the Supreme Court upheld the constitutional validity of the FRA, recognising it as a vital mechanism for securing the livelihoods and cultural identity of Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest dwellers. The Court underscored that the Act does not weaken forest conservation but instead democratises it by empowering local communities as custodians of the environment.

Similarly, in Orissa Mining Corporation Ltd. v. Ministry of Environment and Forests & Ors., 2013, concerning the proposed bauxite mining project in the Niyamgiri Hills, the Supreme Court upheld the Ministry’s decision to deny forest clearance. The Court found that the project violated both the FRA and the customary rights of the Dongria Kondh tribe, whose spiritual and cultural ties to the Niyamgiri Hills were constitutionally protected.
In paragraph 43 of the judgment (attached below), the Court characterised the FRA as a “social welfare or remedial statute” designed to recognise and vest forest rights. The legislative intent, it observed, is unambiguously to safeguard the customs, usages, and traditional practices of forest dwellers. The judgment further emphasised that under the Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 (PESA) (read below), particularly Section 4(d), the Gram Sabha is entrusted with the duty to preserve and protect tribal traditions, cultural identity, and community resources.

This landmark ruling thus establishes a jurisprudential framework that directly supports the claims of the Tharu petitioners. Their ongoing struggle to secure recognition of their Community Forest Resources (CFRs) in the Terai region echoes the Dongria Kondhs’ defence of their sacred landscapes. The same legal reasoning: recognition of customary rights, participatory decision-making through the Gram Sabha, and the FRA’s remedial purpose, should guide judicial interpretation in the Tharu case as well.

Constitutional Implication: Articles 14, 21, and 300A

The arbitrary usage of the Indian Forest Act and Wildlife (Protection) Act, to arrest and detain Tharu Tribe members, under the guise of ‘protecting wildlife and natural habitat’, violates equality and liberty guaranteed under Article 14 of the Constitution. The forest officials particularly target people belonging to Scheduled Tribes, who often lack legal and financial recourse to raise their voices. The FIRs are filed without looking at the facts of the circumstance (as in the case of Surdas Ram Bhajan), and any sort of resistance is framed as insurgency. Therefore, non-arbitrariness, which is at the heart of Article 14, is violated.

Article 21 guarantees the right to life and personal liberty. The FRA helps secure the right to life for forest-dwelling communities by protecting their ability to earn a livelihood from the forest. The petitioners argue that non-conferment of their forest rights is a violation of Article 21, and a further perpetuation of historical injustice, against which the FRA was meant to protect.

Article 300A of the Constitution protects the right of an individual to not be deprived of their property, secured by the authority of law. The Adivasis and Tharu tribe members are forced into a system of private/state property, as a result of unsettled land rights and lack of clear demarcations. The logic holds that any land that is not owned by individuals automatically becomes state property.

Thus, the 4000 cases against Tharu Community members violate their right to life, equality and property.

Conclusion and Way Forward

The core purpose of the Forest Rights Act (FRA), 2006 was to rectify the “historical injustice” committed against forest-dwelling communities, particularly Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers, whose customary rights to forest lands and resources were denied during the colonial period and, regrettably, even after independence (as reiterated in Orissa Mining Corporation Ltd. v. Ministry of Environment and Forests).

In the case of the Tharu community, the lands they had long inhabited were declared “forest land” or designated as “protected areas” for wildlife conservation, disregarding their traditional conservation practices and deep ecological dependence on forest resources.

The extensive rights guaranteed under the FRA remain largely unrealised due to the excessive control exercised by forest officials, whose discretion often renders these legal protections ineffective in practice. Furthermore, the recent Forest Conservation (Amendment) Act, 2023, has weakened the FRA’s intent by allowing the Union Government to grant forest clearances even before the rights of forest-dwelling communities are settled or their consent obtained. This legal overlap has created a dangerous precedent where conservation is invoked to justify dispossession.

These developments also highlight how state machinery, including the Police and Forest Departments, disproportionately target communities residing in and around forest areas, a significant proportion of whom belong to Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Castes.

The petition submitted by Santari Ram Rana and Sadai before the Allahabad High Court exposes this subtle yet pervasive bureaucratic violence embedded within law. Unlike overt forms of repression, this harm is inflicted quietly through administrative procedures, documentation, and regulatory control, reflecting a colonial mindset that continues to view forests as needing protection from the very people who have protected them for generations.

While the writ petition remains pending before the High Court, members of the Tharu community must continue asserting their legal and cultural rights, drawing inspiration from the Van Gujjars of Uttarakhand and the Adivasi movements in Hoshangabad. Only through sustained advocacy, awareness, and judicial engagement can the original spirit of the Forest Rights Act be truly realised.

(The legal research team of CJP consists of lawyers and interns; this resource has been worked on by Shyamli Pengoriya)

Related

Vested Rights under Threat: Tharu tribe petitions High Court against administrative harassment

Forest Conservation Amendment Act, 2023: A challenge to Adivasi land rights and environmental protections

U’khand Forest Dept admits faults in eviction notices issued to Van Gujjars

Forest Conservation Rules, 2022- An overview of changes that snatch rights of Gram Sabhas

Sokalo Gond and Nivada Rana lead the campaign for Forest Rights in SC

Tribals Allege Officials Use Forest Rights Act to Harass, Demand Money; Picket DM’s Office

The post When Conservation Becomes Coercion: The silent violence faced by the Tharus of Kheri appeared first on SabrangIndia.