Explainer · Caste
Is caste "sovereign"? Ambedkar, the courts and the idea of a law above the law
An idea often heard in anti-caste writing is that caste governs itself, like a sovereign, whatever the state's laws say. B. R.
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An independent, anti-caste publication written from a Dalit standpoint: justice, liberty, equality and fraternity.
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Perumpalli Dalits say they begged to bury a 90-year-old
Cases Without Convictions
India has a law against caste violence. Its courts rarely make it stick
In 2024 India's courts finished trials in fewer than 5 of every 100 caste-atrocity cases before them, and convicted in a third of those. The Una and Dangawas verdicts show what happens to the rest.
India's court backlog of caste-atrocity cases tripled in ten years, while finished trials stayed flat
Dalit protesters at a mass rally in Gujarat, in a photo published with a report on the Una flogging case. File photo. — Vibes of India, Shared with credit
This shows how difficult it is for Dalits to get justice. This is eroding the trust in the justice system and the guarantee of justice that our constitution gives us.
i
Source: The Wire, 7 Aug 2026339,853
Crimes against Scheduled Castes awaiting trial at the end of 2024: 95.2% of the cases before the courts. A third of finished trials ended in conviction.
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Source: NCRB, Crime in India 2024, Table 7A.6, accessed 4 Oct 2026Caste on Campus
IIT Bombay promised caste reforms after Darshan Solanki. Sahil Wakode's death tests what it built
Three years after Darshan Solanki's death, another Dalit student has died at IIT Bombay, and the institute's first account again centred on the student. Students want many of the same reforms.
Campus caste rules are on hold. Here is what still protects Dalit and Adivasi students
IIT Bombay's main building in Powai, a neighbourhood of Mumbai. File photo. — Shishirdasika, CC BY-SA 4.0
… there was a vaccine to cure Covid, and similarly, the Rohith Act is a cure for casteism.
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Source: The News Minute, 18 Jan 20262,389 of 5,737
Posts reserved for Scheduled Castes in India's 45 central universities that stood vacant on 1 April 2021.
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Source: Ministry of Education, Lok Sabha question 2295, 2 Aug 2021Untouchability & Modern India
A ritual to cleanse ground a Dalit leader stood on, and a commission that found no caste in it
Untouchability has never needed anyone to announce a motive. India's Scheduled Castes commission went looking for one in Haldwani.
Where did untouchability go? How caste survived the law in modern India
Mallikarjun Kharge greets the crowd from the stage at Ramlila Maidan, Haldwani, 8 August 2026. File photo. — Mallikarjun Kharge, Shared with credit
But after my speech, you … tried to insult me by doing a purification ritual … you made me feel the sting of untouchability.
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Source: The Wire, 5 Sept 202627%
Of respondents to the India Human Development Survey (2011–12) who said they practised untouchability in some form.
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Source: IHDS, as reported by The Indian Express, 29 Nov 2014Who Holds the Land
In the fight over KCR's farmhouse, Erravalli's Dalit assignees are the ones asked to prove their land
Telangana says it is testing an allegation against a former chief minister. The notices have gone to Dalit families who have farmed Erravalli's assigned land for 60 years.
In Poomani's Vekkai, the law belongs to whoever owns the land, and caste goes unnamed
Farmers bring their land papers to revenue officials during the government land survey in Erravalli, Telangana, in September 2026. File photo. — Deccan Chronicle, Shared with credit
I am a farmer, without my land I am nothing.
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Source: The Guardian, 26 Sept 2026186,000 of 1.2 million acres
Panchami land left in Tamil Nadu out of the land granted, the state's social justice minister told the Assembly, citing RTI replies.
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Source: ETV Bharat, 7 Sept 2026Four states have divided the Dalit quota. The central government keeps no count to test it
Each state built its case on its own commission's evidence after India's Supreme Court allowed the split in 2024. Central government records count Dalits in central jobs, not which Dalit communities hold them.
India's Caste Census Is in the Field. What the Blank Caste Column Means
Manda Krishna Madiga, founder of the Madiga Reservation Porata Samithi, addresses a seated gathering. File photo. — Shankereflu, CC BY-SA 4.0
A census produces data. Data by itself does not produce equality.
i
Source: Countercurrents, 30 Dec 202584 of 543
Lok Sabha seats reserved for Scheduled Castes since the 2008 delimitation, up from 79.
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Source: Government of India, state-wise Lok Sabha seats, 18 Mar 2009Caste Law Beyond India
Nepal cites a Dalit apology it never formally made
Nepal told the UN it had apologised to Dalits. No apology was passed by the Cabinet or gazetted, and a Dalit man's death in police custody was investigated only by the police.
Yashica Dutt stopped passing in 2016. A decade on, she is taking caste to New York's lawmakers
Police face Dalit rights protesters in Kathmandu in June 2013, at a protest over the lack of justice for attacks on Dalits in Rautahat district. File photo. — The Advocacy Project, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Sometimes I was evicted after landlords learned my caste. At other times, I faced physical violence. Now it is time to fight the final battle and end this discrimination once and for all.
i
Source: Republica, 24 Jul 202639
Untouchability cases Nepal Police registered in the 2021/22 fiscal year, after 30 the year before.
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Source: Nepal Police, via The Kathmandu Post, 4 Jun 2022Kilvenmani, 1968: the wage strike, the fire and the acquittal that became a pattern
On 25 December 1968, 44 Dalits were burnt alive in a hut in Tamil Nadu after farm workers demanded higher wages. The landlords charged were acquitted. What happened, and why it still matters.
After a Dalit principal retired, Bhim Army says, his chair was "purified"
AI-generated image, The Dalit Project – Why AI image?
- When is caste abuse "in public view"? What four High Court rulings say about homes, Facebook, WhatsApp and video
- What is the Protection of Civil Rights Act, and why does India barely use it?
- The UN asked India for a civil law against caste exclusion. India still answers untouchability only with the police
- A Dalit family in Punjab held its son's body to demand caste-atrocity charges. Police supervised his cremation instead
They don't collect tax because we are Dalits. They have two different graveyards for Dalits and caste Christians, that shouldn't exist.
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Source: The News Minute287,694
cases under the SC/ST Act were pending trial across India at the end of 2024, the highest in five years.
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Source: National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data tabled in the Rajya Sabha, Parliament's upper house, on 30 July 2026, via SCC Times.Who decides who counts as a Scheduled Caste? India's lists are written by presidential order
India's Scheduled Caste lists are set by presidential order and changed by amending Acts. The Orders and Acts show how the state built the record, and which Dalits it excluded from it.
Does backward-class status survive conversion to Islam? What the Supreme Court said, and who it leaves out
AI-generated image, The Dalit Project – Why AI image?
- Adequate, not proportionate: why Karnataka's High Court struck down larger quotas for Scheduled Castes and Tribes
- India's own commission found caste survives conversion. Nineteen years on, it is still right
- Four states have divided the Dalit quota. The central government keeps no count to test it
- India's Caste Census Is in the Field. What the Blank Caste Column Means
What can possibly be done is to exclude the economically better SCs from economic concession and various caste-based subsidies but not from job reservation.
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Source: writing in Outlook, September 202417.14%
Share of central government posts held by Scheduled Castes on 1 January 2026, against a 15% quota. How those posts divide among the communities on the list is not recorded centrally.
Andhra Pradesh police blocked, for 111 days, a reel of Dalit families describing the land they lost to Google's data centre
For 111 days, viewers in India could not see Tarluvada's Dalit residents describe losing land to Google's data centre. The order came from the state police, and no one has explained it.
In the fight over KCR's farmhouse, Erravalli's Dalit assignees are the ones asked to prove their land
AI-generated image, The Dalit Project – Why AI image?
The dominance of upper caste in rural areas is primarily due to their dominance of the control of land. Therefore, land reforms are most vital. … they [Dalits] have been distributed 1,000 acres of land but only on paper. The actual, physical possession has not been guaranteed.
Caste at the shop counter and the trader's scale: what a 2026 study of two Nanded villages records
A field study in two Dalit-majority villages in Maharashtra records caste working in input and crop markets, and argues that India's farm-income policies should name it.
A BJP leader says manual scavenging has been eradicated. The government's own count of Gujarat's sewer deaths says otherwise
AI-generated image, The Dalit Project – Why AI image?
- Three festivals, no reason: how India keeps a film on the caste order in hospital sanitation work off screen
- Inside India's new caste economy: equity follows the IIT network, and the state lends to Dalit founders
- What counts as manual scavenging under India's 2013 law, and who falls outside it
- Sanitation workers counted 101 sewer deaths in the first 188 days of 2026. The government counted 16 for the half-year, none as manual scavenging
We are not scavengers because we are poor, weak, or illiterate, or because we have chosen to be scavengers. It is because somebody else has made us scavengers.
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Source: India Development Review92%
of the 54,574 sewer and septic-tank workers in towns and cities verified under NAMASTE, the central government scheme for sanitation workers, belong to Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe or Other Backward Class communities: 67.9% Scheduled Caste, 15.7% Other Backward Class and 8.3% Scheduled Tribe.
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Source: Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, answer to Lok Sabha Unstarred Question 3453, 17 December 2024. The same answer said the work "is an occupation based activity rather than caste based".Ten years after Rohith Vemula, Telangana's campus caste-discrimination law is still a committee
Telangana named a bill after Rohith Vemula in April and gave it to five ministers. Five months on, it hasn't said whom the law would protect, while his movement has already published its own.
IIT Bombay promised caste reforms after Darshan Solanki. Sahil Wakode's death tests what it built
Radhika Vemula, Rohith Vemula's mother, with students at his memorial on the University of Hyderabad campus on the tenth anniversary of his death, January 2026. — The News Minute
We do not know what pushed him to this end: caste discrimination or unendurable stress. What we know for sure is this is an institutional issue. Let us stop looking at student suicides across campuses as isolated incidents.
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Source: as reported by Careers36028 of 45
students who died by suicide at India's 23 IITs between 2020-21 and 2024-25 were from Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe (Adivasi, or Indigenous) or Other Backward Class (OBC) communities, a broad group of historically disadvantaged castes.
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Source: official data compiled from all 23 IITs for a question in the Lok Sabha, Parliament's lower house, dated 8 December 2025, as reported by ETV Bharat. The compilation gives no details of the circumstances of the deaths, ETV Bharat notes, so the numbers alone cannot show why these students died.India's model blood-donor form doesn't ask for caste. Why did a form at an Ooty camp?
Students at a government college in Tamil Nadu questioned, on camera, a youth body's caste column that India's model donor questionnaire lacks. No reported explanation says what it was for.
A Kanpur university closed a Dalit student's caste complaint on its own committee's word. A national commission has given it 15 days to answer
The form handed out at the Ooty blood-donation camp in September 2026, its caste column circled and names blurred. — ETV Bharat
- The cockroach and the Constitution: Dalit writers split on a Dalit-founded protest party
- Ambedkar's warning, read in West Bengal's voter rolls and its 68 Dalit seats
- Campus caste rules are on hold. Here is what still protects Dalit and Adivasi students
- The merit card: how one word does caste's arguing online
The fear in the Brahminical establishment is that a Dalit can enter this so-called prestigious institute with a voice and assertion. Their deepest insecurities were exposed in the way this case was handled.
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Source: in Outlook17% → 7%
West Bengal's OBC reservation in state government posts, after the May 2026 notification restored the pre-2010 list of 66 classes.
Dalits and Christianity in India: a faith they chose, a caste that followed them
Dalits joined India's churches, often as whole communities, to leave caste behind. How caste followed them in, how they fought back, and why the state says it ended at baptism.
Anthony Poola once drank from cupped hands at a village well. Now the first Dalit cardinal leads India's Catholic bishops
The Visudha Mandapam at Eraviperoor, near Thiruvalla in Kerala, where the Prathyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha has its headquarters. File photo. — Vishnurajthannickal, CC BY-SA 4.0
It created a space for the visualization, sound modulation and movements of an assertive Dalit body for the first time.
2011
The year Gujarat laid the foundation stone for the wider Khambhalida project. In October 2026 the state's Buddhist monument beside the caves stood unguarded, damaged and not yet inaugurated.
Christina Dhanuja on the caste mind that awards merit, and why a Dalit woman's education is a right
Her book Dalit Women and the Fullness of Life is sharpest on merit, allyship and who sets the terms. Its turn to joy as a political practice is braver than it is finished.
Christina Dhanuja is building the rooms caste kept Dalit women out of
Christina Dhanuja with her book Dalit Women and the Fullness of Life (2026). — SheThePeople, Shared with credit
Dalit women in India are the Dalits among Dalits and suffer from three-fold oppression — on account of gender as a result of patriarchy, caste 'the untouchable', and class — as they hail from the poorest and most marginalised communities.
16 years
in roles across India, China, Singapore and the Netherlands, with government, business and development organisations, by her own account.
South Asian solidarity with Black and Aboriginal struggles breaks down where caste is left unsaid
Dalit leaders, from the communities once branded "untouchable", have sought common cause with Black movements since 1946. Solidarity spoken for all South Asians keeps leaving out caste.
Nepal cites a Dalit apology it never formally made
The poets Aleena Sabu and Dakota Feirer with the director Tess Joseph, whose show We Belong won the poetry award at the 2026 Adelaide Fringe. — Supplied, Shared with credit
- Nepal's caste law has no word for the rented room. A Dalit woman has sat five months asking for one
- Yashica Dutt stopped passing in 2016. A decade on, she is taking caste to New York's lawmakers
- The EU has leverage on caste. Its India trade deal doesn't use it
- A Geneva side event tests whether caste gets its own line in UN human rights law
The hardest part is getting justice for Dalit victims because police refuse to register complaints. If it is registered, a Dalit hardly gets justice because all institutions are run by upper-caste people who still think Dalits are untouchable.
15 to 43
complaints Nepal Police registered each year under the 2011 caste-discrimination law, 2019/20 to 2023/24.
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Source: Amnesty International, from Nepal Police annual reports.For whose freedom? Ambedkar's warning to the Congress, and who governs India now
In 1930 and 1945, Ambedkar warned that independence could hand power to a governing class. The records show where his test still bites and where the Constitution changed the answer.
An anonymous post called anti-caste readings "poison". A day later, the Education Ministry asked universities to answer it.
M. K. Gandhi and B. R. Ambedkar among the delegates at the Round Table Conference in London, 1931. — Wikimedia Commons
- The 'poison' list is built on the anti-caste canon: what Phule, Ambedkar and Rege wrote, and why universities teach it
- What the evidence shows about caste bias in AI
- A ritual to cleanse ground a Dalit leader stood on, and a commission that found no caste in it
- Where did untouchability go? How caste survived the law in modern India
why does the model enforces [sic] and justifies 'dignity' for lower-caste, but upper-caste have a default right to dignity?
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Source: FAccT'26 paper1 day
from the anonymous post (26 September 2026) to the Education Ministry's "urgent" email to central universities (27 September 2026).