Format
Continuous prose, a strong personal argument, the byline itself is the standpoint.
India's 2026 Transgender Amendment Act stripped self-identification from the 2019 law it replaced. A DBA trans and queer network's response didn't stop at trans rights — it named the denial as the same one Dalits met in 1932.
A decade after Rohith Vemula's death, India's higher-education regulator tried to institutionalize protection for Dalit students. The Supreme Court stayed it as unconstitutionally vague within sixteen days — proof, not disproof, of what Ambedkar argued ninety years ago.
Ten years after the Una flogging, five men were convicted under India's atrocity law — and walked free anyway, on sentencing arithmetic. Twenty years after Khairlanji, courts never invoked the law at all. Two different failures, the same outcome.
A 26-year-old was granted bail on condition he clean the police station that had detained him. The Supreme Court called it obnoxious and void — but seven other Odisha bail orders had done the same thing, almost all to Dalit and Adivasi defendants.
West Bengal's Dalit voters turned out at a historic 93.71% despite a mass voter-roll purge — and received zero substantive policy commitments from any major party. Ambedkar diagnosed exactly this gap between franchise and power in 1949.
A European Parliament hearing brought UN experts and Dalit activists to Brussels to lay out caste discrimination in concrete terms. The tools to act on it already exist — trade preferences, development funding, human rights dialogues. What's missing is the will.
Tamil cinema's anti-caste filmmakers built their own institutions and audiences before Mumbai noticed — calling that a 'crossover' gets the story backwards.
Nobody says "caste" at the dinner table or the job interview anymore. Something still shapes who sits where and who gets called back. Caste didn't leave those rooms — it learned to speak in a different grammar.
India's tech economy is supposed to be a clean break from the old hierarchies. Look at who founds the companies, controls the venture capital, and runs the engineering teams, and the same pattern recurs — just wearing a credential instead of a caste name.
Zero of 121 leadership roles in India's newsrooms are held by a Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe journalist — and the data shows the loss isn't at the classroom, it's at the hiring door.
It rarely arrives as a slur. On a tech team, casteism looks like a review that never comes, a promotion cycle with the same names, an idea absorbed into the room and credited to someone else. The industry's self-image as a meritocracy is what makes it effective at hiding this.