Two men, including a migrant worker, were killed and six others injured after an armed gang launched an indiscriminate attack on residents in Nanguneri of Tamil Nadu's Tirunelveli district.
While the police have maintained that the incident was not linked to caste, concerns have continued to grow among civil society groups and activists who say the violence cannot be understood without examining the region’s deeply-merged caste dynamics.
In this interview, TNM’s Shabbir Ahmed speaks to Professor Lakshmanan of the Dalit Intellectual Collective to understand what his led fact-finding team discovered on the ground, why questions of caste continue to surface in this violence despite official denial, and about what the tragedy reveals about the persistence of caste inequalities in Tamil Nadu.