On September 2, 2023, a Dalit man in Kerala was slapped by two caste Hindus who hurled casteist abuses at him and even spat on him in public. What prompted this behavior? The victim had apparently won the tender invited by the Devaswom Board to prepare 'unniyappam’ (a traditional sweet) at the Sabarimala temple. The assaulters were upset about a Dalit man participating in the tender process when according to them, “the temple belonged to Hindus and not Pulayas.”
Almost two weeks later on September 19, 2023, Kerala state Devaswom Minister K Radhakrishnan spoke about a personal instance of untouchability that he faced at a temple event, where the priest refused to hand over the lamp to the minister owing to his caste. It was widely discussed in the state as a stark reminder of how even ministers cannot escape caste discrimination.
North of Kerala, in Ujjain, on September 25, 2023, a 12-year-old girl who survived a brutal rape had to wander semi-naked on the road for almost 2.5 hours, begging for help. Not a single person assisted her, and the disturbing video where she is seen to be shooed away went viral, sparking heated discussions on social media.
Over a week later on October 9, 2023, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi asked during a press conference in New Delhi, "Let me ask the journalists in this room, how many of you are Dalits? How many of you are from OBC?” and not a single person raised their hand. This was one of the most damning illustrations of the caste hegemony in Indian mainstream media.
On November 23, 2023, in Varanasi, a teenage Dalit boy was assaulted, forced to drink urine, and his eyebrows shaved by a few men from his village. Two days later in Prayagraj, as India celebrated Constitution Day, a statue of Dr BR Ambedkar was vandalized. Such vandalisation of Ambedkar statues has been a common occurrence in India over the years as one of the greatest Indians to have ever lived, a man who passed away in 1956, continues to terrify caste supremacists even today.
On December 3, 2023, Union Minister of State for Social Justice and Empowerment Ramdas Athawale informed the Parliament that over 400 people died while cleaning septic tanks and sewers in India between 2018 and 2023. According to the data provided by the minister, 76 deaths occurred in 2018, 133 in 2019, 35 in 2020, 66 in 2021, 84 in 2022, and 49 in 2023.
Two months later on February 23, 2024, in Gandhinagar, a Dalit man was assaulted for riding a horse in his wedding procession by upper caste Thakors. There was a viral video that showed a lone man crashing into a wedding crowd, walking straight up to the groom, and hitting him with not even the slightest worry about his own physical safety. If you think about it, that is not rational behavior, and that is what a caste society does to people.
As this piece was being written, on May 2, 2024, in Tamil Nadu, a major uproar was reported by caste Hindus against Dalits entering a temple at Salem, with shops set on fire and stones pelted at each other.
None of these incidents are sourced from research papers, theorized by sociologists, or ‘cooked up by urban Naxals’. They are all news reports that anyone can find with a simple Google search. “Turn in any direction you like and caste is the monster that crosses your path. You cannot have political reform, you cannot have economic reform unless you kill this monster,” said Dr Ambedkar in ‘Annihilation of caste’, an essential read for every Indian.
Despite this, caste is not problematised enough in our mainstream spaces, and even the more progressive ones are dominated by Savarnas.
For the uninitiated, Savarnas belong to one of the four varnas: Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya & Shudra, and Avarnas are those outside the varna system (Dalits & tribals). When it comes to caste, the Savarna Indians, in general, have always maintained a convenient ignorance hoping that the problem will automatically vanish – an attitude of “delulu is the solulu”, borrowing from the Gen Z parlance. They engage with caste almost daily but conveniently feign ignorance about it.
Savarna Indians conveniently forget that only about 5% of all marriages in India are inter-caste, and arranged marriage as a concept exists in our society, unlike the rest of the world, because we adhere to the tradition of marrying within one’s caste to perpetuate caste purity. The only major reform that we’ve had so far is that we could increase the minimum age of marriage to 18 and save children from it.
Savarna Indians also care little, among other things, about where their waste goes. Do they realize that people die cleaning up after them? Only a caste society can invest millions in space exploration, and even land on the moon, yet lack the same fervor to develop waste management technology to end manual scavenging. It’s a crying shame that such a practice exists in India despite technological alternatives.
If we take the case of food, ‘pure veg' hotels exist around us, and vegetarianism in the subcontinent is mainly a manifestation of caste. Unlike veganism in the West, most vegetarians in India are so, not by choice, but by birth. Attaching words like ‘pure’ with vegetarian food directly comes from the caste-based notions of ‘purity’ and ‘pollution’. When we say 'vegetarian food’, it is more about ensuring that there is no trace of meat in it than eating more vegetables.
In that sense, ‘non-vegetarian food' is essentially a double negative, brahmanical term, and phrases like ‘pure vegetarian’ and 'non-vegetarian’ are used nowhere in the world except in caste societies like India. The same is the case with 'non-veg jokes’, a commonly used Indian phrase to refer to dirty/vulgar jokes, as opposed to 'clean' comedy. This connotation of 'non-veg' with vulgarity and dirt is rooted in the same caste logic which attributes 'purity' to vegetarian food. These words are manifestations of a vegetarian hegemony in society, which is, in turn, a manifestation of caste. This is also why in a country where more than 70% of the population eats meat, many states deny eggs to their children in mid-day meals.
Numerous studies analyzing data on caste representation in India unambiguously establish the gross overrepresentation of the upper castes in every walk of society— be it judiciary, media, corporate, government services, education, or bureaucracy. All these statistics must be read keeping in mind that the upper castes constitute only around 20% of the Indian population. As per the recent caste census conducted in Bihar, the upper castes constitute only around 15.52% of the population. Here are a few data points for your consideration:
In 2022, a report by Oxfam India & NewsLaundry revealed that about 90% of leadership positions in print, TV, and digital media in India are occupied by upper caste groups with not a single Dalit or Adivasi.
Three out of every four anchors of flagship debates were found to be upper caste.
Only 10 of the 972 articles featured on the cover pages of the 12 magazines were about issues related to caste, and no more than 5% of all articles in English newspapers were written by Dalits and Adivasis.
In 2021, then Union Education Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal informed the Rajya Sabha that in IISc Bengaluru, only 2.1% of candidates admitted to PhD programmes were from the ST category, 9% were from SC and 8% from OBC categories from 2016-2020.
In the 17 Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIITs), 1.7% of total PhD candidates were from the ST category, 9% from SC, and 27.4% from OBC. These trends are similar or even worse in other institutes like NITs and IISERs.
Even after securing admission, it is challenging for marginalized students to continue the course. In 2019, the same minister, in a written reply to the Parliament, said that 48% of students dropping out of the IITs and over 62.6% from IIMs are from the SC, ST, and OBC categories.
According to data by the education ministry, presented in 2019 in Lok Sabha, out of 6,043 faculty members at the 23 IITs, 149 were SCs and 21 were STs — they made up less than 3% of the total number of faculty members. Most of the IITs do not have a single professor from the SC/ST community.
According to a 2019 study, 94% of corporate directors and CEOs in India were from upper castes.
A 2012 study found that 93% of board members in India's top 1,000 businesses are from upper castes, which make up less than 15% of the population.
In 2023, then Union law minister Arjun Ram Meghwal informed the Rajya Sabha that 492 out of 650 (76%) judges appointed to different High Courts since 2018 came from upper castes.
According to a report in the EPW, only four of 289 India's male test cricketers have been SC/ST, who are over 25% of the population.
Despite all this data, Savarna Indians are unable to recognise the legitimacy of reservation. In India, most jobs are in the private sector and most of the colleges are private unaided — neither of which comes under the purview of the reservation policy. Savarnas often boast about their ‘merit’ and how reservation ‘destroys the merit’ in the system, dismissing the systemic advantage of individuals from certain communities obtained from generations of accumulated capital.
All the popular arguments posed against caste-based reservations are founded on myths and have no basis in reality. This is not surprising as the dominant social groups are always threatened by attempts to create a more equal and just society. Let us briefly examine a few key of them.
One of the most popular arguments against reservation remains this: “Richer people will reap the benefits more than the poor, so caste should be replaced by economic criteria for reservation”. The irony is that this premise itself is false. According to the NSS data, in 2011–12, about 68% of all permanent SC employees were educated below the secondary and higher secondary levels, while 32% were educated up to the graduate level or above. So about 3/5th of all SC beneficiaries of reservation in employment had education levels below the secondary and higher secondary levels, and these people also generally belonged to the economically weaker sections. Now, among those who were graduates or had higher levels of education, 82% possessed land less than 1.23 acres, which highlights their relatively weak financial status. This implies that the poor from all educational levels have benefited from a reservation in employment.
So there is simply no basis to say that reservations favour the rich among the reserved and not the poor. Even if we ignore this inaccuracy in the premise and look at the argument in principle, there is no rationale for a state providing reservations based on economic status. Reservation by definition is not a poverty alleviation policy, but a mechanism to ensure the representation of those who don't get natural justice in society and are actively discriminated against. Discrimination transcends the individual’s economic status. As all the individuals from a group are affected due to their social identity, irrespective of the economic standing of the individual, the criteria for legal safeguards and policies have to be caste and not the economic status of the individual within the group.
Another popular argument is this: "Reservations have achieved limited success in solving the poverty among the reserved groups who still remain largely poor, so pro-poor policies are better alternatives”. Now here, there is some truth to the statement that reservations have achieved only limited success. But the blame for this must be placed not on the principle of reservations, but squarely on te extent of its coverage. This narrow coverage is due to two reasons: the exclusion of private sector jobs (a large majority of the total jobs) and the exclusion of temporary government jobs from the ambit of reservation. Only about 18% of non-farm SC workers are targeted beneficiaries, with 82% remaining outside the purview of reservation. Thus, the prevalence of a high level of poverty among the SCs is not due to the poor performance of the reservation policy but is due to low coverage. In the absence of reservation in employment, the decline in poverty would have been much less than what has been achieved.
Another argument, often posed as an innocent question, is this: "How long do reservations need to continue? Isn't it time to stop it? Didn’t Ambedkar want it to be discontinued after 10 years?” Not at all, reservations will have to continue until discrimination persists. According to the latest surveys, one in four Indians admitted to practicing untouchability in some form in their homes. According to NCRB, India reported 10 cases of rape of Dalit women daily on average in 2019. In the same year, crimes against SCs and STs increased by 7% and 26% respectively. After the Hathras case, a lot of discussions happened in the mainstream media about violence and discrimination based on caste. But after a while, it is conveniently forgotten and the next time a similar incident happens, people wake up and talk about it with the same wilful ignorance as the last time. With each passing day, there are new such stories in the media, and if you don't actively make the effort to ignore them, you won't miss them. So, how long should the reservation policy continue? As long as discrimination and disparities against the lower castes persist and their representation remains abysmal in the Indian mainstream. As for Dr Ambedkar wanting to discontinue reservations, this is one of the popular fake news that caters to the anti-reservation bias. The time limit of 10 years was imposed only on reservations to state and central legislatures, but even that was something Dr Ambedkar disagreed with. No such restrictions were applied on reservations in education or government jobs. Yet Savarna Indians continue to peddle this lie time and again, as recently as Tavleen Singh in her column in The Indian Express last December.
Savarna Indians conveniently forget everything they see, hear, and know about caste in their everyday lives, and ‘innocently’ claim that they just can’t see it. They don’t consider it relevant to modern times, worthy of their attention, or a key problem in our society. They ask with innocent faces: “What is caste?”, “Where is caste?”, “How does caste look?”, “Does it still exist?”, “Isn’t it a past thing?”, “Didn’t the British create it”, “Why reservation today for past oppression?” and so on.
Even after intellectual giants like the Buddha, Ambedkar, Periyar, Phule, Narayana Guru, and many others, meticulously wrote and spoke about caste, dissecting its intricate architecture, the caste elite still don't seem to have the slightest clue about how it operates in society.
Disappointingly, even those who you think finally get it make frivolous claims like advocating for reservations only for the financially poor. This conspicuous void in analysis, understanding, and awareness of caste among dominant castes can only be ascribed to a sentiment deeply rooted in a firm reluctance to engage with people 'below' oneself, a solidified belief that those ‘below’ us will never have anything to teach 'us'.
It is a manifestation of caste pride that traps them in stupidity and ignorance forever, safeguarding their power and contributing to the reproduction of the caste society.
So why didn’t anyone help the minor rape victim who begged for help for 2.5 hours in Ujjain last September? As a society, we simply do not have the moral tendency to help people 'below' us. We help only 'our' people and those 'above' us, because the foremost spiritual doctrine of this society is caste and in a caste society, it is nearly impossible to inculcate the tendency in people to help everyone regardless of who they are. This is why the road ahead is extremely important.
Caste is India’s shame and it must be annihilated. And when we say this, it's not just about sporadic acts of violence or exclusion from rituals; it's a pervasive system that denies Dalits, Adivasis, and other oppressed communities their fundamental right to dignity and equality. Eradicating caste requires a collective effort – education to foster empathy, accurate data to guide policy, and well-designed interventions to dismantle the machinery of oppression. Only then can India emerge from the shadow of caste and embrace the true meaning of an equal society. To dismantle this web of prejudice, a multi-pronged approach is essential.
Each one of us in Savarna India needs to put in a conscious effort to analyze situations and events through the lens of caste. Read books about caste, watch films about caste, listen to the voices who speak about their lived experiences, be empathetic, and contribute towards making an inclusive society. Open discussions about caste structures, their harmful effects, and the importance of social justice are crucial to fostering empathy and challenging social hierarchies.
It is also important that we offer critical support to political parties who promise to fight against caste. We must assess their vision to work towards caste equity, and offer support based on their merit. We must also demand to conduct the caste census because for fair and effective action, accurate data is vital as it is the cornerstone for designing effective affirmative action policies. We also need to remind the world, and even the left-wingers ironically, of the fallacy in providing reservations based on economic status, and pressurize our government to abolish EWS reservations.
At an institutional level, we must demand that the government bring caste education into school curriculums. We talk about the lack of sex education in schools, which is a very important demand of its own, while caste education is not pushed for.
As a community, we need to look inwards and strive to recognise our complicity, privileges, and roles in the sustenance and reproduction of a caste society.
In the hope for a casteless India,
A Savarna Indian
Views expressed are the author’s own