Articles
World
When International Law Names Caste But Cannot Enforce It
Nepal's 2026 UN review reveals the gap at the heart of global human rights: the system can recognize discrimination but rarely compels justice.
By Editor18 min read
Power
When the Government Erases Dalit Dispossession, It Starts by Silencing the Video
India's use of Section 79(3)(b) of the IT Act to restrict videos of land-grab protests reveals how tech infrastructure and platform censorship have become tools for simultaneous economic and epistemic erasure of Dalit communities.
By Editor7 min read
Ideas
Who Counts as Dalit? The State's Answer: Not Those Who Choose Their Own Religion
As India's caste census approaches, a Supreme Court ruling reveals how the state defines Scheduled Caste status—not by lived discrimination but by religious conformity. The conversion exclusion shows that the Presidential Orders are instruments of power, not neutral classification.
By Editor9 min read
Ideas
Caste Cannot Be Reformed. It Can Only Be Annihilated.
The Supreme Court's stay of anti-discrimination rules proves what Ambedkar taught: caste is a structure, not a prejudice. Sensitivity training, reservation lists, and legal prohibitions fail because they leave the religious and institutional architecture intact.
By Editor9 min read
Power
The Silence After Enumeration: Why India's Caste Census Without Delimitation Is Counting Without Consequence
The government's failed push for delimitation before the caste census reveals a deeper truth—frozen constituencies encode caste power, and counting caste without redistributing seats is merely making visible what remains frozen.
By Editor9 min read
Future
The Land That Liberates, Then Dispossesses: Dalit Families and the New Age of Dispossession
On April 28, 2026, India's state machinery repurposed itself for a second dispossession. Dalit families who won land redistribution in the 1970s now face acquisition by the same apparatus for a Google-backed data center—the latest turn in a 75-year cycle of reform, erosion, and renewed dispossession.
By Editor7 min read
Power
Democracy's Administrative Erasure: How India's Supreme Court Sanctioned Caste-Coded Voter Purges
India's highest court just validated mass voter deletion as constitutional. But the ruling reveals something older—how "neutral" state procedures have always functioned as tools of caste hierarchy.
By Editor7 min read
Power
The Caste Census and the Silence That Followed
India's first caste enumeration since 1931 will produce demographic data the government refuses to use. The defeat of delimitation bills reveals a calculated choice to preserve frozen constituency boundaries that have encoded upper-caste political geography for fifty years.
By Editor7 min read
Critique
How the BJP Weaponizes Caste Lists
West Bengal's slashing of OBC reservation from 17% to 7% exposes how Hindu nationalist governance uses caste enumeration as a tool of communal patronage, not social justice.
By Editor9 min read
Power
Democracy's Dalit Paradox: How Bengal's Record Turnout Masks Structural Disenfranchisement
West Bengal's 94% election turnout in 2026 represents the highest in Indian history. Yet every mainstream party deliberately erased caste from its platform despite Dalits comprising 23.5% of the state's population. This is Ambedkar's diagnosis vindicated: franchise without substantive power.
By Editor8 min read
Power
The Conversion Trap: How India's Law Punishes Religious Freedom
A Supreme Court ruling denies caste-atrocities protections to a Christian pastor. But the real question is whether conversion erases caste—or merely erases the legal acknowledgment of it.
By Editor6 min read
Power
When a Movement Becomes the System: The Dipke Disclosure and the Limits of Viral Politics
The Cockroach Janta Party's Dalit founder revealed his caste identity and faced coordinated abuse from the movement's own base—a contradiction that exposes what Ambedkar warned about 75 years ago.
By Editor8 min read
Power
The EU Has Leverage on Caste. It Must Use It.
The European Parliament heard demands for EU action on caste discrimination. Now Brussels must decide whether to act on trade, development, and human rights tools already at hand.
By Editor7 min read
Power
When Judges Order Dalits to Clean: How Caste Hides Inside Judicial Procedure
A Supreme Court ruling in May 2026 struck down bail conditions that forced Dalit and Adivasi accused to clean police stations—exposing how untouchability has migrated into the administration of justice itself.
By Editor7 min read
Lab
The Body Keeps Score: Why Caste Is India's Stunting Crisis
A new study shows India's worse child malnutrition than sub-Saharan Africa isn't a poverty problem—it's caste inscribed in flesh. Ambedkar understood this decades ago.
By Editor7 min read
Memory
The Panthers Rewrote the Script: How Dalit Militancy Forced the RSS to Hide Caste
The Dalit Panthers' 1973 confrontation with the RSS shows how subaltern movements reshape ideological terrain without state power—but the 2026 Bengal election reveals what that rhetorical victory concealed.
By Editor7 min read
Power
Ambedkar's Warning: How India's Largest Democracy Harvests Dalit Votes and Suppresses Dalit Power
West Bengal's 2026 election exposed a gap Ambedkar identified in 1949: franchise without real political power to demand accountability—a pattern that shapes democracy across India.
By Editor7 min read
Lives
Caste Doesn't Clear Customs
Australia named caste discrimination racism, built a 600-page evidentiary base, and wrote the recommendation. A government with a fresh mandate still hasn't moved.
By Editor5 min read
Ideas
India Has a Law Against Caste Violence. Its Courts Won't Use It.
Twenty years after the Khairlanji massacre, the Una acquittal confirms a durable judicial pattern: India's anti-atrocity statute works everywhere except in court.
By Editor8 min read
Ideas
The Word Disappears. The System Remains.
Caste does not need its own name to function. It survives by borrowing the language of merit, tradition, and belonging.
By Editor2 min read
Ideas
The Invisible Hierarchy: What Casteism Looks Like on a Tech Team
Casteism in tech doesn't announce itself. It runs on social capital, access, and silence — and the industry keeps calling it meritocracy.
By Editor1 min read
Ideas
How Caste Began: Ambedkar's Endogamy Thesis
A twenty-five-year-old Indian student at a Columbia anthropology seminar in 1916 isolated the single mechanism that defines caste — and made most subsequent caste theory look like elaboration around a missing centre.
By Editor5 min read
Power
Inside India's New Caste Economy
The language of newness hides an old mechanism. Read through Ambedkar's analysis of caste as graded social closure, the contemporary economy looks less like a break from the past than its most efficient continuation.
By Editor3 min read