Kumeswar Naik is 26 years old. In May 2025, a judge of the Orissa High Court granted him bail on one condition: every morning for two months, between 6 and 9 a.m., he was to clean the premises of Kashipur Police Station. Naik was an anti-mining protester arrested for opposing a Vedanta bauxite extraction project in Rayagada District. He spent five months imprisoned at that same station before his release. The cleaning order required him to travel twenty kilometers daily to the institution that had detained him, armed with a broom and phenol, to perform labor that the court, without irony, expected him to execute as a condition of freedom.
Naik's case was not exceptional. Between May 2025 and January 2026, at least eight bail orders imposed identical conditions on accused persons in Rayagada and Kalahandi districts. Of those eight, six were Dalit and two were Adivasi. The judge issuing most orders was the same. The pattern was unmistakable. On May 4, 2026, the Supreme Court of India named it for what it was: a direct encoding of caste hierarchy into judicial procedure.
The Supreme Court's ruling, delivered by Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi, declared the bail conditions "on the face very obnoxious," "so abhorrent, cruel, degrading and unknown to law," and reflective of "regression to a colonial mindset." The Court found that they violated the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection and the prohibition on untouchability. The bench ordered all such conditions null and void and directed that no court in India should impose similar requirements in future. It was a rare institutional moment: the highest court naming, explicitly, what Ambedkar identified as the mechanism of caste itself—the assignment of degrading labor to communities designated untouchable, and the use of that labor assignment to reinforce their degradation.
But the opinion mattered precisely because it exposed what had been hidden. The conditions were not aberrations. They were the contemporary form of an ancient instrument: the conscription of caste-designated labor to mark and enforce hierarchy. And the ruling, though correct, arrived only through appeal to the Supreme Court—a remedy available to almost no one. For Naik and others similarly ordered to clean, the humiliation was not hypothetical. It happened first. The correction came months later.
This is how caste persists in post-constitutional India. It does not announce itself. It hides inside procedure, discretion, institutional normalcy—the machinery that is supposed to guarantee the rule of law.
Ambedkar wrote extensively on manual scavenging as the mechanism through which the caste system perpetuates untouchability. He traced the practice to occupational restriction: communities were not scavengers because of their labor, but because of their caste designation. The labor assignment preceded and justified the degradation. The purity-pollution logic embedded in the caste system made certain castes, certain occupations, inseparable. Ambedkar argued that this interlocking of caste and occupation was the system's genius—it economically confined communities while ritually marking them as polluted, creating a self-reinforcing cycle. What he called the children of India's ghetto were not poor; they were structurally excluded and rendered dependent through the assignment of degrading work.
The Constitution abolished untouchability in 1950. But the caste system adapted. It moved from explicit legal designation to administrative procedure, from overt violence to bureaucratic discretion. The SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act, 1989 created a legal framework for addressing caste violence. But conviction rates remain abysmal—fewer than 3 percent of cases result in conviction. The law exists, but the state does not enforce it with urgency. The Constitution guarantees equality; the courts apply it selectively.
And now we see how the same logic operates inside the justice system itself. Courts, supposed to be guardians of equality, became sites where judges could conscript Dalit and Adivasi accused into degrading labor under the veneer of bail conditions. This is what contemporary untouchability within the administration of justice looks like. It is not that the judge is a caste supremacist who explicitly says so. It is that the judge's exercise of discretion—which appears neutral, procedural, within his authority—automatically reproduces caste hierarchy. The system works. The person is humiliated. The institution is unbothered.
Anand Teltumbde, writing on the persistence of caste, observed that caste hierarchy in contemporary India hides in institutions, in normalized practices, in systems that appear to operate according to rational rules. The bail conditions imposed by Odisha courts were not framed as caste-based. They were framed as judicial conditions—remedial, character-building, within a judge's discretion to impose. But they were imposed exclusively on accused from marginalized communities. The discretion that appears neutral is the vehicle through which caste reasserts itself.
Here one might ask: Should judges not have discretion? Should bail conditions not be permitted at all? The answer is not to eliminate judicial discretion, but to recognize that discretion, unchecked by institutional accountability and structural awareness of caste, becomes an instrument of caste. A judge who grants bail on condition that the accused perform hours of unpaid labor at the place of her detention is not exercising neutral discretion. She is exercising caste. She is using the authority of the state to enforce the assignment of degrading work to a caste-designated community.
The Constitution forbids untouchability. It protects the accused from punishment before trial. It prohibits discrimination on grounds of caste. These are not mere ideals. They are binding law. Yet a judge in Odisha imposed conditions that violated all three—conditions that no court, if it had genuinely attended to these constitutional commitments, would have generated in the first place. The Supreme Court had to intervene because the Odisha judges did not recognize themselves as perpetuating caste. They saw only procedure. They saw only their discretion.
The real measure of reform is not whether the Supreme Court can catch and reverse such conditions on appeal. The real measure is whether the conditions become unthinkable at the point of origination—whether judges, at the moment of writing a bail order, feel the structural weight of caste discrimination, recognize the assignment of degrading labor as a caste mechanism, and refuse. That requires not just case-by-case correction. It requires that every judge confront the caste logic embedded in her own practice, that law schools teach the history of caste and judicial responsibility, that courts establish oversight mechanisms to prevent discriminatory bail conditions, and that the legal profession itself makes clear that judicial discretion is not a license to humiliate.
Kumeswar Naik's cleaning condition was struck down. He no longer has to commute to the police station at dawn. But for that reversal to matter, courts across India would need to transform not just their bail conditions but the institutional cultures that made such conditions thinkable in the first place. Until then, the Supreme Court ruling is a reprieve, not a remedy. It is the highest court telling lower courts what they should have known: that caste hierarchy, even when it wears the robes of procedure, is a violation of the Constitution and an insult to human dignity. It is also, and this is the harder part, an invitation to examine how many other practices, how many other exercises of judicial discretion, carry the same caste logic unchallenged into the chambers of law.