
The EU has leverage on caste. Its India trade deal doesn't use it
Brussels' trade deal, due-diligence law and human-rights dialogue with India all stop short of naming caste. Parliament's consent vote on the deal is the moment to change that.
Caste violence, and what the state does next. We follow each case from the attack to the verdict, measure the gap between the law Dalits won in 1989 and the convictions it delivers, and record how families and organisations force accountability.
View all →Reservation is a constitutional claim, not a favour. We test it against the record: posts left empty for want of a 'suitable' candidate, quotas divided without data, a census that counts caste but may not change who is protected, and promised money that never arrived.
View all →Who owns, who works and who profits. Dalit families still wait for land the state granted a century ago, sanitation workers still die in sewers officials say nobody cleans by hand, and caste still decides who gets hired, paid and funded.
View all →Latest
Who holds power, and who is kept out of it. We count who sits in legislatures, newsrooms, courts and boardrooms, follow the parties that court Dalit votes, and ask what Dalit representatives can change once they are inside.
View all →Latest
Caste does not disappear in code; it is written into it. We report who builds Indian and global tech and who gets filtered out, what automated systems learn about Dalit people, and who decides which Dalit voices stay online.
View all →Dalit culture made on its own terms: work that refuses the stories dominant castes wrote for it, critics who judge it from a stated standpoint, the archives movements kept for themselves, and the Ambedkarite and Buddhist turn that treats leaving caste as a political act.
View all →Caste and patriarchy work together, and so do the people who fight both. We report where Brahminical patriarchy bites hardest, in the field, the home and the courtroom, and hear from Dalit women and queer, trans and disabled Dalit people on their own terms.
View all →Caste is not only India's, and neither is the fight against it. From Nepal's courts to Seattle's council, Geneva's treaty bodies and Brussels' trade talks, we track where caste discrimination is named in law, and whether naming it changes anything.
View all →Dalit thought as the primary theory of caste, not a footnote to it. We read its thinkers closely, from Ambedkar's 1916 paper on endogamy to Dalit scholars writing now, and test their arguments against what happens this week.
View all →Caste violence, and what the state does next. We follow each case from the attack to the verdict, measure the gap between the law Dalits won in 1989 and the convictions it delivers, and record how families and organisations force accountability.
View all →Reservation is a constitutional claim, not a favour. We test it against the record: posts left empty for want of a 'suitable' candidate, quotas divided without data, a census that counts caste but may not change who is protected, and promised money that never arrived.
View all →Who owns, who works and who profits. Dalit families still wait for land the state granted a century ago, sanitation workers still die in sewers officials say nobody cleans by hand, and caste still decides who gets hired, paid and funded.
View all →Latest
Who holds power, and who is kept out of it. We count who sits in legislatures, newsrooms, courts and boardrooms, follow the parties that court Dalit votes, and ask what Dalit representatives can change once they are inside.
View all →Latest
Caste does not disappear in code; it is written into it. We report who builds Indian and global tech and who gets filtered out, what automated systems learn about Dalit people, and who decides which Dalit voices stay online.
View all →Dalit culture made on its own terms: work that refuses the stories dominant castes wrote for it, critics who judge it from a stated standpoint, the archives movements kept for themselves, and the Ambedkarite and Buddhist turn that treats leaving caste as a political act.
View all →Caste and patriarchy work together, and so do the people who fight both. We report where Brahminical patriarchy bites hardest, in the field, the home and the courtroom, and hear from Dalit women and queer, trans and disabled Dalit people on their own terms.
View all →Caste is not only India's, and neither is the fight against it. From Nepal's courts to Seattle's council, Geneva's treaty bodies and Brussels' trade talks, we track where caste discrimination is named in law, and whether naming it changes anything.
View all →Dalit thought as the primary theory of caste, not a footnote to it. We read its thinkers closely, from Ambedkar's 1916 paper on endogamy to Dalit scholars writing now, and test their arguments against what happens this week.
View all →Format
Continuous prose, a strong personal argument, the byline itself is the standpoint.

Brussels' trade deal, due-diligence law and human-rights dialogue with India all stop short of naming caste. Parliament's consent vote on the deal is the moment to change that.
Ambedkar called Indian democracy a "top-dressing" on undemocratic soil. In West Bengal's 2026 election, a roll revision struck about 9.1 million names, and Matua voters say what lay beneath.
India's 2026 transgender law stripped self-identification from the 2019 Act. A Dalit, Bahujan and Adivasi trans and queer network named it the same denial Dalits met in 1932.
The Supreme Court froze the campus rules Rohith Vemula's mother fought for, over whether caste discrimination runs one way. Ambedkar explained in 1936 why rules alone keep losing.
Tamil cinema's anti-caste filmmakers built their own institutions and audiences before Mumbai noticed — calling that a 'crossover' gets the story backwards.