Perspectives
Analysis, through a Dalit lens
Politics, ideas, and culture — read through Ambedkarite analysis and grounded in the record and the evidence.
Power
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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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Ideas
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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
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
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
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
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
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
