The Caste India Sees in Mallikarjun Kharge But Refuses to See in Itself

This unwillingness, and perhaps inability, of Opposition parties, civil society, and even progressive media spaces to confront the caste-Hindu society that legitimises the notion of ritual defilement and normalises purification is a major hindrance to meaningful public conversations about untouchability.

(Photo: Kamran Akhter/The Quint)

Gopal Guru, a leading thinker on untouchability and caste in India, argued in his 2023 paper Archaeology of Untouchability that modernity has forced the open expression of repulsion and nausea towards Dalits to recede into the depths of Brahminical minds.

In urban cities, he argues, it is largely in the private sphere that upper castes can exercise sovereignty in practising untouchability. He differentiates this from rural practices of untouchability against Dalits, which remain more visible on the surface of social interactions.

While this distinction is accurate, the recent incident of untouchability faced by Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge at the hands of Shri Ram Sena Dharmarth Seva Nyas Sangathan, an upper-caste-led Hindutva group in Haldwani, Uttarakhand, and the silence surrounding it, calls for a reckoning with a public discourse and political culture that seem either indifferent to the issue or treat it as just another unfortunate event to condemn and move on.

Kharge is the president of India’s largest Opposition party, but the office he occupies does not seem to erase the history he carries. Those who know his life story know that he grew up in Karnataka amid the violence, loss, and humiliations of caste and untouchability. Decades later, after rising to one of the highest echelons of Indian public life, he was made to confront the same old fiction—that his very presence could defile, that his body could still be marked as impure. There is something profoundly tragic in that return.

Beyond Hindutva

Many Opposition leaders and progressive groups have expressed concern over the casteism that Kharge had to endure. However, their criticisms often frame the incident primarily as an expression of Hindutva political ideology linked to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), while overlooking the social interactions and religious moorings in places like Uttarakhand that legitimise public untouchability and separation against members of Scheduled Caste communities.

This unwillingness, and perhaps inability, of Opposition parties, civil society, and even progressive media spaces to confront the caste-Hindu society that legitimises the notion of ritual defilement and normalises purification is a major hindrance to meaningful public conversations about untouchability.

Many Hindutva outfits promote the supremacy and superiority of upper-caste Hindus, particularly Brahmins and Thakurs, and they do so openly in places where the dominant social understandings provide them with the ground to do so.

States like Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, for all the romanticism surrounding their hills, snow, picturesque landscapes, and sacred Hindu pilgrimages, continue to be regions where members of SC communities not only face intense forms of caste discrimination and untouchability but have also been prevented from developing a powerful public discourse around their socio-cultural conditions.

One regularly hears about casteist practices and untouchability in states such as Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Rajasthan, but Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh hardly feature in mainstream or alternative news spaces. For decades, the latter states have been carefully presented as embodiments of Hindu spirituality in its pristine, ancient form. Consequently, criticism of their social and cultural moorings, particularly concerning untouchability, almost seems taboo.

How ‘Culture’ Makes Caste Harder to Confront

The unspeakability of this problem is a result of what anthropologist Balamurali Natarajan calls the culturalisation of caste, whereby even deeply inhumane practices are normalised under the pretext of culture. Culture then is articulated as harmless, authentic, and rooted expressions of Indian traditions and past that one needs to preserve in the face of encroaching modernity, which is linked to Western notions of corrupted morality.

Once culture is placed on this pedestal, criticising it—particularly Brahminical upper-caste culture—is often treated as nothing short of electoral suicide by many political parties.

This is precisely why, despite the purification of his house, and despite not receiving votes from upper-caste Hindus, even a prominent OBC leader like Akhilesh Yadav falls at the feet of a Brahmin Shankaracharya who justifies the Chaturvarna order, in which human beings are assigned unequal worth by birth.

Many prominent Western and Indian scholars, from Nicholas Dirks to Arjun Appadurai, have bypassed the widely shared hierarchical culture in India under the pretext of rescuing India from colonial and Orientalist biases that see India solely through caste.

Dalits in Public Life

On the other hand, the representation of Dalits in the media has largely become a matter of occasional caste violence, which is treated as an aberration, or of Ambedkar symbolism and debates over reservation. These representations miss the fundamental chasm of untouchability that caste-Hindu society reproduces through subtle and explicit means, attributing impurity to Dalit bodies, occupations, and settlements.

Untouchability is primarily a matter of values embedded in the hearts and minds of caste Hindus, but these values also have material logics and consequences. Neither the highly acclaimed Dravidian parties nor the Left in Kerala has been able to eradicate these values from the minds of caste Hindus. They have, to varying degrees, been successful in delivering welfare and public services to Dalit communities. Still, they have not fundamentally altered the attitudes and dispositions of caste Hindus towards Dalits.

At the same time, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has been able to embed itself through its workers and numerous grassroots organisations among Adivasi communities in the hinterlands and to provide a common space for Dalit and lower-caste youth through aggressive religious gatherings and processions. Yet, it has not convinced its upper-caste Hindu constituencies of the need for a common social life with those whom they consider lower and inferior.

It will not do so because it recognises the existence of separate castes, each supposedly entitled to its own social boundaries, which nevertheless need to come together for the larger Hindu cause. It also knows that any serious attempt towards social assimilation would be aggressively opposed by its primary constituency and by sections of the orthodox Brahmin clergy.

When Dalits Are Useful, But Not Equal

For one side of the political spectrum, the Dalit remains merely a recipient of welfare schemes and services; for the other, Dalits either remain pitiable characters drawn from Brahminical mythologies or disposable foot soldiers for Hindutva programmes. In both these political trajectories, the fundamental transformation of Indian values tied to the perception of the Dalit with nausea and repulsion remains unaddressed. 

This scourge requires a robust culture of dissent and a courageous confrontation with caste-Hindu society on the questions of untouchability, ritual defilement, and the social position of Dalits. Any public event that treats a Dalit body as defiled or impure should be met with the harshest legal and social condemnation and should be recognised as a matter of national shame. Without such a reckoning, incidents like what happened to Kharge will happen again—to another Dalit public figure, just as they did to the then tallest Dalit leader Babu Jagjivan Ram four decades ago. 

Indian political culture has a long history of treating Dalits as mere cadres and workers, rather than as leaders to be taken seriously and respected by diverse sections of society. Their participation in politics, even at the local panchayat level, has been met with a series of acts of violence and intimidation by dominant-caste groups.

Some rare Dalit individuals rise to influential positions in non-Dalit-led parties, and even when they do, they are surrounded by various dominant-caste lobbies that seek to subordinate them to the latter. Some concede to the dominant ideology of their parties, while others are constrained from becoming true representatives of the Dalit constituencies they claim to represent. This has a pernicious effect on the larger political culture of India.

Events like the Haldwani purification not only prevent the universalisation of Dalit leaders, but the silence and meek reactions surrounding them further diminish the figure of the Dalit in public life.

(Sumit Samos is a researcher and anti-caste activist and his research interests are Dalit Christians, cosmopolitan elites, student politics, and society and culture in Odisha. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)