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.