When Chief Justice of India BR Gavai made a dismissive remark about petitioners seeking judicial intervention on a Vishnu idol dispute in September 2025—telling them to ask the deity themselves—he committed an offence that, in the calculus of Hindu nationalism, was unforgivable.
Not because the remark was constitutionally problematic, but because it came from a Dalit judge who refused to genuflect before Brahminical religious supremacy. What followed was no ordinary turbulence of public criticism. It was the exposure of a transnational infrastructure of caste violence, a coordinated campaign of dehumanisation that would eventually manifest in Times Square, revealing the deep architecture of diaspora-led Hindu nationalist mobilisation against Dalit power in India.
The trajectory from the remark to Times Square billboard is instructive. It shows that in contemporary India and among diaspora elites, the presence of a Dalit in institutional power—particularly one exercising that power with constitutional independence—functions as a provocation to those committed to maintaining Brahminical supremacy.