TheEconomistJuly 25th 2020 171A
nkit paland Tushar Singh have a few
things in common. They are 19 and 18
years old respectively and live within a
couple of hours’ drive of Delhi, albeit in op-
posite directions. They both happen to be
Dalits, from the bottom ranks of India’s vo-
luminous caste register. And they have also
both been in the news lately, though for
very different reasons.
In mid-July the smiling, bespectacled
Mr Singh won brief fame by scoring a flaw-
less 100 out of 100 in each of five subjects in
school-leaving exams—the best marks in
the country. He wants to study history, he
told interviewers, and enter the Indian Ad-
ministrative Service, the top echelon of the
bureaucracy. Mr Pal, in contrast, appeared
wearing a pink shirt and grey trousers in a
viral video last year in which two young
men from the landowning Jat caste force
him to pull down his trousers and then beat
him with a heavy stick. His tormentors
were angry because Mr Pal, having found a
job in a factory making smartphone
screens, refused to work their land or look
after their cows, as Dalits in the Jat-domin-
ated village have done for generations.
Seventy years ago, India’s constitution,
largely written by B.R. Ambedkar, a Dalit
intellectual, declared all citizens equal be-
fore the law. It abolished untouchability,
making the Hindu practice a punishable
offence, and enjoined the state to improve
the lot of the “weaker sections” of society.
Dalits’ circumstances have indeed im-proved. The rigid, ritual shunning of them
has largely faded. Three generations of
quotas in legislative bodies, in state
schools and in government service have
created a lower-caste bourgeoisie, such
that mid-ranked castes began lobbying for,
and eventually won their own “reserva-
tions”. Caste-based parties have sprung up
to agitate for more government help, and
won power in many states.
Given all this, the stellar success of Mr
Singh ought to be unremarkable, just as the
casual violence and ritual humiliation in-
flicted on Mr Pal ought to be unthinkable.
Yet Mr Singh’s caste, revealed by the proud
portrait of Ambedkar in the young schol-
ar’s living room, was widely remarked
upon. Mr Singh is also unusual in that he
attended a top private school. His parents
are college teachers.
Mr Pal’s luck is of a different kind. It is
lucky that he, like many Dalits who have
found ways to escape the only jobs previ-
ously open to them, such as share-crop-
ping, waste removal and tanning, no lon-
ger needs higher-caste patrons. He is also
lucky to be alive. Few Hindus any longer
observe strict ritual purity or consider Da-
lits literally “untouchable”. Even so, with
dismal regularity news stories tell of high-
er-caste people maiming, raping or mur-
dering Dalits for such slights as daring toCaste in India
No escape
DELHI
After decades of positive discrimination and despite huge demographic
shifts, caste bias remains rife
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