Replug|Ambedkar Jayanti: Why Caste Violence And Exclusion Persist In India

“Educate, Agitate, Organise.”

— B.R. Ambedkar

It is often when people attempt to do exactly that, educate themselves, agitate against oppression and organise for dignity, that they face the harshest resistance.

Just days before Ambedkar Jayanti, yet another Dalit student, pursuing his studies at adental college in Kerala’s Kannur died by suicide allegedly because of the humiliation and disgrace he had to face from his teachers. Nithin Raj R.L., who was just 22 years old and a first year BDS student, was allegedly discriminated against based on caste and skin color by some professors in the college. The faculty members have been identified and are currently suspended by the college administration.

The deaths of Dalits are neither rare nor new. Structural discrimination, social exclusion and violence continue to obstruct access to education, opportunity and equality.

In January 2026, a 23-year-old Dalit house surgeon at a Government Medical College in Telangana died by suicide after someone refused to marry her based on her caste. In 2019, a 21-year-old Dalit man in Uttarakhand was reportedly killed for eating in front of upper-caste men at a wedding.

Across India, atrocities against Dalits remain widespread, while attempts at upward social mobility are often met with hostility.

At Outlook, we have consistently examined the many dimensions of caste oppression, from violence and justice to memory, politics and representation.

In the 21 September 2024 issue, Caste vs Caste, Anand Teltumbde argued that while the caste census has sparked heated debate, even its strongest supporters have struggled to explain how the resulting data would be meaningfully used.

In the same edition, Editor Chinki Sinha and Abhik Bhattacharya spoke to LJP leader Chirag Paswan, who said that even when Dalits attain economic progress and social standing, discrimination persists across all levels of society.

Santosh Kiro wrote that mainstream society views reservations as being against the right to equality. He argued that it is time they were understood instead as a matter of the right to justice.

In the 21 August 2023 issue, titled Gandhiji, I Have No Homeland, Outlook asked a difficult question: more than 75 years after Independence, has freedom truly reached the Dalit community?

The issue also revisited Baluta, the first Dalit autobiography to be published, which created a stir when it appeared in Marathi in 1978. Set in Mumbai and rural Maharashtra of the 1940s and 1950s, writer and poet Daya Pawar laid bare the realities of caste violence and untouchability, while also celebrating the resilience, dignity and courage of Dalit communities fighting for equality.

Y.S. Alone asked whether India needs a Museum of Untouchability. Every museum begins with history, he wrote, and so must one dedicated to untouchability. Though it is a disease of the mind, its material expressions are everywhere. Such a museum, he suggested, could preserve the stories, objects and evidence of caste atrocities. 

In the 4 October 2021 issue, Jeevan Prakash Sharma revisited the Hathras case one year later, showing how it had once again exposed the brutal realities of India’s caste hierarchy, where marginalised communities continue to face physical and psychological violence at the hands of dominant castes.

In the same issue, Khalid Anis Ansari argued that the caste census must move beyond electoral calculations and become a wider democratic conversation about the kind of nation India wishes to build for future generations.

Preetha Nair explains why a caste census could radically reshape India’s political landscape. Accurate data, she argues, would reopen debate over the quota ceiling, reservation distribution and broader questions of social justice.

In the 19 October 2020 issue, She the Dalit, Swati Kamble explored anti-caste intersectional feminism. She wrote of the long and bloody history of caste-based sexual violence faced by Dalit women, and how that violence continues through both social structures and state complicity. ()

Ambedkar’s call to educate, agitate and organise has become all the more relevant because the struggle it addressed is far from over. Each new tragedy is not an isolated incident, but a reminder of how much remains unchanged.