We Must Not Choose Between "Caste" And "Civic sense”

Why are Indian streets so often strewn with litter? Why do so many of us treat public spaces with such complete disregard? I have wrestled with these questions for many years—both as an ordinary citizen and as a Dalit who has studied Indian society academically and also lived within its social hierarchies as a fact of everyday life.

Suraj Yengde’s recent piece offers a straightforward answer to this larger question of cleanliness and civic sense—caste. His well-placed assertion is that caste has trained much of Indian society to outsource responsibility to others. Imagine cleaning as the "job" of a designated group of Dalits, and it becomes easier to treat mess as morally weightless and inconsequential. In this arrangement, filth becomes public, but shame becomes privatised—or made invisible altogether—and accountability is shifted to others. I agree with this completely. It explains why most Indians are meticulously clean inside their homes, but readily throw garbage where it doesn't belong, showing little concern for what happens outside their gates.

But my own life experiences push me toward a more complicated picture. Caste is indeed a necessary explanation for India’s sanitation order (or rather, disorder) and civic sense. Who cleans your streets first thing in the morning, whose labour is stigmatized, and who is considered “designated” to clean “our mess”? Caste explains this division of labour and the moral permission it creates. But it does not fully explain why public neglect persists and keeps reproducing itself, even in situations where caste hierarchy is not the immediate or visible operating mechanism. To understand the everyday stability of littering and disregard for public goods, we also need to see sanitation as part of a wider social logic of chalta hai—a low-trust environment in which individuals routinely assume that public rules will not be followed or fairly enforced and therefore feel it is “rational” to break them first. The result is not just a caste problem but a public-goods trap, one whose moral authority draws on caste but whose daily reproduction is driven by collective-action failure.

Let me give a concrete example. A few years ago, I attended an Ambedkar Jayanti rally in Delhi. For most Dalits, this day carries the same importance as, if not greater than, a national holiday. It is a day to celebrate hard-earned dignity, equal rights, and an unfinished struggle. The atmosphere was highly charged, with blue flags everywhere, slogans of “educate, agitate, organise,” speeches, songs, and dancing, in an intense sense of community. But as the crowd dispersed toward the end of the day, the pride turned into embarrassment. The road along which the procession had moved was blanketed with trash of pamphlets, plastic water bottles, paper plates, cigarette butts, and everything a large crowd could throw on the street. After the programme concluded, volunteers started cleaning up. However, the irony was sharp enough to hurt. We had spent the day invoking a politics of dignity and ended it by turning a shared public space into a dumping ground.

My first instinct was to reach for excuses. The crowd was huge. There were no dustbins. The municipality should have planned better. Where were people expected to dispose of the litter—in their pockets? But these explanations didn’t touch the deeper truth, which is that we had behaved like nearly every other large gathering in India. It was no different from a student political rally I attended at Delhi University, where roads were plastered with posters, or a public roadshow by any politician, big or small. We left the mess for “someone else” to handle. And that “someone else” was a sanitation worker from a Dalit community itself, which made the moment even more bitter. This episode doesn't disprove Yengde’s point. It revealed something deeper and adjacent to it, and pushed me to extend this narrative further. Even those who don't believe in any caste hierarchy or champion the cause of Dalits can still fall into the habit of treating public space as morally disposable. Oppression does not automatically produce better public conduct. It produces people living within the same social environment, responding to the same incentives, and absorbing the same norms.

I saw the same logic at work in the South Haryana village where I grew up. Everyday life was full of small acts of rule-breaking, routinely justified as necessary or common sense. Until recently, illegal hookups to electric poles (in simple terms, electricity theft) were common to avoid bills, cutting across caste groups. Giving a small bribe, known as ghoos or bakshish, to a traffic constable to avoid receiving a challan was/is a common practice. Calling a “politically connected” person in the tehsil or any government office, for that matter, to get some paperwork done. Finding jugaad for everything, from land registry to marriage certificates to even securing a hospital bed in a big Delhi hospital. Then there were election-time “gifts,” usually liquor or cash, to secure votes. I don’t want to take this piece in the direction of petty corruption—that’s a topic for another day—but these are everyday ‘Indian things’ cutting across caste backgrounds. It is true that those in power are often upper caste, but given the chance, no Dalit is magically immune to this great Indian phenomenon.

These examples, among thousands of others, point to something very uncomfortable, that is, public order in India is treated as negotiable across the board, and oftentimes rules are mere suggestions. People curse corruption and rule-breaking, and then participate in it when they benefit from it and the consequences are low. Over time, this arrangement becomes a learned equilibrium. You become part of a large machine whose wheels need constant greasing to keep it moving. Consider a telling parable from North India about a farmer (Annadata Kisaan). He might quietly pull a sugarcane from his neighbour’s field, yet loudly accuse others of stealing from his crop, forgetting that their fields lie just as close to his. So this logic is consistent across society. You don’t follow rules because you believe others won’t.  You don’t keep public spaces clean because you assume they will be dirty anyway. You don’t act like a custodian because you don’t trust anyone else to be one.

This is why “civic sense” as a moral slogan so often fails. It criticises individuals without addressing the underlying structural issues. Yengde is right to point out that caste has historically made it easier for most Indians to outsource filth onto Dalit bodies and labour. But once the habit of outsourcing becomes normal, it spreads beyond any single caste psychology. It becomes a general orientation toward the public—public resources, public spaces, public rules—someone else’s job, someone else’s headache at someone else’s cost. That same outlook shows up not only in littering but also in the everyday mechanics of public life, for instance, traffic violations, queue-jumping, casual bribery, and indifference to others’ inconvenience. These are not separate pathologies; they are variations of a single moral move—externalising responsibility and then calling the consequences “ohh, everyone is corrupt.”

You can see this logic in a simple everyday moment. On the road, someone tosses an empty plastic water bottle. They know, in principle, that it’s wrong. But the street is already dirty. There’s no dustbin nearby. Everyone else is doing it, and there’s unlikely to be any penalty. The inner calculation becomes very simple—my one bottle won't add much, and carrying it with me is troublesome, so let's throw it away. Multiply that simple reasoning by millions of daily micro-choices, and you get a stable, predictable outcome—filthy streets from north to south, from sea beaches to the Himalayas, where chips packets and plastic bottles are everywhere, and a society frustrated with itself, where everyone complains, and almost everyone participates. There are, of course, exceptions, and they are growing with increasing awareness. But this remains the tragedy of the commons in everyday form. The mess is not just about the moral failure; it is more of a social habit, a social equilibrium.

Caste and this equilibrium reinforce each other. Caste supplies the historical moral economy. It degrades cleaning, assigns it to the bottom rung of society, to specific castes, and produces the contempt and invisibility that Dalit sanitation workers still face. The public-goods trap provides the mechanism for persistence, in which weak enforcement, uneven services, and low trust create conditions where even people who otherwise would behave better will do the same as if nothing they do matters. In short, caste explains the moral history of filth in India; collective-action failure explains its daily reproduction.

So where does that leave us? We must not choose between "caste" and "civic sense," but rather insist that sanitation reform must address both structure and behavior.

First, the caste order of sanitation must be dismantled materially. This is a structural issue, and we can’t do much at the individual level. Dignified wages, protections, and visibility for sanitation work, serious enforcement of prohibitions on manual scavenging, and an end to treating sanitation as a hereditary stigma or caste occupation rather than public infrastructure are the domain of the state, which, despite its good intentions, has not succeeded in the fullest sense. Second, the public goods equilibrium must be altered. We need better infrastructure—dustbins, public toilets—but also ask hard questions. How do we stop people from stealing public dustbins, just to take a random example? For that, we need consistent penalties and norms that make leaving a mess socially costly and cleaning up culturally ordinary. Without the first, “civic responsibility” becomes upper-caste moralising built on Dalit labour. Without the second, even sincere anti-caste politics will keep reproducing the same patterns because the surrounding environment still rewards short-term selfishness.

For a few years now, I have been living in the United States and have been part of the South Asian diasporic communities here. What strikes me repeatedly is how differently most Indians behave once they are outside India. Generally, they adhere to rules, show respect for queues, obey traffic signals, and conform to culturally accepted norms. There are, of course, a few outliers who attract public attention for doing “typical Indian things,” and they rightly invite scrutiny. However, these individuals are the exceptions, not the norm. Most Indians abroad behave rationally and responsibly. But the moment the plane from San Francisco or Dubai lands at the Indira Gandhi International Airport, something changes instantly. The same people who were patient, orderly, and rule-abiding just hours ago slip back into the same patterns; for instance, the aircraft has barely come to a halt, and people are already standing up, opening overhead luggage bins, and jostling to retrieve their bags. What changed mid-flight? Is it character or values? No, it’s the environment. The sense of impunity returns. One re-enters an equilibrium shaped by a “chalta hai” attitude.

Admitting all this is uncomfortable. It is easier to place blame elsewhere and claim innocence for one’s own community. But honesty demands something more than that. We cannot solve this issue by romanticising Dalits or demonising the upper-caste folks, because neither of these is necessarily a holy cow or inherent devil. To suggest otherwise strips them of individual human agency. If Dalits are as human as anyone else, they are also as capable of throwing garbage on the street or engaging in public misconduct as any other Indian. I have seen enough corrupt Dalit officials. It's not about being a Dalit or not; it's about the system, the equilibrium. We can critique public disorder without reproducing caste contempt. The point is not that everyone is equally guilty. It is that everyone is implicated in maintaining a broken public culture, even though the burdens of that brokenness are still distributed unequally along caste and class lines.  So yes, Yengde is right that India cannot fix sanitation without confronting caste psychology. I would like to add that India also cannot fix sanitation without confronting the everyday logic that makes public neglect feel rational.

Views expressed are personal