When the Hindu reformist group, the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal (Forum for Break-up of Caste) of Lahore, which had invited Ambedkar to deliver its annual lecture in 1936, asked for and received the text of the speech in advance, it found the contents “unbearable”. The Mandal realised that Ambedkar intended to use its platform not merely to criticise the practice of caste, but to denounce Hinduism itself, and withdrew its invitation. In May 1936, Ambedkar printed 1,500 copies of the text of his speech at his own expense. It was soon translated into six languages. While the majority of the privileged castes are blissfully ignorant of its existence, Annihilation of Caste has been printed and reprinted—like most of Ambedkar’s large oeuvre—by small, mostly Dalit-owned presses, and read by mostly Dalit readers over seven decades. It now has the curious distinction of being one of the most obscure as well as one of the most widely read books in India. This in itself illuminates the iron grid of the caste system.

The “infection of imitation”, like the half-life of a radioactive atom, decays exponentially as it moves down the caste ladder, but never quite disappears. It has created what Ambedkar describes as a system of “graded inequality” in which “there is no such class as a completely unprivileged class except the one which is at the base of the social pyramid. The privileges of the rest are graded. Even the low is privileged as compared with lower. Each class being privileged, every class is interested in maintaining the system.”

The connection between racism and casteism was made more than a century before the 2001 Durban conference. Empathy sometimes achieves what scholarship cannot.

The real violence of caste was the denial of entitlement: to land, to wealth, to knowledge, to equal opportunity.

The practice of untouchability, cruel as it was—the broom tied to the waist, the pot hung around the neck—was the performative, ritualistic end of the practice of caste. The real violence of caste was the denial of entitlement: to land, to wealth, to knowledge, to equal opportunity. (The caste system is the feudal version of the doctrine of trusteeship: the entitled must be left in possession of their entitlement, and be trusted to use it for the public good.)

The differences between Ambedkar and the new Communist Party of India were not superficial. They went back to first principles. Communists were people of The Book, and The Book was written by a German Jew who had heard of, but had not actually encountered, Brahminism. This left Indian communists without theoretical tools to deal with caste. Since they were people of The Book, and since the caste system had denied Shudra and Untouchable castes the opportunity of learning, by default the leaders of the Communist Party of India and its subsequent offshoots belonged to (and by and large continue to belong to) the privileged castes, mostly Brahmin. … While Ambedkar believed that class was an important—and even primary—prism through which to view and understand society, he did not believe it was the only one. Ambedkar believed that the two enemies of the Indian working class were capitalism (in the liberal sense of the word) and Brahminism.

In 1938, he founded his own political party, the Independent Labour Party (ILP). As its name suggests, the programme of the ILP was broad-based, overtly socialist and was not limited to issues of caste. … Though it was a young party, the ILP did extremely well in the 1937 elections, winning sixteen of the eighteen seats it contested in the Bombay Presidency and the Central Provinces and Berar.

In 1950, the Indian Constitution made the state the custodian of Adivasi homelands, thereby ratifying British colonial policy. The Adivasi population became squatters on their own land. By denying them their traditional rights to forest produce, it criminalised a whole way of life. It gave them the right to vote, but snatched away their livelihood and dignity.

After four days of the fast, on 24 September 1932, Ambedkar visited Gandhi in Yerawada prison and signed the Poona Pact.

In India, in a far slyer way, an apparently generous form of enfranchisement has ensured the virtual disenfranchisement of the Dalit population.

On 11 July 1996, the Ranveer Sena, a privileged-caste, feudal militia murdered twenty-one landless labourers in Bathani Tola village in the state of Bihar. In 2012, the Patna High Court acquitted all the accused. On 1 December 1997, the Ranveer Sena massacred fifty-eight Dalits in Laxmanpur Bathe village, also in Bihar. In April 2010, the trial court convicted all the twenty-six accused. It sentenced ten of them to life imprisonment and sixteen to death. In October 2013, the Patna High Court suspended the conviction of all twenty-six accused, saying the prosecution had not produced any evidence to guarantee any punishment at all.

The speech prepared by me for the Jat-Pat Todak Mandalb of Lahore has had an astonishingly warm reception from the Hindu public for whom it was primarily intended. The English edition of one thousand five hundred copies was exhausted within two months of its publication. It has been translated into Gujarati and Tamil. It is being translated into Marathi, Hindi, Punjabi and Malayalam. The demand for the English text still continues unabated.

This I have done not because what he has said is so weighty as to deserve a reply, but because to many a Hindu he is an oracle, so great that when he opens his lips it is expected that the argument must close and no dog must bark.

I shall be satisfied if I make the Hindus realise that they are the sick men of India, and that their sickness is causing danger to the health and happiness of other Indians.

The second edition of this essay appeared in 1937, and was exhausted within a very short period. A new edition has been in demand for a long time. It was my intention to recast the essay so as to incorporate into it another essay of mine called “Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development,” which appeared in the issue of the Indian Antiquary journal for May 1917.f But as I could not find time, and as there is very little prospect of my being able to do so, and as the demand for it from the public is very insistent, I am content to let this be a mere reprint of the second edition.

In the end I agreed to preside. The annual conference was to be held at Lahore, the headquarters of the Mandal.

I have reason to believe that my presence at the Sikh Prachar Conference held at Amritsar has had a good deal to do with the decision of the committee.

This is I believe the first time when the appointment of a president is cancelled by the reception committee because it does not approve of the views of the president. But whether that is so or not, this is certainly the first time in my life to have been invited to preside over a conference of caste Hindus. I am sorry that it has ended in a tragedy. But what can anyone expect from a relationship so tragic as the relationship between the reforming sect of caste Hindus and the self-respecting sect of Untouchables, where the former have no desire to alienate their orthodox fellows, and the latter have no alternative but to insist upon reform being carried out?

In 1931, the Mandal campaigned against the declaration of caste in the census. Mark Juergensmeyer (1982/2009, 39) writes that the Mandal relied heavily on the support of privileged-caste Arya Samajis in this regard. This may have caused the Mandal to refuse the address prepared by Ambedkar.

The British government, from 1916 onwards, deployed the bureaucratic term Depressed Classes (used first in the volumes of the Bombay Gazetteer in 1877), which was replaced by Scheduled Castes in 1935 by the Government of India Act—a term that continues to be used in official parlance till date.

The Brahmin of the Punjab is racially of the same stock as the Chamar of the Punjab, and the Brahmin of Madras is of the same race as the Pariah of Madras.

Bhakti is devotional love for a personal god experienced without the mediation of the priest or ritual. The progenitors of the Bhakti movement, the Alvars (sixth to ninth centuries) and Nayanmars (twelfth century) of the Tamil country, were fiercely monotheistic in their expression of love for Vishnu and Siva or their forms, and this happened at the expense and persecution of Jains and Buddhists (see Monius 2011). What was crucial, however, was that anyone from any strata of society—men and women—could aspire to reach god.

The reign of the Peshwas witnessed what feminist scholar Uma Chakravarti (1995, 3–21) terms “the consolidation of Brahmanya-raj”. In 1818, the 30,000-strong army of the last Peshwa, Bajirao II (1795–1818), was defeated by the 500-member regiment of ‘Untouchable’ Mahar soldiers led by Capt F.F. Staunton. This is known as the Battle of Koregaon, along the river Bhima, northwest of Poona.

Dalits in this village, denied access to the local pond, have been waging a struggle since 1980. In 2001, two Dalits were fined Rs 50,000 by the Jat- and Brahmin-dominated village panchayat for using water from the Chakwara pond (Usmani, 2008).

The story of Shambuka is told in the seventh book, Uttarakanda, of the Valmiki Ramayana. Shambuka wants to achieve a higher status than the suras (devtas, gods) through meditation and austerities. On discovering that Shambuka, a Shudra, was indeed meditating, Rama promptly beheads him to restore varnasharma dharma. The story has been used by the Dravidian movement and in anticaste literature to ridicule the idea of Rama as the embodiment of perfection.

Dr Ambedkar found that the vast majority of savarna Hindus had not only conducted themselves inhumanly against those of their fellow religionists whom they classed as Untouchables, but they had based their conduct on the authority of their scriptures, and when he began to search them he had found ample warrant for their beliefs in untouchability and all its implications. The author of the address has quoted chapter and verse in proof of his three-fold indictment—inhuman conduct itself, the unabashed justification for it on the part of the perpetrators, and the subsequent discovery that the justification was warranted by their scriptures.

Arrogation of a superior status by and of a varna over another is a denial of the law. And there is nothing in the law of varna to warrant a belief in untouchability.

As in the heart of their hearts dwijas do not want to give social equality to the so-called Touchable and Untouchable Shudras, so they refuse to break caste—and give liberal donations for the removal of untouchability simply to evade the issue. To seek the help of the shastras for the removal of untouchability and caste is simply to wash mud with mud.

Rajah—author of The Oppressed Hindus (1925), the first ever book in English by an Untouchable in India—was the chief political rival of Ambedkar to the position of the representative of the Depressed Classes on the national scene.

In 1922, Rajah was conferred the British honorary title, Rao Bahadur, after his entrance to the Madras Legislative Council as the first Adi Dravida (as Untouchables were known in Tamil-speaking areas) member. In 1927, he became the first Depressed Classes member to be nominated to the Central Legislative Council.

His doctoral work was on The Evolution of Provincial Finance in British India: A Study in the Provincial Decentralisation of Imperial Finance

The masses do not make any distinction between texts which are genuine and texts which are interpolations. The masses do not know what the texts are. They are too illiterate to know the contents of the shastras. They have believed what they have been told, and what they have been told is that the shastras do enjoin as a religious duty the observance of caste and untouchability.

If everyone must pursue his ancestral calling, then it must follow that a man must continue to be a pimp because his grandfather was a pimp, and a woman must continue to be a prostitute because her grandmother was a prostitute. Is the Mahatma prepared to accept the logical conclusion of his doctrine?

If the Communal Award of 16 August 1932 was a victory of sorts for those who sought to take social difference seriously in India, the Poona Pact of 24 September 1932 was a defeat. … It was to oppose the political rights granted to the Untouchables by the Communal Award that Gandhi took a dramatic and coercive step—a fast unto death on 20 September 1932 that culminated in the Poona Pact only four days later.

On 24 September 1932, Ambedkar gave in and signed the Poona Pact as the principal signatory on behalf of the Depressed Classes, while the right-wing Hindu Mahasabha leader, Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, represented Gandhi and the Hindus. Gandhi did not sign the pact.

Under the Poona Pact, Untouchables had to give up their separate electorate and be part of joint electorates with Hindus. They also had to give up the unique political weapon Ambedkar had won for them—the second vote that would give them a say in the election of caste-Hindu candidates in their constituency. All that remained for Scheduled Castes was a reserved seat whose holder would be selected by the general population. The Scheduled Caste representative would, in effect, be selected by the very caste-Hindu majority that had already proved its hostility to Scheduled Caste political aspirations.

In such a redesigned democracy, the value of a devalued Untouchable had to be deliberately raised through special provisions such as the double vote or the adoption of the principle of reservation, or both.

Till date, the BSP remains the only mainstream political party that speaks unambiguously against the Poona Pact and Gandhi.

The Congress-dominated Parliament then decided to do away with DMCs through the Two-Member Constituencies (Abolition) Act, 1961, putting an end to ninety-one such Lok Sabha constituencies, which were subsequently delimited and converted to single-member constituencies.

On counting of votes, the leading Scheduled Caste or Tribe candidate got the reserved seat. Thereafter, all the other candidates, including the scheduled groups, were considered to be in competition for the general seat, which was awarded to the candidate who polled the largest number of votes. Thus, if the scheduled groups polled the largest number of votes in the second category the system will produce two of their representatives, instead of one as in the system of reserved constituency

The Poona Pact gave the Untouchables 148 seats, while the Communal Award had given them seventy-eight.

During the 2007 assembly elections in the state, the BSP fielded only four of its ninety-three Dalit candidates in general constituencies. The non-Dalit vote in a general constituency does not easily transfer to a Dalit, it seems, as all four lost; meanwhile, sixty-two of the eighty-nine candidates fielded in reserved constituencies won.