OPINION | The purification of a stage and the pollution of a Republic

The “purification” of the stage at Haldwani’s Ramlila Maidan after Congress president and Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge addressed a public meeting is deeply disturbing, not merely for the insult it represents, but for what it reveals about the persistence of caste in the very idea of citizenship. Kharge raised the matter in Parliament on August 13, alleging that a ritual of “shuddhikaran” (purification) was performed at the venue following his August 8 meeting. As expected, Union Minister J.P. Nadda expressed regret and assured the House that the matter would be investigated. But the larger question cannot await an inquiry: what does it say about the Republic when a public space is deemed to require purification after a Dalit citizen has occupied it?

The answer should trouble every Indian who takes the Constitution seriously. For this is not merely an insult to a most revered person, but it is an affront to the constitutional idea that every citizen possesses equal dignity. A republic cannot be free, just or genuinely democratic while birth continues to determine whose presence is considered pure, whose touch is considered contaminating, whose food may be shared, whose house may be entered, or whose dignity may be casually diminished.

The Constitution could scarcely have been clearer.

Article 17 declares: “‘Untouchability’ is abolished and its practice in any form is forbidden.” It further makes the enforcement of any disability arising from untouchability an offence punishable by law. Articles 14 and 15 guarantee equality before law and prohibit discrimination on grounds including caste. The Preamble promises equality of status and opportunity and, more profoundly, “fraternity assuring the dignity of the individual”.

The choice of the word “abolished” was not accidental. The Constitution did not just ask Indians to become kinder to those whom caste had historically degraded. It sought to terminate a social institution. Parliament followed Article 17 with the Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955, which criminalises the preaching and practice of untouchability and disabilities arising from it. The law expressly covers social disabilities, denial of services, boycotts and even incitement or justification of untouchability.

Yet laws can abolish a practice faster than society can eradicate the prejudice that sustains it.

That is the uncomfortable truth behind the Haldwani episode.

India did not abolish caste in 1950; it abolished untouchability as a constitutional practice and established a legal and moral framework for dismantling caste hierarchy. The caste mind, however, proved far more durable than the caste law. It survived in matrimonial preferences, residential segregation, occupational stigma, social exclusion, political activism and the everyday policing of who may enter, eat, marry, worship and belong.

The evidence is not anecdotal. It is scattered across different aspects of social life, but the pattern is unmistakable. In 2024, 55,698 crimes against Scheduled Castes were registered, a reminder of the violence that caste hierarchy can still produce. A recent caste survey in Telangana found that 5.7% of households — about 6.4 lakh — reported restrictions or intimidation in accessing places of worship, while only 5.6% reported an inter-caste marriage, leaving nearly 95% within caste boundaries. Pew Research Centre’s nationwide survey similarly found that only 69% of rural and 78% of urban Indians were willing to accept a Scheduled Caste person as a neighbour. And the persistence of caste-linked occupations is most brutally visible in sanitation: at least 859 sanitation workers died cleaning sewers and septic tanks between 2014 and 2025, despite the legal prohibition on hazardous manual cleaning. Together, they expose the social architecture that makes untouchability possible: distance, segregation, endogamy, occupational inheritance and the continuing idea that caste can determine where a person belongs and how he or she should be treated. Article 17 abolished untouchability in law; these realities show how much of the caste mind remains untouched.

This is why the language of “purification” matters. It symbolically resurrects precisely the logic that the Constitution repudiated: that human beings can carry pollution by birth and that physical proximity can contaminate a supposedly superior social order. If a stage requires purification because a Dalit leader stood upon it, the ritual is not religious symbolism but it becomes a public statement about hierarchy. The line between religion, history, and the perpetuation of caste exclusion is precisely where constitutional morality must operate.

Ambedkar understood this problem with clarity. Introducing the Draft Constitution in 1948, he warned that constitutional morality was not a natural sentiment but something that had to be cultivated. He quoted the historian George Grote’s formulation of constitutional morality and added a sentence that remains unsettlingly relevant: “Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic.”

Ambedkar’s point was not that Indians were incapable of democracy, but that democratic institutions cannot survive indefinitely upon a social order that denies equality. A Constitution can proclaim liberty; it cannot by proclamation make people respect one another. It can criminalise untouchability; it cannot, by itself, cleanse the imagination of the inherited belief that some human beings stand above others.

That is why Ambedkar insisted, in his final Constituent Assembly speech on November 25, 1949, that India must not be satisfied with political democracy. “Political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of it social democracy,” he said, defining social democracy as a way of life recognising liberty, equality and fraternity as principles. He called these principles a trinity: separating one from another would defeat the purpose of democracy.

The most neglected of those three principles may be fraternity.

Equality can be legislated. Liberty can be constitutionally guaranteed.

But Fraternity requires citizens to recognise one another as equals in worth.

It asks something beyond non-discrimination: to abandon the instinct to rank human beings.

That is exactly where the symbolism of a “purified” public stage becomes so revealing. The stage was presumably not rendered impure by the speech delivered upon it, nor by the political ideology expressed from it, nor by the shoes of thousands who walked across it. Its supposed impurity arose from the identity of the person who occupied it. That is the logic of caste distilled into a ritual. Ambedkar’s critique of caste was precisely this. Caste, he argued in Annihilation of Caste, was not merely a division of labour but “a division of labourers”, arranged in a hierarchy. The genius of caste, and its enduring danger, lies in making inequality appear natural: the person is not merely treated differently; the difference is attached to birth and then presented as social fact, cultural tradition or sacred order.

India’s democratic achievement lies in having rejected that premise in constitutional law. Its unfinished task is to reject it in all aspects of social life.

The appropriate response to Haldwani, therefore, is larger than condemnation.

The episode cannot be reduced to a few individuals or dismissed as an aberration. It belongs to a wider political culture in which the BJP and its ideological ecosystem have too often been willing to invoke caste when electorally useful while treating the Constitution’s egalitarian promise as secondary to inherited social hierarchies. From the glorification of Manusmriti and its hierarchical social order to the celebration of figures and traditions associated with caste exclusion, the contradiction is difficult to ignore: a politics that claims civilisational pride cannot selectively inherit the civilisation’s inequalities.

The BJP’s leadership therefore owes more than an expression of regret; it owes an unequivocal repudiation of the idea that any Indian can be rendered “impure” by birth. Further, the deeper responsibility remains societal: no political party could sustain such a mindset unless society continued to accommodate it. We cannot celebrate Ambedkar in statues and speeches while ignoring the social philosophy he spent his life fighting. We cannot invoke the Constitution when convenient and retreat into inherited hierarchies when no court is watching.

The Republic does not require a stage to be purified after a citizen has stood upon it; it requires a social conscience purified of the caste prejudice that makes such an act conceivable.

India became a republic in 1950 by declaring that status would no longer be inherited from birth. The unfinished work of the republic is to make that declaration true in everyday life. Until a Dalit’s presence in a public space is as unremarkable as anyone else’s, Article 17 remains not merely a constitutional provision but a national promise still awaiting fulfilment.

A republic cannot be free while birth determines dignity, just while ancestry determines status, or a fraternity of equals while anyone is still deemed capable of polluting the spaces they enter.

The Constitution did not ask India to purify its stages. It asked India to transform itself.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK.

Amal Chandra is an author, political analyst, and columnist, currently serving as The Statement Fellow, and Coordinator at Students For Liberty, South Asia.