It is about capitalism and hierarchy The government has now reached a final conclusion on the raging controversy over the Caste-based census in the country. In order to reconcile with the contending positions, the government has decided to conduct a separate stand-alone exercise of a parallel house-to-house enumeration of the Caste affiliations of households. It is not yet clear as to whether the results and the data of the census proper...

India has long been simultaneously a country of enormous wealth and desperate poverty. In recent decades, the distance has only grown between those who enjoy living standards comparable to the finest in the world, and the millions left far behind. Even as Indians crowd the lists of the world’s richest dollar billionaires, an estimated 200 million people sleep hungry. Half our children are malnourished and nearly a fifth severely so....

A charred piece of earth and some bits of bones are the only signs of a dastardly killing in the name of honour. No other evidence remains of the spine-chilling crime to mar the rustic charm of Maalaipatti village, perched among the green mountains of the Western Ghats in Dindigul district. On July 28, 2008, a few days after being chained in a bathroom and treated like a rabid dog...

Untouchability was not so much a sin as a calculated crime. But it is easier for everyone, even some victims, to treat it as a sin, for acceptance of moral culpability costs nothing. The recent walkabout (padayatre) of Basavananda Maadara Channaiah Swamiji, head of a Dalit matha (gurupeetha) in Chitradurga, in a predominantly Brahmin-inhabited agrahara in Mysore, and the cordial, indeed reverential, welcome he received highlight the changing formal perceptions about...

Acting swiftly against a glaring instance of untouchability in western Tamil Nadu, revenue and police officials on Wednesday directed Caste Hindus of N Kumarapalayam village, near Dharapuram in Tirupur district, to remove two fences they had erected to prevent dalits from using public roads. About 150 families of Caste Hindus erected barbed wire "untouchability fences" on Friday to prevent over 50 dalit families living in the Aandikattu Thottam village from...