Ambedkar's unfinished war against a a republic that learned to count castes but forgot to count human beings
By Ramphal Kataria
India abolished untouchability in its Constitution. It did not abolish the social mind that produced untouchability.
Abstract
Why has caste survived nearly eight decades of constitutional democracy?
This is not merely an academic question. It is an indictment.
Independent India inherited caste and promised to destroy its most brutal manifestations. The Constitution guaranteed equality. Untouchability was abolished. Reservations opened the doors of legislatures, universities and public employment. Democracy gave every adult an equal vote. Industrialisation, urbanisation and economic liberalisation shattered many of the traditional occupational boundaries of caste.
And yet caste refuses to die.
Worse, it has discovered democracy.
The caste system that once operated through religious sanction and social coercion now operates through electoral arithmetic, political mobilisation, marriage networks, economic inheritance, institutional representation and the politics of entitlement. Caste has travelled from the village well to the university campus, from the temple courtyard to Parliament, from hereditary occupation to professional networking, and from social hierarchy to the mathematics of elections.
This is the central paradox of contemporary India: the Republic has weakened caste as a system of formal discrimination while simultaneously making caste an indispensable instrument of democratic politics.
Dr. B. R. Ambedkar anticipated this contradiction with extraordinary clarity. In Annihilation of Caste, he did not merely condemn untouchability. He attacked caste as a system of graded inequality that divided human beings into hereditary compartments and destroyed social solidarity. He rejected the comforting fiction that caste was simply a division of labour, arguing instead that it was a division of labourers.
His argument was also profoundly economic. Caste denied individuals freedom to choose occupations, restricted access to education and productive resources, prevented labour mobility and protected inherited monopolies.
Marx, meanwhile, explained society primarily through class, ownership and relations of production. But Indian society exposed a difficulty that orthodox Marxism never satisfactorily resolved: the Indian worker was not merely a worker; he was also a member of a caste. A poor man could exploit someone socially beneath him. A worker could refuse solidarity with another worker because of caste. The oppressed could be divided against themselves.
Ambedkar therefore challenged both the social order and the inadequacy of class reductionism.
The tragedy of contemporary India is that we have selectively accepted both thinkers. We have adopted Marx's vocabulary of economic justice without adequately dismantling class inequality, and Ambedkar's vocabulary of representation without completing his project of social annihilation.
We have learned to manage caste.
We have not learned to destroy it.
I. The question India does not want to answer
There is a question that polite India prefers to avoid:
If caste is evil, why does everyone keep using it?
The political party that denounces caste discrimination calculates caste equations before selecting candidates.
The social reformer who speaks of equality may still insist that his son or daughter marry within the caste.
The urban professional who considers himself modern may quietly use caste networks for marriage, employment and social connections.
The State that promises a casteless society continues to classify citizens by caste because its welfare and representation mechanisms require such classification.
And the citizen who claims that caste is disappearing may suddenly rediscover it when an election arrives, a matrimonial alliance is proposed, a government job is advertised, or a political ticket is distributed.
This is not hypocrisy at the margins.
It is the central contradiction.
Caste has ceased to be respectable as an ideology but remains enormously useful as an institution.
That is why it survives.
Ambedkar understood that caste was not merely a collection of prejudices. It was a system that reproduced itself. Its genius, if one may use such a terrible word, was that it did not require every generation to consciously recreate the system. Family, marriage, occupation, property, social custom and religious belief did the work automatically.
Caste was inherited.
And then inheritance was mistaken for destiny.
II. Ambedkar saw the monster; India has learned to negotiate with it
Ambedkar's description of caste was uncompromising.
He saw Hindu society as a hierarchy in which every group stood above somebody and below somebody else—a graded inequality that produced an “ascending scale of reverence and a descending scale of contempt.”
That formulation destroys the comforting binary of oppressor and oppressed.
Caste does not merely divide society into two camps.
It creates hundreds of camps.
And that is precisely why it is so difficult to overthrow.
The person crushed by one hierarchy can derive status from another.
The lower middle caste may resent the dominant caste but simultaneously look down upon a caste below it.
The system therefore manufactures small privileges and distributes them downward.
It gives the oppressed a reason to defend the hierarchy that oppresses them.
This was Ambedkar's great sociological insight.
Caste survives not only because the powerful defend it, but because the hierarchy gives fragments of superiority to almost everyone.
That is why caste is far more resilient than a simple class system.
A capitalist can be overthrown.
A government can be defeated.
A law can be repealed.
But what happens when hierarchy is embedded inside family honour, marriage, community identity, social status and everyday psychology?
That is the monster Ambedkar confronted.
And that is the monster India has not killed.
III. We abolished untouchability and congratulated ourselves
Article 17 abolished untouchability.
Good.
But why should a civilisation congratulate itself merely for outlawing something that should never have existed?
The Constitution was revolutionary because it declared that the State would no longer recognise hereditary inequality.
But constitutional prohibition is not social transformation.
The law can tell a man that another human being is his equal.
It cannot compel him to believe it.
That is the unfinished business.
Ambedkar understood that untouchability was only the most visible and brutal end of a larger structure.
If caste were merely untouchability, India could have declared victory in 1950.
But caste is much larger.
It determines marriage.
It influences residential patterns.
It affects access to social networks.
It shapes political mobilisation.
It interacts with property ownership.
It influences economic opportunity.
It survives in surnames, associations and matrimonial advertisements.
The caste system has not disappeared.
It has modernised.
IV. Caste has gone to college
The defenders of modern India often make one argument:
“Caste is disappearing because young Indians are educated.”
Really?
Then why does caste frequently become more—not less—visible when young Indians begin thinking about marriage?
The IIT graduate can work with anyone.
The doctor can treat anyone.
The bureaucrat can administer the State for everyone.
The corporate executive can manage employees from every caste.
But when it comes to marriage?
Suddenly ancestry matters.
Suddenly community matters.
Suddenly family honour matters.
Suddenly “compatibility” acquires a remarkably precise caste meaning.
This is not a trivial contradiction.
Endogamy is the reproductive engine of caste.
Ambedkar's early analysis of caste placed endogamy at the heart of caste reproduction. The supplied material similarly identifies strict endogamy as a mechanism for maintaining caste boundaries.
A society can abolish caste occupations and still preserve caste through marriage.
A society can urbanise and still preserve caste through matrimonial networks.
A society can become globally connected and still reproduce caste at the dinner table.
The laptop may be modern.
The marriage arrangement may be medieval.
That is India.
V. The great lie of “Division of Labour”
Ambedkar's economic critique deserves to be rescued from the footnotes.
The traditional defence of caste says:
“Every society requires a division of labour.”
Of course.
But Ambedkar's devastating response was that caste was not merely a division of labour.
It was a division of labourers.
There is an enormous difference.
A modern economy asks:
What are you capable of doing?
Caste asks:
What were your ancestors doing?
The first rewards aptitude.
The second rewards birth.
The first permits mobility.
The second demands inheritance.
The first allows a person to change his profession.
The second tells him that his occupation is already written into his social identity.
What sort of economic system deliberately prevents a talented person from doing the work for which he is best suited?
An irrational one.
An inefficient one.
An economy that wastes human potential.
Ambedkar saw this clearly.
Caste did not merely humiliate people.
It impoverished the nation.
VI. The poor were not allowed to become equal
The economic question becomes even more uncomfortable when property enters the discussion.
Who owned land?
Who had access to education?
Who possessed commercial capital?
Who controlled knowledge?
Who had the right to accumulate wealth?
Who had the social networks necessary to obtain credit and employment?
Historical caste hierarchy did not merely distribute dignity unequally.
It distributed opportunity unequally.
And opportunity compounds.
A family with property can educate its children.
Education produces better employment.
Better employment produces savings.
Savings produce investment.
Investment produces businesses.
Businesses produce networks.
Networks create opportunities for the next generation.
The opposite is equally true.
A family denied property for generations cannot magically acquire the same capital base because the Constitution declares equality.
This is why the phrase “equal opportunity” is so often intellectually dishonest.
Equal opportunity cannot exist where inherited starting points remain radically unequal.
The Indian State has reduced some of these disparities through reservations and welfare programmes. But representation and redistribution are not the same thing.
A government job can change a family's trajectory.
It cannot, by itself, redistribute the productive assets of an entire society.
VII. The reservation paradox
Here lies one of independent India's greatest contradictions.
Reservation was necessary because caste existed.
But reservation requires the State to recognise caste.
Thus, the State seeks to destroy caste hierarchy through policies that necessarily classify citizens by caste.
This is not an argument against reservation.
It is an argument for understanding its purpose.
Reservation is a corrective instrument.
It is not the final philosophy of social equality.
Its objective cannot sensibly be to make caste permanently indispensable to Indian citizenship.
Yet this is where politics becomes uncomfortable.
Once caste becomes an electoral asset, there is little political incentive to make it disappear.
Why would a political entrepreneur voluntarily destroy the identity through which he mobilises his constituency?
Why would a party abandon caste arithmetic when caste arithmetic wins elections?
Why would a government make itself politically irrelevant to communities whose grievances can be converted into votes?
The political system therefore develops a strange incentive structure.
Caste is officially condemned, constitutionally restricted, socially criticised—and electorally cultivated.
That is the paradox.
VIII. Caste has become a democratic currency
This is where the debate must become uncomfortable for everybody.
Caste politics was not invented by cynical politicians alone.
For oppressed communities, caste mobilisation was historically a mechanism of survival.
If the powerful organised as caste groups, the powerless had little choice but to organise themselves.
Political representation became a route to dignity.
Caste associations became vehicles for education, employment, reservations and social recognition.
Democracy therefore did something extraordinary:
it turned caste from a purely hierarchical institution into a bargaining institution.
That was progress.
But democracy also created a new danger.
Caste could now be monetised politically.
Count the community.
Identify its numerical strength.
Distribute tickets.
Promise representation.
Announce a scheme.
Create a slogan.
Repeat.
Election won.
Then the next election begins.
The community remains poor.
The caste remains mobilised.
The politician remains relevant.
What changed?
Often, only the political brokerage.
IX. The Dalit question cannot be reduced to representation
There is no denying the historical importance of Dalit political representation.
The presence of Dalits in legislatures, bureaucracy, education and public institutions is a monumental departure from the India Ambedkar inherited.
But representation must ultimately answer to material outcomes.
How much land?
How much capital?
How much education?
How much entrepreneurship?
How much social mobility?
How much household wealth?
How much security?
How much dignity?
These questions are more difficult than counting legislators.
And they expose the limitations of symbolic politics.
A Dalit minister is important.
A Dalit entrepreneur is important.
A Dalit professor is important.
But the ultimate measure of emancipation is not whether a few individuals reach the top.
It is whether the bottom moves upward.
Political representation without broad-based economic transformation risks producing a new elite without transforming the structural position of the majority.
That is not failure of Dalit aspiration.
It is failure of the State to convert political equality into substantive equality.
X. The state is not innocent
Let us confront the State directly.
The Indian State is not indifferent to caste.
It has enacted constitutional safeguards, reservations, protective legislation and targeted welfare programmes.
But the State is conflicted.
It wants the benefits of caste-based mobilisation without accepting the consequences of caste-based fragmentation.
It wants social justice without permanently confronting entrenched economic interests.
It wants caste data when useful and caste blindness when convenient.
It wants to eradicate discrimination while continuing to operate a political system in which caste identity is one of the most efficient instruments of electoral mobilisation.
The State therefore does not necessarily seek the eradication of caste.
More accurately:
it seeks the management of caste.
And management is not annihilation.
A government can manage poverty without eliminating poverty.
It can manage unemployment without creating full employment.
It can manage communal tensions without producing communal harmony.
Likewise, it can manage caste without abolishing caste.
XI. The Indian Left's uncomfortable failure
The Left deserves its own indictment.
Marx gave the world an extraordinary vocabulary for understanding exploitation.
But Indian Marxism too often treated caste as a secondary question that would eventually disappear after class revolution.
That was a serious miscalculation.
The Indian worker does not enter the factory stripped of his caste.
He carries it with him.
He carries it into the village.
Into marriage.
Into social networks.
Into politics.
Sometimes even into the trade union.
Ambedkar understood the problem.
How can workers unite when they do not regard each other as social equals?
How can the proletariat form a unified political class when caste fragments the proletariat itself?
The supplied material captures this criticism directly: caste destroys the possibility of proletarian unity by creating graded social identities among the poor themselves.
This is where Ambedkar was more perceptive about India than Marxism.
The revolution cannot begin by asking people to forget the social humiliation they experience every day.
You cannot build fraternity by postponing dignity.
XII. But Ambedkar cannot be turned into an anti-marxist mascot
Yet there is another intellectual laziness emerging today.
Because Ambedkar criticised orthodox Marxism, some attempt to place him permanently against Marx.
That is equally wrong.
Ambedkar was deeply concerned with economic exploitation, labour rights, industrialisation, land relations and economic organisation.
He understood that liberty without material capability was hollow.
Marx asks who owns the means of production.
Ambedkar asks who is permitted to participate in society as an equal.
Why choose?
India needs both questions.
A landless Dalit agricultural labourer is simultaneously a member of an oppressed caste and a member of the working class.
Ignoring either dimension produces an incomplete analysis.
Marx without Ambedkar cannot adequately explain India's social hierarchy.
Ambedkar without political economy cannot fully explain the persistence of material inequality.
The intellectually serious position is therefore not:
Ambedkar versus Marx.
It is:
Ambedkar plus Marx—understood through India.
XIII. Why caste refuses to die
Caste survives because it performs too many functions simultaneously.
It provides identity.
It provides marriage networks.
It provides political mobilisation.
It provides social security.
It can provide economic networks.
It provides status.
It provides historical memory.
And, most importantly, it provides hierarchy.
Every system that gives people an advantage will develop defenders.
That is the brutal simplicity of social power.
The privileged do not surrender privilege merely because philosophers prove that privilege is unjust.
They surrender it when institutions make it impossible—or when the moral cost of retaining it becomes intolerable.
India has changed the law.
It has not changed enough of the social incentive structure.
XIV. Urban India is not casteless India
There is a particularly seductive myth that cities destroy caste.
Cities weaken certain forms of caste.
They do not necessarily destroy caste.
The village makes caste visible.
The city makes it private.
That distinction is crucial.
In a village, caste may determine where one lives.
In a city, it may determine whom one's parents want one to marry.
In a village, caste may determine occupation.
In a city, it may influence networks through which jobs and businesses are accessed.
In a village, hierarchy can be physical.
In a city, it can become invisible.
Invisible discrimination is not necessarily weaker discrimination.
Sometimes it is simply harder to prove.
XV. The new caste elite
There is another question that Ambedkar's followers must confront themselves.
What happens when political emancipation produces an elite?
Every social movement faces this danger.
A leadership class emerges.
It gains education.
It gains political access.
It gains institutional positions.
It gains economic resources.
But does the bottom half of the community move with it?
This is the difference between elite mobility and mass mobility.
A democracy should celebrate the emergence of successful Dalit professionals, entrepreneurs, administrators, academics and political leaders.
But their success cannot become the evidence that structural discrimination has disappeared.
The existence of a few successful individuals proves that mobility is possible.
It does not prove that opportunity is equal.
XVI. The politics of perpetual victimhood is also dangerous
The opposite extreme is equally destructive.
A community cannot build a future exclusively around historical victimhood.
History must be remembered.
Injustice must be acknowledged.
But politics that permanently converts identity into grievance can trap the very people it claims to liberate.
The purpose of remembering oppression is not to institutionalise permanent antagonism.
It is to prevent its repetition.
Ambedkar did not dream of replacing one caste hierarchy with another.
He wanted hierarchy itself destroyed.
That is the distinction contemporary caste politics must recover.
XVII. The greatest betrayal of Ambedkar is symbolic Ambedkar
Every political camp wants Ambedkar now.
His photograph is safe.
His statue is safe.
His birthday is safe.
His Constitution-making role is safe.
What is dangerous is his actual intellectual programme.
Because the real Ambedkar asks inconvenient questions.
Why should birth determine social status?
Why should religious authority protect inequality?
Why should economic power remain concentrated?
Why should political democracy coexist with social hierarchy?
Why should fraternity remain merely a word?
Why should a person inherit a social rank?
These questions make everybody uncomfortable.
So Ambedkar is increasingly turned into an icon rather than read as an indictment.
The safest Ambedkar is a statue.
The dangerous Ambedkar is the one whose books are actually read.
XVIII. The republic's central contradiction
India has achieved political democracy without fully achieving social democracy.
One person has one vote.
But one person does not necessarily possess one equal social status.
One person can contest an election.
But not everyone enters economic life with equal inherited resources.
One person can obtain education.
But educational quality and family capital differ enormously.
One person can marry whom he chooses legally.
But society may punish him for exercising that freedom.
This is the gap between constitutional citizenship and social citizenship.
Ambedkar knew that democracy could not survive indefinitely on political equality alone.
Democracy must become a way of life.
The argument identifies constitutional morality—liberty, equality and fraternity—as the deeper thread of Ambedkar's social philosophy.
India has built democratic institutions.
It is still building the democratic citizen.
XIX. What must actually be done?
If caste is to disappear, India must stop pretending that a single policy can accomplish it.
Reservation is necessary but insufficient.
Legislation is necessary but insufficient.
Education is necessary but insufficient.
Economic growth is necessary but insufficient.
Political representation is necessary but insufficient.
What is required is a simultaneous transformation of social status, economic opportunity and political incentives.
The country must move from:
reservation to capability;
representation to ownership;
welfare to productive assets;
identity mobilisation to substantive citizenship;
legal equality to lived equality.
Education must become genuinely equalising.
Capital must become more accessible.
Entrepreneurship among historically excluded communities must be supported.
Labour must become genuinely mobile.
Discrimination must be punished.
Inter-caste social interaction must become normal.
And political parties must eventually be forced to compete on policy rather than merely caste arithmetic.
This will not happen through moral lectures.
It requires institutional redesign.
XX. The final question: Does India actually want a casteless society?
Here is the most uncomfortable question of all.
Does India actually want caste to disappear?
If the answer is yes, then one day caste-based political arithmetic must become unnecessary.
If the answer is yes, then marriage across caste must become socially ordinary.
If the answer is yes, then surnames should stop functioning as social credentials.
If the answer is yes, inherited occupation should become meaningless.
If the answer is yes, social networks should cease to depend upon caste.
If the answer is yes, political parties should stop treating communities as electoral commodities.
If the answer is yes, the ultimate objective of affirmative action must remain a society in which historical caste disadvantage no longer determines life chances.
But if we continue to say:
“Caste is bad, but my caste must remain politically powerful,”
then we are not annihilating caste.
We are negotiating its terms.
And Ambedkar did not ask India to negotiate with caste.
He asked India to annihilate it.
XXI. Conclusion: The republic that counts castes
India has travelled far.
That must be acknowledged.
Millions who were once excluded from education, public institutions and political power have entered spaces from which their ancestors were barred.
The Constitution changed the legal architecture of the country.
Democracy changed the distribution of political power.
Economic development changed occupations.
Urbanisation weakened traditional social controls.
Reservations changed representation.
These are historic achievements.
But they do not justify complacency.
Because the caste system has demonstrated an extraordinary capacity to adapt.
It has moved from religious sanction to political arithmetic.
From hereditary occupation to social networks.
From public segregation to private exclusion.
From village hierarchy to matrimonial choice.
From ritual status to inherited economic capital.
And from an openly defended hierarchy to a publicly denied but privately reproduced identity.
That is why caste refuses to die.
It is not dead.
It is not even necessarily dying at the speed that a modern democracy should expect.
It is changing its clothes.
And India keeps mistaking the new clothes for the death of the institution.
The real challenge is therefore much larger than reservation.
It is larger than Dalit representation.
It is larger than electoral politics.
It is larger than Hindu reform.
It is the question of whether India can transform itself from a society of inherited identities into a society of equal citizens.
Ambedkar's greatest warning was that political democracy resting upon social inequality contains an internal contradiction.
We have lived with that contradiction for nearly eight decades.
Perhaps that is the real failure.
Not that Ambedkar was ignored.
But that he was partially accepted.
We accepted his Constitution.
We accepted his reservations.
We accepted his portrait.
We accepted his birthday.
We accepted his political symbolism.
But we have not fully accepted his demand that caste itself must lose its moral, social and political legitimacy.
That is the Ambedkar India still finds difficult to embrace.
And perhaps the most damning question we can ask ourselves is this:
What kind of democracy celebrates equality in Parliament while negotiating inequality at the dinner table?
Until India can answer that question honestly, it has not completed its democratic revolution.
The final battle against caste will not be fought in Parliament alone.
It will be fought in families.
In marriages.
In schools.
In workplaces.
In property relations.
In political parties.
In economic institutions.
And above all, in the human mind.
Because caste will disappear from India only when Indians stop treating birth as biography, surname as status, community as destiny and hierarchy as tradition.
Until then, the Constitution will remain ahead of society.
Ambedkar will remain ahead of India.
And the Republic will continue to perform the extraordinary political ritual of proclaiming:
“All citizens are equal.”
while society quietly asks:
“But what caste are you?”
That question is the real monument to India's unfinished transformation.
And until that question becomes socially meaningless, Ambedkar's crusade remains unfinished.
Caste refuses to die because India has not yet summoned the courage to kill it.
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