In East India, a Marian shrine draws in Christian, Hindu and Muslim pilgrims

(RNS) — The historic Catholic minor basilica attracts thousands of pilgrims annually — the majority of them Hindu and Muslim — seeking what they call the power of the divine feminine from the Virgin Mary.

Devotees pray at the Basilica of the Holy Rosary, locally known as the Bandel Church, on May 30, 2026, near Kolkata, India. (Photo by Priyadarshini Sen)

Priyadarshini Sen
July 9, 2026   

RNS

BANDEL, India (RNS) — Each week for the last 13 years, 28-year-old Rimpa Chowdhury, who describes herself as a devout Hindu, has visited the Basilica of the Holy Rosary — a historic 16th-century Catholic church on the banks of the Hooghly River in eastern India with a shrine to the Virgin Mary.

For Chowdhury, the Bandel Church, as it is known locally, is more than a place where her prayers have been answered. Its vast riverside grounds, 50 miles north of Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal, are where she has found community and peace.

“There’s something about this place,” said Chowdhury, wearing a loose green tunic. “A shrine becomes something else when a woman has power over it.”

Over decades, thousands of pilgrims — the majority of them Muslims and Hindus — have been visiting the basilica for feast days every year, led by what they call the “power of the divine feminine” — their belief in the power of Mary, the mother of Jesus.

The Basilica of the Holy Rosary in Bandel, India, near Kolkata. It was declared a minor basilica by Pope John Paul II in 1988. (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia/Creative Commons)

Against its grand façade, featuring soaring arches and a vaulted-ceiling nave of ancient murals, a statue of Mary, “Our Lady of Happy Voyage,” stands out as the main attraction. Sailors and travelers visit her shrine frequently, praying for protection from danger. In 1988, Pope John Paul II declared the historic sanctuary a minor basilica, recognizing the church’s spiritual significance.

According to historical records, Catholic Augustinian friars and Portuguese traders settled in this region of Bengal in the late 16th century. Portugal’s monarchy tied Marian devotion to their colonial conquests, placing their outposts under the protection of the Virgin Mary.

An entrance to the Basilica of the Holy Rosary, locally known as the Bandel Church, on the outskirts of Kolkata, India. (Photo by Priyadarshini Sen)

Although the original church, built in 1599, was destroyed during an invasion by Muslim rulers of the Portuguese outpost in 1632 and again by an earthquake, legends say the rescue of Mary’s statue from the depths of the Hooghly River cemented her place as a divine protector.

“In Bengal, the goddess is revered as the ultimate primordial force in the universe,” said Father John Chalil, lead priest of the Bandel Church. “Devotees from all over India come here seeking sanctuary, and the nuns cater to their various needs.”

Since the 1950s, Chalil says, nuns from five congregations have been serving at the shrine and building social harmony in an area dotted with terracotta temples, mosques and churches. Local communities lean on each other, often transcending religious differences.

India’s Christian leaders work to convince Modi government to curb attacks

The shrine community around the church stretches across several villages — each village informally named after Marian apparitions, including Our Lady of Fatima and Our Lady of Vailankanni (Good Health).

People pass through Bandel, India, on May 30, 2026, near Kolkata. 

(Photo by Priyadarshini Sen)

The harmony is historically rooted. Though once a vital Portuguese outpost on the Hooghly River, the town of Bandel has evolved into a shared space where people of all faiths venerate local shrines. The church’s community programs reach non-Christian populations.

“We go to the surrounding villages to educate the masses about women’s rights and tribal welfare,” said Sister Nirmala, a nun involved with spiritual work at Bandel for more than 15 years. “Religious differences have not interfered with people’s faith in Mary.”

The nuns have been offering spiritual nourishment to the devotees and smoothing sectarian differences despite the growing religious polarization in India.

Those with Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity provide vital care and health services in the nearby areas. The Missionary Sisters of Mary Immaculate offer retreats and counseling to pilgrims, and the Auxilium Convent Sisters run a boarding home for young, underprivileged girls, providing them an education and assistance to live independently after graduation.

Nuns pray at the Basilica of the Holy Rosary, locally known as the Bandel Church, on May 30, 2026, near Kolkata, India. (Photo by Priyadarshini Sen)

Sister Philomena Mathew, a nun with the Missionary Sisters of Mary Help of Christians, another Catholic order in the local community, is concerned about the growing attacks on Christians across the country.

“We’re willing to confront anyone who obstructs the peace and harmony in this region,” she said.

Anti-Christian violence spearheaded by Hindu nationalist mobs has escalated across India since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014. Vigilante groups have disrupted prayer gatherings, vandalized church properties and assaulted pastors and nuns, accusing them without evidence of forcibly converting Hindus to Christianity.

“Last year there were 831 attacks against Christians in India,” said AC Michael, the national coordinator for United Christian Forum, a New Delhi-based human rights coalition that advocates for the rights of religious minorities. “From isolated localized incidents, the violence has become systemic, operating through a network of persecutions.”

Even though West Bengal has in the past been a safer state for religious minorities compared to the rest of the country, the recent election of a BJP state government has sparked apprehension, with attacks against Christians rising in the region.

Why anti-Christian persecution demands our collective action

Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity, a global Catholic order founded in Kolkata, has been coming under severe scrutiny from Hindu nationalist organizations, which claim its charitable work is aimed at converting vulnerable Hindus to Christianity. In December 2021, India’s Ministry of Home Affairs revoked the organization’s license, but reversed its decision after weeks of pushback.

Mother Teresa shown with an Indian child in 1977. (RNS archive photo)

“If nuns from the Missionaries of Charity were able to fend off attacks from religious extremists, I’m sure nuns at Bandel will also keep the community safe,” Michael said.

Mother Teresa visited Bandel Church in 1995, two years before her death. Her work in the region was centered on maintaining a mutually supportive relationship with the local Salesian order.

The town of Bandel has not been a focal point of targeted minority violence, but the broader region has occasionally witnessed political and festival-related communal clashes. On July 5, a mob barged into a newly constructed church south of Kolkata, threatening the congregants and vandalizing crosses.

“It’s the vision of the great saints that we are carrying forward,” said Sister Jesline Rose, a nun with the Missionary Sisters of Mary Immaculate who serves at the church. “No doubt the political landscape in Bengal is changing, but we’ll keep our pluralistic spirit alive.”

Rose and her fellow nuns regularly visit Hindu and Muslim families in the neighborhood to offer spiritual support and solace to individuals facing personal and medical hardships.

The altar and interior of the Basilica of the Holy Rosary near Kolkata, India. (Photo by Priyadarshini Sen)

The pilgrims, aided by the nuns, write down their prayer intentions on small slips of paper that are dropped into the wish box located near the statue of the Virgin Mary.

During festivals and winter walk pilgrimages, the nuns manage thousands of devotees — mostly Muslims and Christians — who congregate on the grounds to unite in thanksgiving.

The church is the unifying cultural monument for the devotees, and the nuns, its custodians.

They believe the power of the divine feminine in Bengal — from the Virgin Mary to Hindu goddesses Kali and Durga — will help them fight off threats from religious extremists.

“We look to the nuns for hope,” said Chowdhury, who lives in the narrow alleyways behind Bandel Church, a neighborhood of mostly Hindu and Muslim families. She’s anxious about the rising religious intolerance in the country, which she believes could trickle down to Bengal. The nuns “embody the power of Mother Mary, who is the protector of all devotees at our church,” she said.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Hinduism Is Fascism

Bengal After Trinamool: Political Economy of a Collapse

Sandip Chakraborty | 15 Jun 2026

• 
  
• 
  

What replaced the Left Front was not a more progressive alternative. TMC’s populist slogan “Maa, Mati, Manush" delivered nothing solid to the real peasantry, rural & urban poor.

Image Courtesy: PTI

When the results of the West Bengal Assembly election were declared on May 4, 2026, much of the national commentariat reached for a familiar frame: a personality story, the rise and fall of Mamata Banerjee, a morality tale about one leader's hubris. There is truth in that frame, but it is also a convenient one, because it allows the deeper story to go untold — the story of how, for 15 years, West Bengal was governed by a political formation that represented no class interest except that of capital in its most parasitic, rent-extracting forms, dressed in the language of the poor. And and how that formation's collapse has now handed the state to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the most organised vehicle of Hindutva and corporate consolidation that Indian politics has produced.

To understand what just happened in Bengal, it is necessary to go back to what the Trinamool Congress (TMC) actually was — not as a cult of personality, though it was certainly that too, but as a political-economic project. And to understand that, one has to start with what it replaced.

What the Left Front Built, and What Replaced It

For 34 years, the Left Front government in West Bengal carried out the most far-reaching land reform programme: Operation Barga gave sharecroppers recorded rights over the land they tilled, redistribution broke up the largest holdings, and a functioning three-tier panchayat system devolved real power — and real budgets — to elected bodies at the village level. This was not a perfect record, and the Left Front's own missteps, particularly its turn toward forced land acquisition for industry in the mid-2000s, opened the door for everything that followed. But it is important to be clear about what was actually lost when that government fell in 2011, because the TMC's entire subsequent narrative depends on nobody remembering it.

What replaced the Left Front was not a more progressive alternative. It was a coalition assembled, opportunistically, from every force that had a grievance against the Left Front government — some with legitimate grievances rooted in the Singur and Nandigram land acquisitions, others with grievances rooted in something closer to their opposite: landlords and rural elites whose interests Operation Barga had curtailed, real estate and construction capital that found the Left Front's regulatory apparatus inconvenient, and a layer of rural strongmen who saw, in the breakdown of Left Front discipline, an opportunity to build their own local fiefdoms. The TMC's genius — if that is the word — was in holding this coalition together under a single populist banner, "Maa, Mati, Manush," while delivering, in practice, almost nothing to the actual peasantry and rural poor that the slogan invoked.

The Class Character of Trinamool

It has become fashionable to describe the TMC as having "no ideology," and there is a sense in which that is true: it never produced a programme document, never articulated a position on land, industry, or labour that it held consistently for more than an electoral cycle. But "no ideology" is itself a kind of ideology — it is the ideology of capital that does not want to be governed by any rules at all, that prefers a state which can be approached transactionally, deal by deal, rather than one bound by policy.

This is the thread that runs through the TMC's entire history in government, from the appointment of Amit Mitra — formerly Secretary General of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, India's most powerful corporate lobby, and a public advocate for retail FDI and the deregulation of fuel prices — as Finance and Industry Minister, to the systematic dismantling of trade union activity in the state's remaining industrial belts, to the return of factory lockouts with police protection for management rather than workers. None of this required a manifesto. It only required a government willing to let capital operate without the friction of organised labour or regulatory oversight — and willing, in exchange, to extract its own cut through a parallel economy of "syndicates."

That parallel economy deserves to be named for what it was: a mechanism of primitive accumulation, in which party functionaries inserted themselves as gatekeepers — over construction material, over small business licensing, over local infrastructure contracts — and extracted a toll from the petty-bourgeois and working-class people who had to pass through that gate to make a living. This was not a deviation from TMC governance. For millions of people in Bengal's towns and peri-urban areas, the "syndicate" was the most direct daily experience of what TMC rule actually meant.

The Sangh Parivar Link: A History TMC Would Rather Forget

If there is one part of this story that the TMC's current self-presentation — as Bengal's last secular bulwark against Hindutva — depends most heavily on erasing, it is the party's own history of collaboration with the Sangh Parivar. After breaking from Congress in 1998, Banerjee joined the BJP-led NDA, served in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee cabinet, and in September 2003 addressed an RSS (rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) gathering in Delhi, praising the organisation as a body of "true patriots" engaged in a "fight against communists" — language for which RSS leaders reportedly hailed her as "saakshat Durga." Through the late 1990s and early 2000s, TMC alliances with the BJP extended across Lok Sabha, Assembly, panchayat, and municipal contests in Bengal.

This history matters for a reason that goes beyond hypocrisy, though it is certainly that. It matters because it was the TMC, not the BJP acting alone, that did the work of normalising Hindutva politics as a legitimate participant in Bengal's electoral landscape — a state that had, for decades, kept communal politics on the margins. Every subsequent BJP gain in Bengal, including the 2026 sweep, was built on a foundation that the TMC itself helped lay, brick by electoral alliance, two decades earlier, purely in pursuit of ministerial office in Delhi. When TMC leaders now warn voters that a BJP government represents an existential communal threat to Bengal, they are not wrong about the threat — but they are concealing their own role in making that threat electorally viable in the first place.

Singur, Nandigram, and the Forces That Gathered

The Singur and Nandigram agitations of 2006–2008 are remembered, in mainstream accounts, as a popular uprising against forced land acquisition — and there was real, justified anger in both places that deserves to be taken seriously on its own terms. But the political coalition that formed around that anger was not a coalition of the peasantry alone, and it is worth being precise about who else was in the room.

Maoist cadres, operating in the Jangal Mahal districts, found in the TMC a useful ally against a common enemy — and the alliance went well beyond rhetorical convergence. Investigations later attributed 245 deaths of CPI(M) workers and civilians in Jangal Mahal to this TMC-Maoist nexus, and the relationship reached its most extreme point on November 2, 2008, when an assassination attempt on sitting Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya at Salboni was met, from sections of the TMC leadership, not with condemnation but with statements that read, in retrospect, as closer to satisfaction.

Maoist commander Kishenji publicly endorsed Banerjee for the Chief Minister's post in an interview published in October 2009, and again ahead of a Lalgarh rally in August 2010 — open collaboration between a mainstream party holding ministerial office at the Centre and an organisation the same Central government had designated the country's gravest internal security threat.

A parallel pattern unfolded in North Bengal with the Kamtapur Liberation Organisation, whose cadres had killed more than 60 CPI(M) workers, including five shot dead at a party office in Dhupguri in August 2002. When the TMC took power in 2011, KLO chief Tom Adhikari and several senior associates were released from custody, vanishing underground within months, with KLO operatives again under suspicion in a 2013 bombing.

Religious fundamentalist organisations and foreign-funded NGOs — the latter a category that deserves scrutiny rather than the automatic benefit of the doubt that "civil society" branding often receives — also found common cause with the TMC during this period, for the same reason the Maoists did: not because they shared an analysis of land policy, but because they shared an enemy. Once that enemy was removed from power in 2011, every one of these alliances was discarded. The Maoist label was redirected at the TMC's own critics. The KLO leaders went back underground. The NGOs moved on to other causes. What remained was the TMC, now in government, having drawn on every reactionary current available to it on the way up, and having no further use for any of them on the way down.

Saradha, Narada, and Financialisation of Politics

The Saradha chit fund collapse of April 2013 is usually narrated as a corruption scandal — and it was that, on a staggering scale: roughly 1,700 companies under the Saradha umbrella extracted more than ₹2 lakh crore from more than one crore depositors, the overwhelming majority of them working people putting aside small savings. But it should also be read as something more structural: an example of what happens when a state government's relationship to capital is organised entirely around informal, personalised channels rather than regulated ones.

Saradha's promoter, Sudipta Sen, built ties with the TMC from 2009 onward, and a month before Banerjee became Chief Minister in 2011, he purchased paintings attributed to her for roughly ₹1.8 crore — the first of a series of such purchases, by entities later identified as shell companies, totalling more than ₹21 crore, that investigators characterised as a channel for laundering chit fund deposits into the party's finances.

In communications with the CBI, Sen described being required to make large recurring payments to TMC-linked media operations, in the explicit expectation of regulatory protection. That protection was, for years, delivered: the Union Home Ministry's warnings between 2011 and 2012, the RBI's repeated flags, and SEBI's multiple show-cause notices between 2010 and 2013 all went unanswered until the scheme collapsed under its own weight — at which point Banerjee's claim to have "known nothing" was directly contradicted by her own government's sworn court affidavit.

The Narada sting operation, in which hidden cameras recorded TMC leaders and a police official apparently accepting cash, and the later confrontation over CBI access to Kolkata's police commissioner — including the extraordinary 2018 episode in which the CBI's own headquarters were effectively occupied overnight by Delhi Police on instructions from the Central government — extended this story onto the national stage.

But for Bengal's voters, the headline figures were simpler: more than 12 lakh Saradha victims remain uncompensated, a state compensation scheme disbursed barely half of what it promised, and at least a hundred victims are reported to have died by suicide, while implicated party figures returned to public life with their standing largely intact.

This is what "financialisation without regulation, mediated by a single ruling party" looks like in practice — and it is not unique to Bengal, or to the TMC, but Bengal under the TMC offered as clear an illustration of it as any state in the country.

2021: The High-Water Mark That Wasn't

The 2021 Assembly election result — a landslide for the TMC against a BJP campaign that had thrown enormous national resources at the state — was presented, including by significant sections of the liberal commentariat outside Bengal, as a victory for secular politics against Hindutva consolidation. There was something to that framing: the BJP's defeat in 2021, after a campaign built heavily around polarisation, was not nothing.

But the result contained a detail that ought to have tempered the celebration considerably: Banerjee herself lost her own seat of Nandigram, to Suvendu Adhikari, a former TMC heavyweight who had defected to the BJP only months earlier. A landslide for the party, delivered while its leader lost her own constituency, is not the sign of a movement. It is the sign of a patronage machine — one capable of delivering votes through its local networks even as the central brand frays, but one whose loyalty to the Centre is conditional on the Centre continuing to deliver patronage in return. Machines of this kind do not have reserves of ideological loyalty to draw on when the patronage stops. They have only the machine itself, and the machine's interest in its own survival.

Within months of that 2021 result, the next chapter began — and it would be the chapter that, more than any other, exhausted whatever reserve of goodwill the TMC had left among Bengal's middle class and aspirational youth.

Cash for Jobs: The SSC Scandal as Class Betrayal

In July 2022, the Enforcement Directorate arrested Partha Chatterjee, then Commerce and Industries Minister and formerly Education Minister during a 2016 School Service Commission recruitment drive, after recovering roughly ₹28 crore in cash and a large quantity of gold from the residence of his close aide, Arpita Mukherjee. What followed was a slow-motion judicial reckoning with what courts eventually termed a "systemic fraud": tampered answer sheets, manipulated merit lists, and, by the Calcutta High Court's own count, 25,753 appointments from the 2016 cycle declared null and void in April 2024 — a ruling the Supreme Court upheld in full in April 2025, ordering those who had obtained posts fraudulently to return their salaries with interest.

It is worth dwelling on what this scandal actually represents, because it is qualitatively different from Saradha, even if the underlying logic — informal payment in exchange for access to state-mediated opportunity — is the same. Saradha defrauded depositors of their savings. The SSC scandal defrauded an entire generation of educated, unemployed young people of the one credible pathway into stable employment that a state with limited industrial growth still offered: a government teaching post. For a party whose foundational claim was that it represented "Maa, Mati, Manush" against an indifferent establishment, presiding over a scheme in which teaching jobs were allegedly sold to the highest bidder while genuinely qualified candidates from working and lower-middle-class families were shut out was not merely corruption. It was a betrayal of the precise social base the party claimed to speak for.

Sandeshkhali, RG Kar, and the Limits of "Maa, Mati, Manush"

If the SSC scandal exposed the TMC's betrayal of Bengal's aspirational youth, two events in 2024 exposed something more fundamental: the relationship between the party's local power structures and the safety of the women in whose name "Maa" — mother — sat at the head of its own slogan.

In Sandeshkhali, women came forward in early 2024 with allegations of land-grabbing and sexual coercion against a local TMC strongman and his network — a structure of local power that, by multiple accounts, had operated for years before the protests forced any state response. Months later, the rape and murder of a trainee doctor at RG Kar Medical College in Kolkata produced some of the largest protests Bengal has seen in a generation, directed not only at the crime itself but at what protesters experienced as an institutional culture of cover-up. A similar pattern recurred in 2025 with a gang rape at a Kolkata law college, where the accused had prior links to the TMC's student wing and a documented history of complaints that had gone unaddressed.

These were not isolated failures of individual policing. They were the visible surface of a governing model in which local power, exercised through party-linked strongmen, was effectively unaccountable until a crisis became too large for the state to ignore — at which point the response was performative rather than structural. By the time the 2026 campaign began, both Sandeshkhali and RG Kar had become central to the opposition's case, to the point that the mother of the RG Kar victim contested the election on a BJP ticket, citing the state government's handling of her daughter's case as her reason for entering politics. That a victim's family found the BJP — a party whose own record on communal violence and on crimes against women in states it governs is hardly exemplary — more credible on this issue than the incumbent TMC is, in itself, a measure of how completely the TMC had exhausted its claim to represent "Maa, Mati, Manush" by 2026.

The 2026 Verdict and What It Actually Means

The result declared on May 4, 2026 — the BJP crossing the two-hundred-seat mark in a 294-member Assembly, ending 15 years of TMC rule, with Suvendu Adhikari sworn in as Chief Minister — should not be read, as much of the national press has read it, as simply "Bengal turns saffron." It is that, and that alone should be cause for serious concern: the BJP's ascendancy in Bengal represents the consolidation, in one of India's largest states, of the most organised vehicle of Hindutva and corporate power in the country, a force whose record on minority rights, on press freedom, and on the rights of organised labour in the states it already governs gives no reason for optimism.

But the 2026 result is also something else: the collapse, under the weight of its own contradictions, of a 15-year experiment in governing through patronage networks, informal financial channels, and a populist slogan increasingly divorced from any material content. The TMC did not lose because Bengal's voters suddenly discovered, in 2026, facts that had been hidden from them. The Saradha scandal was public knowledge for over a decade. The Maoist alliance was reported on as it happened. The SSC verdicts were delivered by courts, in public, over years. Sandeshkhali and RG Kar played out on national television for months. What changed was not the information. It was that a model of governance built on patronage requires patronage to keep flowing — and a state with West Bengal's fiscal constraints, governing through extraction rather than production, eventually runs out of patronage to distribute, leaving only the extraction itself visible.

Within weeks of the defeat, the TMC's internal contradictions — a long-simmering divide between an older generation of district-level leaders and a more centralised operation built around Mamata Banerjee's nephew, Abhishek Banerjee — broke into open rebellion, with significant numbers of MPs and MLAs publicly challenging the leadership of both. A party held together for nearly three decades almost entirely by the personal authority of one leader, and by that leader's ability to deliver state power to her local networks, discovered in real time how little of that unity had been about anything else.

The Absence That Matters Most

What is most striking about the 2026 result, from the standpoint of anyone concerned with the actual material conditions of Bengal's working people and peasantry, is not the TMC's defeat — which, on the record above, was earned many times over — but the absence of any political force, in this election, organised around the interests of those people as a class, rather than as a vote bank to be assembled through patronage, communal appeal, or some combination of both.

The Left, whose land reform legacy remains the single most consequential redistribution of agrarian power in any major Indian state, has spent 15 years in the electoral wilderness, a casualty in no small part of its own missteps over Singur and Nandigram, but also of a media and political environment in which the only permitted choice was framed as TMC or BJP — two formations that, for all their mutual hostility, share a common commitment to a state that serves capital first and negotiates with the working population only through patronage, charity, or communal mobilisation, never through organised, collective power.

The TMC's fall is not, in itself, a victory for anyone except the BJP. What Bengal's politics needs now — and what its history, going back to Operation Barga and the panchayat reforms of the 1980s, suggests it is capable of producing again — is a political force willing to organise around the actual material interests of tenants, sharecroppers, industrial and informal workers, and the educated unemployed whose hopes the SSC scandal so comprehensively betrayed. Whether such a force re-emerges, or whether Bengal simply settles into a new equilibrium between Hindutva consolidation and whatever remains of the TMC's patronage networks, will determine far more about the state's future than the headline result of May 4, 2026 — significant as that result undeniably is.

(The views are personal.)

ZOONOSIS / SPILLOVER

Single amino acid change may help viruses jump from bat to human

University of California - San Francisco

Most pandemics start when a pathogen spreads from animals to humans. It’s a leading explanation for the COVID-19 pandemic: the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, is a cousin to coronaviruses that live in bats. 

Now, researchers at the UCSF Quantitative Biosciences Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Institut Pasteur, and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, report that a single amino-acid change alters how a coronavirus protein interacts with the human and bat immune systems, shifting the body's response to infection. 

It helps explain how benign animal viruses can adapt to humans and cause severe disease.

The study appeared in Cell Host & Microbe on May 13.

Researchers looked at SARS-CoV-2 and a related coronavirus called RaTG13, which only infects bats, and compared how each virus interacted with immune proteins in bat and human lung cells. The experiments relied on the first laboratory-grown lung cell line from the greater horseshoe bat.

A viral protein called OrfB9 emerged as a key factor. The SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 versions of OrfB9 differ by one amino acid out of roughly 100. In human cells, the SARS-CoV-2 version disabled an immune alarm system, allowing the virus to multiply. In bat cells, the RaTG13 version activated an immune protein that helped suppress the virus.

"The difference between a virus that stays in bats and one that spills over into humans and causes catastrophic disease can come down to remarkably small genetic changes," said Nevan J. Krogan, PhD, director of QBI and senior author of the study. "By mapping these interactions at the protein level — across two viruses and two species — we can read the molecular signatures that predict spillover risk. It's the kind of early warning system the world needs."

Authors: UCSF authors are Jyoti Batra, PhD; Yuan Zhou, MS; Rithika Adavikolanu; Durga Anand; Sooraj Verma; Martin Gordon, MS; Shivali Malpotra, MS; Jack M. Moen, PhD; Ajda Rojc, MS; Atoshi Banerjee, PhD; Sourobh Maji, PhD; Monita Muralidharan, PhD; Helene Foussard, PhD; Irene P. Chen, PhD; CJ San Felipe, PhD; Lorena Zuliani-Alvarez, PhD; Promisree Choudhury, PhD; Kirsten Obernier, PhD; Rahul Suryawanshi, PhD; Taha Y. Taha, PhD, PharmD; Kliment A. Verba, PhD; James S. Fraser, PhD; Robert M. Stroud, PhD, MA; Melanie Ott, MD, PhD; Ben Polacco, PhD; Danielle L. Swaney, PhD; Ignacia Echeverria, PhD; and Manon Eckhardt, PhD. For all authors see the paper.

Funding:  National Institutes of Health (U19AI135990, U19AI135972, U54AI170792, F31AI164671-01, G20AI174733, UL1TR004419, S10OD026880, S10OD030463); Howard Hughes Medical Institute; James B. Pendleton Charitable Trust; Roddenberry Foundation; P. and E. Taft; Gladstone Institutes; Fast Grants; Innovative Genomics Institute; Chan Zuckerberg Biohub – San Francisco; ANR EmerCoV AAP CE35.

 

About UCSF: The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is exclusively focused on the health sciences and is dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. UCSF Health, which serves as UCSF’s primary academic medical center, includes top-ranked specialty hospitals and other clinical programs, and has affiliations throughout the Bay Area. UCSF School of Medicine also has a regional campus in Fresno. Learn more at https://ucsf.edu or see our Fact Sheet.
 

###

Follow UCSF

ucsf.edu | Facebook.com/ucsf | Twitter.com/ucsf | YouTube.com/ucsf

 

---

Journal

Cell Host & Microbe

Joint Sino-Indian Bid To Get UNESCO Recognition For Buddhist Monk Xuanzang – Analysis

A depiction of the Chinese monk Xuanzang on his journey to India.

 Credit: Wikipedia Commons

June 8, 2026 
By P. K. Balachandran


As early as 2016, the Chinese Consul General in Kolkata had mooted the idea of jointly celebrating the work of Xuanzang, who translated Buddhist scriptures into Chinese and helped Buddhism gain wide acceptance in China.

Thanks to the thaw in relations between India and China, a 10-year old project to jointly secure UNESCO recognition for the work of the 7 th. Century Chinese Buddhist monk, Xuanzang, is set to take off.

China had suggested to India that the two countries jointly bid for UNESCO’s recognition of Xuanzang, who translated Buddhist texts from Sanskrit and Pali to Chinese, and gave Buddhism a firm foundation in China and South East Asia. The goal is to put Xuanzang’s work in UNESCO’s “Intangible Cultural Heritage List.”

The Indian side responded favourably, and internal consultations are underway. An Indian representative is expected to visit China in the coming weeks to hold discussions with his counterparts.

The project aims to identify practices, narratives, and sites associated with Xuanzang. The proposed nomination needs delineation of cultural practices linked to the transmission of Buddhist knowledge, pilgrimage routes traversed by Xuanzang and oral traditions preserved in monasteries and local communities.

Need to Establish It As A Living Heritage

The project must demonstrate that Xuanzang is a “living heritage” in accordance with UNESCO’s criteria. UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) framework, under the 2003 Convention, recognises living traditions such as practices, expressions, knowledge systems and rituals that communities “continue to transmit across generations”.

The list excludes physical manifestations like monuments.

The UNESCO list of Intangible Heritages includes material from over 150 countries, with multinational nominations forming a growing share as States collaborate on shared cultural traditions.

India ratified the convention in 2005 and currently has 16 elements inscribed on UNESCO’s Intangible Culture List, including Yoga, the Kumbh Mela and Durga Puja. Inter-State nominations include Nowruz, a transnational cultural practice shared by several countries in West and South Asia.

Inter-State nominations require participating States to agree on documentation, safeguarding measures and community participation. A joint Sino-Indian proposal would require alignment on the narrative and shared ownership of the elements included.

UNESCO nominations are not easy to get. They require extensive documentation, including evidence of community participation, plans for safeguarding, and demonstration of the element’s continued practice.

UNESCO guidelines require that nominations reflect “community consent and participation”. Therefore, local communities will have to be consulted.

Discussions between India and China will focus on mapping existing material on Xuanzang across archives, monasteries and academic institutions. While India will be examining records related to Nalanda and other sites linked to his stay, China will be compiling material from its own historical sources.

Idea Mooted A Decade Ago

Ten years ago, in 2016, the Chinese Consulate General in Kolkata had held a public event to explain the depth of China’s “cooperative relationship” with India over the last 1400 years. A seminar on “Xuan Zang and China-India Friendly Interactions” was held in Kolkata, which traced the monk’s role “in strengthening Indo-China relations.”

The Chinese Consulate was working with the K.P. Jayaswal Institute, a Bihar-based archaeological institution run by the Bihar Government, to study Stupas.

Improved Climate for Sino-Indian Cooperation

The current outreach from China comes at a time when India-China relations have been seeing attempts at a rapprochement after a period of strain following the 2020 standoff along the Line of Actual Control (the de facto border) between the two countries in Ladakh.

Diplomatic and military talks have continued, with both sides maintaining engagement through established mechanisms. India has allowed increased Chinese investments in its industries and the Hindu pilgrimage to Kailash in Tibet has resumed.

Faxian’s Quest

Buddhism travelled from India to China in the “Later Han period” (from 25-220 AD). Initially, the Chinese rejected it as a “foreign” religion. Only later, during a period of turmoil between 220-and 589 AD, Mahayana or “Great Vehicle” Buddhism began winning Chinese adherents.

It was dissatisfaction with existing Chinese translations of Sanskrit Buddhist scriptures that drove the Buddhist monk Faxian (5 th.Century AD) to set out for India at age 65, intent on finding the originals. After studying them for 10 years in India, he brought back to China a great number of copies of Buddhist texts and translated them from Sanskrit into Chinese. Among them, two of the most important were the “Mahaparinirvana-sutra” a text glorifying the eternal, personal, and pure nature of “nirvana”, on which the nirvana school in China then based its doctrines, and the “Vinaya” (rules of discipline for the monks) of the “Mahasanghika” school, which became available for the regulation of the numerous monastic communities in China.

Xuanzang’s Quest

More than two centuries after Faxian came another Chinese Buddhist monk, Xuanzang (602-664 AD ). He set out for India with much the same purpose in mind – to increase his understanding of the Buddha’s teachings by going to the source. He also wanted to get a feel of the places the Buddha trod.

Judson Knight, writing in encyclopedia.com about Xuanzang, says that under the Sui Dynasty (589-618 AD) and the newly founded T’ang Dynasty (618-907 AD ), Xuanzang and other monks faced a hostile environment. Not only did the T’ang dynasty’s first ruler, Kao Tsu (618-626 AD), embrace the rival faith of Taoism, but placed restrictions on travel in the Western parts of China, which was the gateway to Central Asia and India.

Xuanzang’s Search For Theological Clarity

But Xuanzang was determined to go to India. Whereas Faxian was dissatisfied with Chinese translations of the Buddhist scriptures and wanted to see the originals, Xuanzang’s longing arose from his preoccupation with difficult theological questions. He needed to consult the “Yogacarabhumi Sastra” (dated between 4 th., and 5 th., century AD), which could only be found in India. Therefore, he resolved to make the arduous, extremely challenging journey across the mountains.

But the Chinese Emperor had barred travel beyond the Western borders of China. “As I approached China’s extreme outpost at the edge of the Desert of Lop, I was caught by the Chinese army. Not having a travel permit, they wanted to send me to Tun-huang to stay at the monastery there. However, I said ‘If you insist on detaining me I will allow you to take my life, but I will not take a single step backwards in the direction of China.'”

As it turned out, the top-most government official in the region was a devout Buddhist, and he chose to look the other way, allowing Xuanzang to pass the military outposts that separated China from the lands of Central Asia.

Further West, Xuanzang encountered bandits and marauding tribes, as well as admiring rulers and welcoming groups of monks. He visited Tashkent, Samarkand, and Balkh. (The first two are today in Uzbekistan, and the last in Afghanistan). All three were important trading and cultural centres in the premodern era.

Xuanzang reached India in 631 AD and made his way to the monastery at Nalanda, India’s largest Buddhist centre, where the esteemed master, Silabhadra, taught him personally for 15 months. Xuanzang spent five years at Nalanda, during which time he composed three religious treatises in Sanskrit.

He also travelled to various parts of India, including Bengal, the Deccan Plateau in Central India, and both the Coromandel (eastern) and Malabar (western) coasts. In addition, he journeyed through the Indus River Valley.

King Harsha Hosts Xuanzang

However, a king named Kumara invited Xuanzang to visit him in Assam, in northeastern India, an offer he could not refuse. This in turn led King Kumara’s rival King Harsha ( 590-647 AD), India’s greatest ruler of the early medieval era, to make an invitation of his own.

At Harsha’s court in 642 AD, Xuanzang greatly impressed a gathering of several thousand kings and wise men, winning arguments with Hindu and Jain theologians. Pleased, Harsha showered him with gifts, but Xuanzang accepted only a buffalo-skin coat to keep him warm and dry, and an elephant to transport the many books he had brought with him. Finally, in 643 AD, he set off for China.

Given the fact that he had left China illegally, Xuanzang sent a letter to the Emperor, announcing his return. Eight months later, he received a welcoming reply. As it turned out, Emperor Kao Tsu had been ousted by his son T’ai Tsung (626-649 AD ), who was a Buddhist and eager to meet Xuanzang. The latter arrived at his capital in Ch’ang in early in 645, and the crowd that came out to greet him was so large that at first he could not enter the city.

Rousing Reception In China

He met with the Emperor, and briefed him on all the lands he had visited. Emperor T’ai Tsung offered him a position as his personal advisor, but Xuanzang declined. So the Emperor set him up at the nearby Hung-fu Monastery with a fleet of assistants to help him in his translation work. The only stipulation was that Xuanzang should write a record of his travels, “Ta T’ang Hsi-yü-chi”” or “The Great T’ang Record of Travels to the Western Lands,” which he completed in 646 AD.

Xuanzang’s translation work continued under the reign of Emperor Kao Tsung (649-683 AD ). In 19 years, he produced 76 books. When the great monk died in 664 AD, it was said that a million people attended his funeral. In later years he became a legend.

His translations, commentaries, and those of his close followers make up a quarter of Buddhist literature in Chinese. And the contact he had initiated with India led to close ties between the T’ang dynasty and India


About P. K. Balachandran

P. K. Balachandran is a senior Indian journalist working in Sri Lanka for local and international media and has been writing on South Asian issues for the past 21 years.

View all posts by P. K. Balachandran →

AI disinformation turns Nepal polls into ‘digital battleground’


By AFP
March 2, 2026


Around 80 percent of all of Nepal's internet traffic is through social media platforms - Copyright AFP Arun SANKAR

Anup Ojha

Slick AI-generated disinformation has flooded election campaigns in Nepal, which votes Thursday in the first polls since deadly protests triggered by a brief ban on social media overthrew the government.

The September 2025 protests were driven by tech-savvy youth angry at job shortages and flagrant corruption by an ageing political elite.

Now parties across the political divide are tapping social media to push their agendas and woo voters, especially the young, including a surge of people registering to cast their ballot for the first time.

But some of the content is manipulated or outright fake, experts and fact-checkers say.

“In a country where digital literacy is low, people believe what they see,” said Deepak Adhikari, editor of the independent NepalCheck team.

Kathmandu-based technology policy researcher Samik Kharel described a “digital battleground” in the run-up to the landmark vote, warning that Nepal lacked the expertise to monitor the onslaught of machine-generated content.

“It is even hard for experts to figure out what is real and fake,” Kharel told AFP.

Around 80 percent of all of Nepal’s internet traffic is through social media platforms, he said.

Internet analytics site DataReportal estimates more than 56 percent of Nepal’s 30 million people are online, including 14.8 million Facebook users and around 4.3 million on Instagram. About 2.2 million are on TikTok, according to the Internet Service Providers’ Association of Nepal.

“Disinformation remains a top concern that could undermine the integrity of the election process,” said Ammaarah Nilafdeen of the US-based Center for the Study of Organized Hate.

“Nepal… is grappling with the scale of the threat that disinformation poses to society and democracy at large.”



– Threat to democracy –



The protests last year began after the government moved to regulate social media, briefly banning at least 26 platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and X.

At least 77 people were killed in two days of unrest, parliament was set on fire, and the government of four-time prime minister KP Sharma Oli collapsed.

Activists used the group-chat app Discord to put forward their suggestion of interim leader — and days later their choice, 73-year-old former chief justice Sushila Karki, was appointed to lead the country to elections.

Social media is playing a key role again.

Loyalists of the ousted premier’s Marxist party have shared AI-generated images purporting to be drone photographs of a massive gathering — which were then reposted by top leaders, boasting a sea of more than 500,000 supporters.

Analysis by Nepali online fact-check experts TechPana found the images had been created using OpenAI’s ChatGPT, while police said less than 5,000 people were at the real event.

Another AI-generated video that circulated on TikTok purported to show Gagan Thapa, leader of the Nepali Congress party, urging voters to back a rival party. The platform has removed the video.

In neighbouring India, posts calling to restore Nepal’s deposed Hindu monarchy have made the rounds on social media, said researcher Nilafdeen.

Such “ideological pushes” online — in this case “amplified by Hindu far-right supporters in India” — stand in contrast to “domestic demands for strengthening democratic institutions”, she told AFP.



– Misinformation race –



The Election Commission says there is widespread use of hate speech and deepfake content, including videos created with readily available artificial intelligence tools purporting to show candidates insulting opponents or using obscene language.

“It is a concerning issue,” commission information officer Suman Ghimire said.

More than 600 cases have been passed on to the authorities, he added, with around 150 handled by police.

In one case, police detained a pro-royalist supporter, Durga Prasai, for social media posts allegedly meant to intimidate potential voters.

The Election Commission can impose fines or bar candidates from running, but experts say the sheer scale of disinformation and hate speech online outstrips any effective response.

“Candidates and people close to political parties not only compete to win, but also compete to spread misinformation,” said Basanta Basnet, editor-in-chief of news website Onlinekhabar, which has collaborated with Nepal FactCheck to verify posts.

The organisation has warned that “misinformation encourages citizens to take wrong decisions”, which in turn could undermine the “foundation of democracy”.

 INDIA

Anatomy of Humiliation: Caste Violence in Constitutional Era

Tanya Arora | 27 Jan 2026

• 
  

 

Seventy-five years after the Constitution promised equality, caste hierarchy continues to define who may speak, study, worship, or even judge with dignity.

Image Courtesy: newslaundry.com

Understanding violence against Dalits necessitates moving beyond a mere enumeration of physical atrocities to defining the systemic denial of dignity and the imposition of comprehensive social exclusion. The persistence of caste discrimination, despite the constitutional abolition of untouchability, reveals that caste operates as a profound societal architecture—a “state of the mind”—that actively facilitates dehumanisation. Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s seminal critique identified Hinduism as a structure fostering beliefs inherently unjust and oppressive.

Historical practices underscore the institutional roots of this humiliation, which are alarmingly mirrored and even innovated upon in contemporary India. Accounts from the Peshwa rule describe how untouchables were prevented from using public streets due to the polluting effect of their shadow; in Poona, they were forced to wear a broom attached to their waist to sweep away their footprints. Visuals of such a humiliating practice has been immortalised by Dalit writers and poets (Dalit shahirs)—performers in the late 19th and 20th centuries—that created a body of literature and theatre known as Dalit jalse.[1] Such ritual enforcement of segregation persists today in modernised forms of humiliation. This includes incidents where a 12-year-old Dalit boy died by suicide after being locked in a cowshed and shamed for accidentally entering an upper-caste house in Himachal Pradesh (October 2025), or the horrific case of a 14-year-old Dalit child forced to consume his own faeces (July 2020).

CJP is dedicated to finding and bringing to light instances of Hate Speech, so that the bigots propagating these venomous ideas can be unmasked and brought to justice. To learn more about our campaign against hate speech, please become a member. To support our initiatives, please donate now!

The continuance –in the 21st century — of these ritualistic forms of violence, seven decades after India’s independence, confirms a profound failure of the constitutional promise of equality. The violence is often preceded by symbolic degradation—the imposition of dominant caste thought and perception—which acts as a necessary pre-condition for the subsequent material and physical violence. This structural denial of humanity maintains the cultural and ritual authority of the caste system, fundamentally resisting constitutional mandates.

In 1950, the Constitution of India promised a radical rupture: the abolition of untouchability (Article 17), equality before the law (Article 14), and a vision of dignity that sought to transcend birth-based hierarchy. Even then, as Indians celebrated a vision of equality and non-discrimination, there was vocal resistance (in the Constituent Assembly) to a complete and total abolition of Caste itself at the time of the Constituent Assembly debates; finally, as a compromise, Article 17 was enacted. Seven decades later, the persistence and intensification of violence against Dalits across regions and institutions suggest that even the limited promise remains incomplete.

In recent years, this crude form of violence and exclusion has acquired new visibility — and new legitimacy. Incidents of caste humiliation no longer remain confined to villages or agrarian conflicts; they permeate public spaces, reflective of the re-legitimisation of this othering by the dominance of the political ideology ruling at the Centre and over a dozen states: Schools, cities, social media, and even the judiciary’s symbolic space have been breached: it is as if a shrill messaging is being broadcast of the casteist majoritarian regime in power; that caste exclusion and hierarchy is not simply justified but will be violently imposed. When an advocate of India’s apex court “dares” flinging a shoe at the present Chief Justice of India (CJI), a Buddhist and this is followed by singular racial abuse online, it shatters the comforting belief that institutional achievement insulates against stigma. Such episodes illuminate a wider social truth: caste not only continues to function as India’s deepest grammar of power, adapting to modern structures rather than disappearing within them. Caste resurgence is the order of the day, being re-imposed, brutally by this dispensation. What India is witnessing is the classic form of counter-revolution.

This article maps this regression. Mostly drawing upon recent incidents documented in 2025 —including those in Thoothukudi, Panvel, Meerut, and Madhya Pradesh—it reconstructs what can be termed the “new architecture of caste attacks.” Major incidents before 2025 have also been included to show a pattern. Violence and exclusion today occur through overlapping arenas: the village, the city, the school, the digital sphere, and the state itself. Each arena reveals how caste’s social logic survives despite constitutional guarantees.

Notably, all the incidents referred to in this piece has been provided in detail in a separate document below:

The Ascending Hierarchy of Attack: From ritual to institutional apex

Dr. B.R. Ambedkar envisioned the Constitution as a path towards both a moral and social revolution. The formal abolition of untouchability was meant not merely to criminalise discrimination but to destroy its social roots. Yet Ambedkar warned in the Constituent Assembly that “political equality” without “social and economic equality” would leave democracy vulnerable to caste hierarchy’s return.

The decades following independence saw significant legislative advances—the Protection of Civil Rights Act (1955), the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act (1989)—but these were accompanied by obdurate police and administrative non-application and followed by a persistent social backlash. Caste privilege adapted: open exclusion gave way to subtler forms of humiliation and violence disguised as defence of “tradition,” “honour,” or “religion.”

The post-2014 political climate added a new layer. In 1999, India had already experienced a glimpse of what was in store to come, when the National Democratic Alliance (in its first form) had the RSS-inspired Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) only as a minority. Yet, following the 2002 Gujarat pogrom, the ghastly lynching of five Dalit men in the village of Dulina, Jhajjar district, Haryana, after being falsely accused of cow slaughter, on October 15, 2002, shook the nation. A spate of such crimes continued and were documented.[2] The complicity of the police and the alleged involvement of far right organisations like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) was part of the details recorded.

The ascent of cultural majoritarianism, the mainstreaming of “Sanatani” rhetoric, and the weaponisation of social media have together normalised casteist discourse while weakening institutional checks. The result is not the re-emergence of caste, but its reconfiguration through new technologies, idioms, and legitimations.

The analysis of caste violence must recognise its escalating and diversifying trajectory. The attacks are no longer confined solely to remote rural pockets but have ascended a hierarchy of space and institution, moving from localised ritual control to sophisticated psychological control in urban institutions, and finally culminating in explicit political and ideological confrontation with the nation’s highest constitutional offices.

The sheer volume of reported cases underscores the crisis. According to National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data, in 2023, 57,789 cases of crimes against SCs were registered, a slight 0.4% increase from 57,582 cases in 2022. Looking at a wider period reveals a substantial escalation. A study by the Dalit Human Rights Defenders Network noted a 177.6% rise in crimes against SCs between 1991 and 2021.

This violence is not exclusive to villages; urban centres exhibit alarming rates. As per the statistics, Uttar Pradesh (15,130 cases) reported the highest number of crimes against SCs, followed by Rajasthan (8,449), Madhya Pradesh (8,232), and Bihar (7,064). Despite these statistics, the true incidence is severely underreported. Research suggests that only about 5% of assaults are officially recorded, often due to police indifference, bribery demands, or outright dismissal of complaints, particularly rape reports.

The structural progression of violence can be categorised across distinct spheres, illustrating the systemic nature of exclusion in the modern Republic.

Table 1: Typology of Caste Atrocities: The continuum of humiliation

Ground Zero: Traditional sites of visceral violence (village to street)

Despite rapid urbanisation, the village remains the most enduring theatre of caste violence. In rural Madhya Pradesh, Dalit families were beaten and their seeds confiscated for cultivating common land (July 2025); in Chhatarpur, twenty families faced social boycott for accepting prasad from a Dalit neighbour (January 2025). Similar patterns appear across Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Bihar.

1. Controlling the Essentials: Land, water, and ritual space

In rural India, the primary mechanisms of caste control revolve around denying access to essential resources and ritual spaces, thereby enforcing physical and ritual segregation. Access to water, a non-negotiable human right, remains violently conditional upon caste status. The case of the 8-year-old Dalit boy in Barmer, Rajasthan, who was severely beaten and hung upside down for touching a water pot intended for upper castes, is a visceral demonstration of this control (September 2025). Similarly, the suicide of the 12-year-old Dalit boy in Himachal Pradesh was a direct consequence of humiliation for trespassing on upper-caste property (October 2025).

Ritual spaces, intended to be public, are often violently guarded to enforce untouchability. Dalits have been barred from offering prayers at a Durga Puja Pandal in Madhya Pradesh (September 2025) and violently assaulted for attempting to enter a temple during a religious procession in Churu, Rajasthan (September 2025). The Madras High Court was recently compelled to intervene and issue instructions to the Tenkasi administration regarding the equitable distribution of water due to persistent caste bias, highlighting how essential services are used as weapons of caste control (July 2025). The requirement for police to guard a Dalit wedding in Gujarat, sometimes using drones, underscores the fragility of civil rights protection when faced with entrenched local hierarchy (May 2025).

2. Policing Dalit Assertion: Rites of passage and mobility

Caste violence is inherently triggered not just by deviation from purity codes but by the assertion of equality and self-respect. This is most vividly manifest in attacks aimed at policing Dalit mobility and rites of passage, particularly wedding processions (baraats).

The act of a Dalit groom riding a horse, traditionally reserved for dominant castes, often leads to violence. Incidents across Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan involve grooms being pulled off their horses and guests being attacked (February 2025). This violence becomes ideologically intensified when Dalit identity is asserted. In Mathura, a Dalit baraat was attacked with stones and sticks after the Thakur community objected to the playing of songs related to Dr. Ambedkar and the Jatav community (July 2025). This deliberate suppression of public visibility and self-respect confirms that the violence is preventative, aimed at suppressing any public display of Dalit parity, thereby revealing the fundamentally anti-democratic nature of caste control.

Furthermore, intimate choices that threaten the integrity of caste endogamy are met with brutal force. Honor killings and extreme violence against inter-caste relationships are widespread. A Dalit youth in Tamil Nadu was hacked to death over an inter-caste relationship, with his girlfriend implicating her own family. In another incident, a Dalit boy in Tamil Nadu was stripped, beaten, and subjected to caste slurs for meeting a Vanniyar girl. (July 2025) The alleged honour killing of a Dalit man in Pune over his marriage to a Maratha woman, characterised by his family as a caste murder, confirms that this policing of reproductive choices transcends the rural-urban divide (February 2025).

3. The geography of forced servitude and political disobedience

Economic empowerment and political participation by Dalits are routinely met with retributive violence designed to re-establish feudal control. Violence often flares up when Dalits refuse forced labour or assert their rights over agricultural resources. In Madhya Pradesh, a Dalit youth was brutally beaten and his house set ablaze for refusing to work as a labourer (August 2025). Other attacks have involved dominant caste men snatching seeds and assaulting Dalit families cultivating their land (June 2025).

The targeting extends explicitly to Dalit political empowerment. A Dalit woman Sarpanch and her husband in Rajasthan were attacked with an axe over disputes regarding MNREGA road work (June 2025). This illustrates that achieving political mobility through constitutional offices is tolerated only as long as it does not challenge the economic and social dominance of local power structures. When a Dalit woman attempts to administer public projects (MNREGA), the challenge to local caste authority is met with physical terror, fundamentally linking economic development to caste subjugation.

The Modern Crucible: Institutionalised discrimination (city to school)

Cities were once imagined as caste’s antithesis—sites of anonymity and merit. Yet attacks on Dalit wedding processions in Agra and Meerut, and stone-pelting during Ambedkar-Jayanti rallies in Rajasthan, show that urbanity merely relocates caste antagonism.

Public celebrations become battlegrounds for visibility. The sight of a Dalit groom on a horse, or the sound of Ambedkarite songs, is treated as provocation. The violence is performative: it polices who may occupy the street, who may celebrate publicly, and which forms of joy are legitimate. In several districts, local authorities have begun escorting Dalit weddings with police and drones—an image at once tragic and telling.

Urban caste violence underscores how modern citizenship collides with inherited status. It also demonstrates the selective nature of state protection: preventive deployment rather than structural reform, treating equality as an event to be managed, not a norm to be lived.

1. The Cost of Merit: Caste in elite academia

Caste discrimination has infiltrated the highest echelons of Indian society, shifting the site of exclusion from the village field to the university lecture hall, resulting in a disturbing incidence of student suicides. Elite educational institutions, far from being meritocratic safe spaces, operate under a constant atmosphere of systemic, psychological violence against marginalised students. This structural violence is enacted through ridicule, ostracism, administrative bias, and academic sabotage.

Between November and December 2025 itself, three deaths of Dalit students across India underscored the lethal intersection of caste discrimination, institutional neglect, and structural exclusion in educational spaces. On November 6, a 19-year-old Dalit student of Deshbandhu College, Delhi University, and sister of JNUSU presidential candidate Raj Ratan Rajoriya, was found dead in her Govindpuri rented flat, with BAPSA alleging grave procedural lapses by the police, absence of medical personnel and female officers, and broader “institutional apathy” by Delhi University, including its failure to provide adequate hostel accommodation for marginalised students, forcing them into unsafe and isolating housing conditions. On November 20, an 18-year-old Dalit student, S Gajini, from Government Arignar Anna Arts College in Villupuram, succumbed to injuries ten days after attempting suicide, allegedly driven by caste-based abuse and assault by men from a dominant caste following a road altercation; despite an FIR under the SC/ST Act, the accused remain unidentified. On December 12, a 17-year-old Dalit student at a DIET institute in Kurnool died by suicide after prolonged distress linked to her struggle with English-medium coursework, highlighting how language barriers, caste location, and lack of institutional academic support continue to disproportionately burden first-generation and marginalised learners.

The environment becomes hostile because of the active weaponisation of meritocracy. Dalit students are frequently taunted as “non-meritorious” or “quota products”. This psychological assault on their intellect and dignity constitutes epistemic violence, a modernised replacement for ritual pollution, turning academic spaces into sites of structural harassment.

Case studies vividly illustrate this pattern:

• Rohith Vemula, 2016 (Hyderabad University)[3]: Vemula’s administrative exclusion, which forced him and four others to sleep in a makeshift “Dalit ghetto,” was recognised by his peers as a modern form of villevarda. While his death sparked a national political movement, the later police closure report attempted to undermine the caste-based motivation by questioning his Scheduled Caste status, thereby reinforcing the pernicious stigma of “fake merit”.
• Darshan Solanki, 2023 (IIT Bombay)[4]: Solanki died by suicide after allegedly facing ostracisation and ridicule from peers for asking basic questions in technical subjects. The institutional response from IIT Bombay, which prematurely denied any caste discrimination before a full inquiry was completed, exemplified institutional denial and refusal to confront endemic caste bias.

This environment of toxic exclusion is responsible for widespread trauma, with reports indicating that 80% of suicides in seven IITs were committed by Dalit students. Furthermore, the bias extends beyond performance, affecting administrative representation. Ten Dalit professors at Bangalore University resigned from their administrative roles, citing discrimination. The perpetuation of this violence reveals a fundamental rigidity: caste acts as a boundary that professional success cannot breach.

Table 2: Manifestations of exclusion in educational institutions

 

2. Invisible Barriers: Urban exclusion and professional glass ceilings

For Dalits who successfully navigate the hostile academic environment and achieve high professional status, the violence persists, though it adopts subtler, institutionalised forms. This reality demonstrates that economic independence does not translate into the annihilation of caste.

The suicide of Dalit IPS officer Puran Kumar, who questioned unfair promotions and postings, tragically illustrated that rank and wealth do not grant immunity; caste prejudice penetrates the highest echelons of bureaucracy (October 2025). Similarly, a Dalit Assistant Professor at SV Veterinary University was subjected to public humiliation when his chair was allegedly removed, forcing him to perform his duties while sitting on the floor (June 2025).

Discrimination is also structural in the dynamic urban private sector. Research indicates that job applicants with a Dalit name face significant discrimination, having approximately two-thirds the odds of receiving an interview compared to dominant-caste Hindu applicants with equivalent qualifications. This demonstrates that social exclusion is not a rural remnant but is actively practiced in the most modern sectors of the economy. This systemic sabotage of upward mobility means that educational and professional achievements merely shift the form of violence from physical assault to debilitating psychological and institutional harassment.

3. The digitalisation of hate and incitement

The rise of digital media has provided a new, pervasive medium for the normalisation and amplification of caste hatred. Based on a 2019 report by the human rights organisation Equality Labs, caste-based hate speech was found to make up 13% of the hate content reviewed on Facebook India. This digital sphere has facilitated the de facto normalisation of caste-hate speech and is recognised as a medium for oppressing and humiliating Dalits.

This toxic online envionment is actively utilized by right-wing extremist organisations, which have grown in prominence, sometimes using platforms like Instagram to promote hateful content and even fundraising. Major digital platforms demonstrated a historical disregard for addressing this issue, taking years to incorporate “caste” as a protected characteristic in their hate speech policies, and often failing to list it as an option in their reporting forms.

This digital rhetoric creates a climate of ideological validation that can incite physical violence. Harassment campaigns against high-profile Dalit figures, such as the Chief Justice of India, function as a coordinated form of symbolic violence intended to normalise the rejection of constitutional equality and test the boundaries of legal impunity.

The Politicalisation of Caste Warfare: The current regime context

Beyond violence lies symbolic appropriation. Dalit culture—its festivals, songs, and icons—is increasingly commodified or sanitised within a homogenised “Sanatani” narrative. The exclusion of India’s tribal President from the Ram Mandir inauguration exemplifies this politics of selective inclusion: representation without recognition.

In West Bengal, the “vegetarianisation” of Durga Puja since 2019 reflects a subtler transformation. Non-Sanatani groups, including many Dalit and Bahujan communities, are labelled “non-sattvic,” their rituals cast as impure. This recoding of religiosity transforms caste into cultural hierarchy.

At the same time, Ambedkar’s image is everywhere—on posters, statues, and government programmes—yet his emancipatory thought is domesticated. The appropriation of Ambedkar without the politics of equality amounts to symbolic capture: a neutralised memory that conceals continuing oppression.

Cultural exclusion thus performs two contradictory gestures—erasure and incorporation—both of which depoliticise Dalit assertion while reaffirming upper-caste control over meaning.

1. The Rise of Neo-Traditionalism: Sanatana dharma and exclusion

The period following 2014 has been marked by a significant ideological shift, where the ruling party’s emphasis on Hindu nationalism has provided an explicit political and cultural sanction for traditional caste principles. The concept of Sanatana Dharma has become a central ideological tool. Critics argue that this philosophy inherently justifies and maintains the rigid caste hierarchy, contrasting sharply with the constitutional ideals of liberty and equality. Any critique of caste discrimination, such as those made by Udhayanidhi Stalin regarding the system prevalent in Sanatana Dharma, is immediately framed by the dominant political ecosystem as an attack on Hinduism, aimed at polarising the electorate.

This ideological polarisation was directly responsible for the attempted shoe attack on Chief Justice B.R. Gavai (October 2025). The attacker, Rakesh Kishore, specifically shouted, “Sanatan ka apmaan nahi sahenge” (We will not tolerate the insult of Sanatan Dharma). This action linked a perceived anti-Hindu judicial stance (related to the Khajuraho deity ruling) directly to the caste identity of the judge. The incident functioned as an ideological declaration: constitutional morality, when used by a Dalit judge to challenge majoritarian religious claims, is deemed an “insult” that must be violently resisted, placing religious tradition above constitutional law.

2. Selective appropriation of Ambedkar and Hindutva strategy

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its political affiliates have engaged in a sustained and deliberate political strategy to appropriate the legacy of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, primarily to secure electoral gains and neutralise the profound ideological threat his philosophy poses to the foundational principles of Hindutva.

This strategy involves selectively invoking aspects of Ambedkar’s life, such as his conversion to Buddhism, while simultaneously minimising or ignoring his radical denunciation of Hinduism as being incompatible with democratic values. The attempt is to portray Ambedkar as a “Hindu social reformer” rather than a foundational critic of the caste system, thereby drawing Dalit politics into a unified, but hierarchical, “Hindu” fold. This co-option strategy is further highlighted by political attempts to link Ambedkar to RSS founders, despite historical evidence to the contrary.

The tactical use of Ambedkar’s image is often contradicted by ground realities. For instance, symbolic gestures are performed alongside reported policy failures, such as the denial of scholarships to 3,500 Dalit students in Uttar Pradesh, forcing public condemnation from Dalit leaders (June 2025). This gap between rhetoric and action confirms that the strategy is one of symbolic integration designed to neutralise dissent, rather than a genuine commitment to substantive social justice.

3. Symbolic constitutional exclusion

The pattern of exclusion extends to high constitutional functionaries from marginalised communities. The noticeable absence of President Droupadi Murmu, an Adivasi (Scheduled Tribe) and the constitutional head of state, from the inauguration of the highly politicised Ram Mandir in Ayodhya was widely criticised by opposition leaders, who connected it to her earlier exclusion from the Parliament building inauguration.

Although President Murmu belongs to the Adivasi community, the incident forms part of a larger pattern of ritual exclusion of marginalised constitutional authorities from highly faith-based state functions. The event, serving as a defining moment for the new majoritarian ideology, suggests a reordering of constitutional hierarchy. The exclusion of the head of state, particularly one from a marginalised background, implies that ritual purity and majoritarian religious identity are positioned to supersede constitutional hierarchy and the democratic principle of representation.

The Assault on the Constitutional Apex: Targeting the judiciary

1. The CJI Incident: From judicial remark to caste attack

The attempted shoe attack on Chief Justice of India B.R. Gavai stands as the most explicit act of caste-based political defiance directed at the core institutions of the Republic. The violence was ideologically motivated, following the CJI’s remarks during a hearing about a Vishnu idol in Khajuraho.

The caste dimension was immediately clear. The ideological defence of the attacker, Rakesh Kishore, who invoked Sanatan Dharma, and the support of influential right-wing figures like YouTuber Ajeet Bharti, who called Gavai a “lousy, undeserving judge” and accused him of “anti-Hindu sentiments”, establishes a crucial political point. The attack was not aimed at judicial competence but at the perceived “anti-Sanatan” judicial decision, rooted in the judge’s Dalit identity. This confrontation establishes that challenging ritual caste authority through constitutional interpretation is now publicly deemed an act of ideological treason.

2. Impunity and state response

The response of the state apparatus to the assault and subsequent incitement has set a dangerous precedent of selective justice. The attacker, Rakesh Kishore, was released shortly after questioning because the CJI declined to press charges. Kishore subsequently expressed no remorse for his actions.

Crucially, those who digitally incited further violence were also handled with remarkable leniency. YouTuber Ajeet Bharti, who made provocative remarks about the CJI and allegedly suggested actions such as spitting on the judge, was briefly taken in for questioning by Noida Police but was not arrested and was later released.

This lenient approach towards both the physical attacker and the digital instigator demonstrates a deep political hesitation to punish ideologically driven attacks rooted in majoritarian caste sentiment, even when directed at the highest judicial authority. This establishes a political environment that minimises the gravity of such threats, potentially intimidating the judiciary and compromising its ability to enforce social justice laws without fear of retribution.

Gendered Violence and Custodial Deaths: The deepest layer of impunity

Caste and gender intersect to produce some of India’s most brutal crimes. Dalit women continue to face disproportionate sexual violence, often as retribution for asserting dignity or property rights. Cases from Uttar Pradesh’s Sitapur district (2023) and Madhya Pradesh’s Sidhi forest region (2024) illustrate patterns where rape is both punishment and warning.

Custodial deaths compound the pattern. Dalit men arrested on minor charges have died in custody under suspicious circumstances, their families alleging torture. Investigations are often perfunctory, medical reports delayed, and officers reinstated. Such cases demonstrate how state power fuses with social prejudice, converting constitutional guardians into instruments of caste discipline.

The intersection of caste and gender is absent from mainstream criminal jurisprudence. The law individualises crime; caste violence is collective. Without recognising this collective dimension, justice remains procedural rather than transformative.

Regional Patterns: The southern paradox

Contrary to common perception, official data and recent reportage show high incidence of atrocities in southern states—Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Kerala—regions long celebrated for social reform. The Thoothukudi incident (2023) and the string of attacks in Tirunelveli district (over 1,000 cases in five years) reveal both persistence and visibility.

This “southern paradox” has sociological roots: assertive Dalit movements and higher reporting rates coexist with dominant-caste backlash. Greater literacy and media presence ensure documentation but not necessarily deterrence. The violence is thus both a measure of progress (assertion) and of resistance (repression).

The Post-2014 Inflection: Normalisation and silence

The last decade marks a qualitative shift. Three developments stand out:

1. Cultural majoritarianism: The language of “Sanatan Dharma” has become a political grammar through which caste is re-inscribed as divine order. Public discourse valorises hierarchy as heritage.
2. Digital propagation: Organised online ecosystems amplify caste-coded slurs and mobilise outrage with unprecedented speed.
3. Institutional silence: From police stations to ministries, selective inertia signals tacit endorsement. Silence becomes policy.

This triad—rhetoric, technology, and silence—has rendered caste violence socially negotiable. The constitutional ethos of equality competes with a cultural ethos of graded dignity.

The Constitutional Abyss: Implications for the Indian republic

1. The Failure of the SC/ST (PoA) Act: Legal protections as fiction

The rampant escalation of violence highlights the systemic failure of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 (PoA Act). Designed as a potent legal shield, the Act is continually undermined by institutional resistance and poor enforcement, leading to low conviction rates.[5]

Police inaction is endemic; research documents the prevalent practice of police failing to register FIRs or prematurely closing cases through “Final Reports”. Despite the Supreme Court’s, clear directive that FIR registration is mandatory for cognizable offenses, police show a “differential stance” on enforcing the PoA Act compared to other statutes, demonstrating systemic bias in justice delivery.

Moreover, the state apparatus frequently operates as an agent of caste oppression. Incidents include police custody deaths of Dalit individuals, police brutality against a Dalit woman in Haryana, and officers being booked for assaulting a retired Dalit official. This pattern demonstrates that the constitutional mandate to protect Dalits is often betrayed by the very instruments of state power, rendering legal protections fictional.

The SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989 and its 2015 Amendment remain India’s most potent instruments against caste violence, yet enforcement deficits persist. The act mandates immediate FIR registration, establishment of special courts, and protection of victims. Ground reports show chronic under-registration, downgrading of charges, and police bias.

Judicial interpretation oscillates between protection and dilution. The Supreme Court’s 2018 Subhash Kashinath Mahajan judgment introduced safeguards against “false cases,” effectively softening arrest provisions until partially reversed by Parliament. This episode revealed how institutional anxiety about misuse can overshadow concern for victims’ safety.

At stake is not merely criminal justice but constitutional morality—Ambedkar’s phrase for the ethical framework that must animate state action. When police or courts treat caste violence as routine, they erode that morality. The Republic then survives in form but not in substance.

2. The conceptual meaning of exclusion and humiliation

The pervasive violence is structurally maintained through exclusion, which is the combined outcome of deliberate deprivation and systemic discrimination, preventing Dalits from exercising full economic, social, and political rights.

Humiliation serves as a continuous psychological weapon, seeking to deny the basic humanity of the Dalit individual and enforce ritual hierarchy. Whether through being stripped and beaten, forced into humiliating acts, or subjected to taunts questioning their merit, the goal remains the denial of constitutional dignity. Dr. Ambedkar’s formulation established that democracy requires the foundational principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. The evidence suggests that when Dalits attempt to live a democratic life—by asserting social equality (riding a horse), achieving academic merit (joining an elite institution), or claiming high constitutional office (CJI)—they are met with structural violence and, frequently, death. This structural opposition confirms that the traditional social order fundamentally rejects the core ethical commitments of the Indian Constitutional Republic.

Conclusion: Safeguarding constitutional morality

Philosophers from Avishai Margalit to Axel Honneth define humiliation as the denial of recognition essential to personhood. Caste violence operates precisely through such denial. Its power lies not only in inflicting pain but in publicly authorising inequality. When a Dalit child is beaten for entering a temple, or when a Chief Justice is abused online, the message is continuous: certain bodies remain conditional citizens. Humiliation thus functions as pedagogy—teaching both victim and perpetrator the limits of equality. To counter it requires more than punishment; it requires re-socialisation—a transformation of cultural consciousness that law alone cannot produce.

The investigation into the hierarchy of attacks against Dalits, tracing the violence from ritual control in the village to ideological confrontation at the highest constitutional levels, confirms a severe crisis of constitutional morality in India. The nature of caste warfare has transitioned from covert rural brutality to overt, high-profile ideological confrontations in the urban and judicial spheres. This escalation is profoundly enabled by a political climate that prioritises majoritarian traditionalism over the egalitarian principles of the Constitution. The targeting of a Dalit Chief Justice, sanctioned by ideological rhetoric and met with institutional leniency, signifies that the foundational democratic tenet of equality is now under explicit, active threat.

To address this existential challenge, a set of structural and policy reforms is necessary to transform nominal guarantees into substantive equality:

1. Mandatory and independent police accountability: Legislation must be introduced to mandate the immediate and unconditional registration of FIRs under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act for all cognizable offenses, coupled with the establishment of independent police accountability commissions with the authority to prosecute officers who violate or fail to enforce the Act.
2. Criminalising institutional caste bias: Stringent anti-discrimination laws, backed by criminal penalties, must be implemented across all educational, corporate, and governmental institutions to address structural and psychological harassment, ending the systemic institutional denial of caste discrimination.
3. Digital accountability for incitement: Robust legal and regulatory measures are necessary to hold social media platforms accountable for the unchecked proliferation of caste-based hate speech and the incitement of violence, recognising it as a direct threat to public order and democratic principles.

The escalation of caste violence against Dalits—from the exclusion of a child from water access to the political assault on the Chief Justice—is a gauge of the Republic’s health. If the judiciary cannot be protected from attacks based on the caste identity of its leader, the entire legal and democratic framework built to secure social justice stands compromised.

More than seventy-five years after independence, the Indian Republic stands at a moral crossroads. Formally, it is a constitutional democracy; substantively, it remains stratified by caste. The incidents chronicled in 2025 itsef—stretching from rural Madhya Pradesh to the Supreme Court’s digital corridors—suggest not an aberration but a continuum.

The question is therefore not whether caste survives, but how the state and society have adapted to its survival. The new architecture of attacks—spanning villages, cities, institutions, and cyberspace—reveals that violence and exclusion now coexist comfortably with democratic form.

Ambedkar warned that “Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic.” The task ahead is to deepen the soil—to cultivate a culture where dignity is not negotiable, where equality is not episodic, and where the law’s promise finally becomes social reality. Until then, every assault on a Dalit body, image, or word remains an assault on the Constitution itself.

References

Indian colleges are hotbeds of casteism. How can they do better? – The News Minute https://www.thenewsminute.com/news/indian-colleges-are-hotbeds-casteism-how-can-they-do-better-176683

Caste and the Dalits: An Introduction – Global Ministries https://www.globalministries.org/resource/caste-and-the-dalits-an-introduction/

A clash of ideologies: Why Ambedkar and Hindutva are poles apart – The Polity https://thepolity.co.in/article/173

Hate Speech against Dalits on Social Media – Brandeis Library Open Access Journals https://journals.library.brandeis.edu/index.php/caste/article/download/260/61/1048

View of Hate Speech against Dalits on Social Media: Would a Penny Sparrow be Prosecuted in India for Online Hate Speech? https://journals.library.brandeis.edu/index.php/caste/article/view/260/61

Caste-hate speech – International Dalit Solidarity Network
https://idsn.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Caste-hate-speech-report-IDSN-2021.pdf

Atrocities on Dalits in Contemporary India Even After 75 Years of Indian Independence https://ijfans.org/uploads/paper/5af7bf7ae1851636fe726333533b1c8b.pdf

Dalit scholar’s protest exposes casteism in India’s higher education – FairPlanet https://www.fairplanet.org/story/dalit-scholars-protest-exposes-casteism-in-indias-higher-education/

IIT-Bombay Dalit student death | Senior says Darshan Solanki felt alienated by roommate, https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/iit-bombay-dalit-student-death-senior-says-darshan-solanki-felt-alienated-by-roommate/article66611752.ece

Attack on CJI: Union MoS Athawale seeks SC/ST Act charges as BJP does a tightrope walk https://indianexpress.com/article/political-pulse/shoe-attack-cji-mos-athawale-sc-st-act-bjp-10298249/

Ram Mandir Invitation: NCP Leader Raises Concerns about Draupadi Murmu’s Exclusion,

https://www.epw.in/engage/article/rohith-vemula-foregrounding-caste-oppression#:~:text=Between%202016%20and%202021%20itself,death%20sparked%20a%20political%20movement.

Rohith Vemula: Foregrounding Caste Oppression in Indian Higher Education Institutions, https://www.epw.in/engage/article/rohith-vemula-foregrounding-caste-oppression

IIT Student Suicides: Curse Of Caste On Campus? | Left, Right & Centre – YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhDhIhQiRWQ

How many lives will it take before India acknowledges dominant caste hegemony in educational institutes? – Citizens for Justice and Peace
https://cjp.org.in/how-many-lives-will-it-take-before-india-acknowledges-dominant-caste-hegemony-in-educational-institutes/

India’s caste system: ‘They are trying to erase dalit history. This is a martyrdom, a sacrifice’ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/24/student-suicide-untouchables-stuggle-for-justice-india

Suicide by Dalit students in 4 years – The Hindu https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Madurai/suicide-by-dalit-students-in-4-years/article2425965.ece

Unveiling The Tragic Link: Caste Discrimination And Suicides In Higher Education https://theprobe.in/stories/unveiling-the-tragic-link-caste-discrimination-and-suicides-in-higher-education/

Urban Labour Market Discrimination – GSDRC
https://gsdrc.org/document-library/urban-labour-market-discrimination/

Indian women, Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims face discrimination in earnings and jobs: Oxfam report https://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2022/Sep/15/indian-women-dalits-adivasis-muslims-face-discrimination-in-earnings-and-jobs-oxfam-report-2498476.html

An Introduction to Right-Wing Extremism in India – ScholarWorks at UMass Boston, https://scholarworks.umb.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1809&context=nejpp

For far-right groups in India, Instagram has become a place to promote violence, report shows – PBS
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/for-far-right-groups-in-india-instagram-has-become-a-place-to-promote-violence-report-shows

Online caste-hate speech: Pervasive discrimination and humiliation on social media, https://teaching.globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/resources/online-caste-hate-speech-pervasive-discrimination-and-humiliation-social-media

Udayanidhi Stalin’s Critique of Sanatana Dharma – Two Articles – Janata Weekly
https://janataweekly.org/udayanidhi-stalins-critique-of-sanatana-dharma-two-articles/

The Eternal Discrimination Of Sanatana Dharma – Madras Courier, https://madrascourier.com/opinion/the-eternal-discrimination-of-sanatana-dharma/

Dr.Ambedkar, Sanatan Dharma and Dalit Politics – Countercurrents, https://countercurrents.org/2023/09/dr-ambedkar-sanatan-dharma-and-dalit-politics/

(PDF) The attack on the CJI and the shadow of caste – ResearchGate https://www.researchgate.net/publication/396310357_The_attack_on_the_CJI_and_the_shadow_of_caste

Right-wing influencer Ajeet Bharti faces scrutiny online after ‘shoe attack’ on CJI Gavai, https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/after-shoe-attack-on-cji-right-wing-youtuber-ajeet-bharti-faces-scrutiny-online-101759830247046.html

RSS and Ambedkar: A Camaraderie That Never Existed – Janata Weekly, https://janataweekly.org/rss-and-ambedkar-a-camaraderie-that-never-existed/

From criticism to praise: How RSS changed stance on Ambedkar – Deccan Herald, https://www.deccanherald.com/india/from-criticism-to-praise-how-rss-changed-stance-on-ambedkar-3492843

Appropriating Ambedkar: Effort to merge Left and Ambedkarite politics – The Hindu, https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/appropriating-ambedkar-effort-to-merge-left-and-ambedkarite-politics/article8500076.ece

RSS At 100 And The Philosophy Of A Nation’s Unmaking – OpEd – Eurasia Review, https://www.eurasiareview.com/08102025-rss-at-100-and-the-philosophy-of-a-nations-unmaking-oped/

Who Is Ajeet Bharti? YouTuber Questioned After Controversial Comments On CJI Shoe Attack https://zeenews.india.com/india/who-is-ajeet-bharti-youtuber-questioned-after-controversial-comments-on-cji-shoe-attack-2969348.html

Why did Noida Police question Ajeet Bharti? What he commented on CJI BR Gavai after ‘shoe attack’ | Latest News India – Hindustan Times
https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/why-did-noida-police-question-ajeet-bharti-what-he-commented-on-cji-br-gavai-after-shoe-attack-101759894807122.html

Prof Abhay Dubey on Ajit Bharti Arrested for Inciting Violence Against CJI Gavai after Shoes Hurled – YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqpJ8s7HZhk

YouTuber Ajeet Bharti Taken in for Questioning After Remarks on CJI Shoe Incident, Released Later – LawBeat
https://lawbeat.in/news-updates/youtuber-ajeet-bharti-taken-in-for-questioning-after-remarks-on-cji-shoe-incident-released-later-1533340

‘Final Reports’ under Sec-498A and the SC/ST Atrocities Act | Economic and Political Weekly, https://www.epw.in/journal/2014/41/commentary/final-reports-under-sec-498a-and-scst-atrocities-act.html

Dalits and Social Exclusion: An Overview – International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR)
https://www.ijsr.net/archive/v8i7/ART20199584.pdf

India Exclusion Report 2013-2014 – Selected caste extracts
https://idsn.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/India-Exclusion-Report-2013-Selected-caste-extracts.pdf

The Death of a Dalit in a Democracy – Caste – The India Forum, https://www.theindiaforum.in/caste/death-dalit-democracy

[1] This body of work is also a major source for stories and protest songs (Qawwali) that focus on anti-caste movements and give voice to Dalit struggles wherein the broom and pot would be consistent imagery for this protest tradition.

[2] https://www.hrw.org/reports/2007/india0207/6.htm; https://frontline.thehindu.com/social-issues/article30193600.ece#:~:tex….

[3] https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/we-all-failed-rohith/

[4] https://cjp.org.in/iit-mumbai-report-on-darshan-solanki-death-crucial-e…

[5] https://sabrang.com/cc/archive/2005/mar05/cover.html

Courtesy: Sabrang India

Republic-Day Special: 

'We, The People' And The Republic Of India At 77

Contemporary political realities, including centralisation, the use of constitutional provisions, and debates over secularism, continue to test the promises of Justice, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity embedded in the opening words: “We, the People of India.”

Ainnie Arif
Updated on: 27 January 2026 

Outlook News

The Preamble of India Photo: wiki commons


Summary of this article


India’s Republic was shaped by a long constitutional journey, from the 1929 call for Purna Swaraj and the first Independence Day on January 26, 1930, to the adoption of the Constitution


Foundational debates on equality, federalism and the balance of power between the Centre and the states reflected deep anxieties after Independence.


It produced a Constitution that envisioned a strong Centre while warning against over-centralisation.

Every year, as Republic Day passes, the country is swept up in familiar scenes of celebration: patriotic songs blare from radios, billboards shift to the tricolour, television channels air films steeped in nationalism, and schoolchildren return from Republic Day functions with hands full of ladoos.

Much has been said about Republic Day and its significance, a truth we carried with us long before we learned to grasp its meaning. This year marks India’s 77th Republic Day, commemorating the day the Constitution of India came into force on January 26, 1950, formally establishing the nation as a ‘Sovereign Democratic Republic’.

BR Ambedkar led a key seven-member committee tasked with drafting one of the world’s lengthiest constitutional documents, comprising 395 provisions.

Between India’s independence and the coming into force of the Constitution, a 299-member Constituent Assembly laboured through the upheavals of Partition, communal violence, and the immense task of an ancient civilisation remaking itself into a young, emerging democracy.
Related Content

R-Day Special: What Does the Constitution Mean to Us, Really? A Teenager’s Republic Day

The Invisibles: Outlook Chronicles How Caste Shapes India


Minimum Marxism: Reclaiming Class Politics


Left’s Caste Blind Spot: Ambedkar And His Criticism of The Circle Of 'Brahmin Boys'

Are We There Yet? Reflections On International Day Of Democracy


The final version of the Constitution was signed by members of the Assembly on January 24, 1950 and came into force two days later with a 21-gun salute and the unfurling of the Indian National Flag by Dr Rajendra Prasad.

The Constitution now lays the foundation of democracy in the country. Yet, the journey from Independence to becoming a Republic was long, shaped by defining national moments and urgent calls for momentum, before it finally found expression in the opening words of the Preamble: “We, the People of India.”

The road to the Republic began with a decisive shift in political demands. In 1929, the Indian National Congress, meeting at its historic Lahore session, adopted the call for Purna Swaraj, or complete independence. This came after negotiations between Indian leaders and the British collapsed over the question of granting India dominion status.

The immediate backdrop was the Irwin Declaration of October 31, 1929, issued by Lord Irwin, then Viceroy of India. Framed as a conciliatory gesture, the declaration sought to reassure Indian nationalists that Britain intended, at some point, to help India attain dominion status within the British Empire. However, conveniently, it offered no clear timeline.

Earlier, the Nehru Report of 1928 had articulated the demand for dominion status, stating that India should enjoy the same constitutional position within the British Empire as Canada or Australia. While such demands had surfaced intermittently in the early decades of the 20th century, they gained wider acceptance only after the Government of India Act, 1919, which reshaped India’s constitutional framework without granting real self-rule.


The Irwin Declaration itself was a brief, five-line statement written in simple, non-legal language. Its vagueness, lack of concrete actions and backlash in England frustrated Indian leaders.

Dr. Ambedkar, The Architect Of Inclusive Indian Nationalism

With only half-promises on the table, the nationalist leadership abandoned the demand for dominion status and instead raised the call for Purna Swaraj—complete and uncompromising independence. January 26, 1930, was declared the first Independence (Swarajya) Day and was to be observed across the country.

At midnight on New Year’s Eve, Jawaharlal Nehru, then President of the Indian National Congress, hoisted the tricolour on the banks of the Ravi in Lahore, marking a turn in India’s freedom struggle that eventually led to its independence and declaration of a Republic almost two decades later, however, not without its contradictions.

Ambedkar, Chairman of the Drafting Committee, himself stated how with India becoming a Republic, “we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality, and in social and economic life, we will have inequality.”

In his historic November 25, 1949, speech to the Constituent Assembly, Ambedkar said that the real credit for preparing the draft of the Constitution should first go to B.N. Rao and then to the main draftsman, S.N. Mukherji.

Ambedkar, an advocate of revolutionary state socialism in the Constitution, said: How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life? If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril.

Another major debate centred on federalism. The Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946 proposed a “federal union” in which the Centre would control only three subjects — defence, external affairs and communication — while the provinces retained all remaining powers. However, Partition in 1947 and its violent aftermath forced a rethinking of this model, leading to the idea of “a federation with a strong Centre”.

This shift was reflected in the Constituent Assembly debates. Veteran Bihar leader Brajeshwar Prasad warned against excessive provincial autonomy, stating, “I am opposed to federalism because I fear that with the setting up of semi-sovereign part-states, centrifugal tendencies will break up Indian unity.”

At the same time, concerns were raised about excessive centralisation. Congress leader T T Krishnamachari urged to outline a three criteria test for states: “states must exercise compulsive power in the enforcement of a given political order”; that “these powers must be regularly exercised over all the inhabitants of a given territory”; and, most importantly, “that the activity of the State must not be completely circumscribed by orders handed down for execution by the superior unit.”

Ambedkar clarified that the “basic principle of federalism” lay in the division of “legislative and executive authority” between the Centre and the states, a division made “not by any law to be made by the Centre but the constitution itself.”

Article 1 of the Constitution describes India as a “Union of States”, notably avoiding the word ‘federal’. Powers are clearly distributed through the Union, State and Concurrent Lists. Yet this arrangement has drawn criticism, particularly because the Centre can dominate the Concurrent List and, under certain conditions, legislate on State List subjects.

Ambedkar cautioned against over-centralisation, warning during the debates, “We must resist the tendency to make it (Centre) strong. It cannot chew more than it can digest. Its strength must be commensurable to its weight.”

These issues acquire even greater relevance in the present context, with the government at the Centre also ruling a majority of states, and with the use of provisions such as Article 359. In an era of superseding political mandates and governments that seem to conveniently amend the Constitution, it becomes important to ask who “we”, as a Republic, truly are — the “we” who give voice to the opening words of the Preamble of India.

9
Politics of Petals: When A Secular Festival Becomes Inconvenient


At Outlook Magazine, we've asked the question: How far have we come and which are the challenges before the Repubic?


In our issue dated February 28, 2022, we examined the debates on federalism and sought to understand how this struggle has been shaped in recent times.

In 'Renegotiating India’s Federal Compact’, Yamini Aiyar wrote how this model of federalism, with a strong Union and intergovernmental dependence, served India well, despite routine misuse of its powers by the Union.

However, “the emergence of BJP as a single party majority in 2014 has fundamentally changed that federal bargain, both because it has put a pause to the increased presence of regional parties in national politics, but also because the BJP’s penchant for centralisation has opened new sites of contestation in India’s federal bargain. Thus, federalism today is both more vulnerable and unexpectedly more resilient.”

In Right In The Centre, Harish Khare notes the historicity of India's Constitution and its implementation in varying socio-political realities; alongside workability of the States and the Centre.

“As a primary covenant, the Constitution prescribed as well as proscribed working of a few basic relationships: The Union and the States, the Centre and the Periphery, the State and the Citizens, the Majority and the Minorities; and, the Executive-Judiciary; each rel­ationship is defined by limits, to be observed by all constitutional players. The framers had aimed for a dyn­amic equilibrium as we would undertake the task of cobbling together a modern state and a vibrant political community.”

Another debate revolved around the inclusion of the word secularism. In Outlook Magazine’s November 21, 2022 issue, The Secularism Question, Abhik Bhattacharya writes about the beginning of the debate, with discussions on concepts of secularism to God to Power Politics as A Test Of Indian Secularism.

H.V. Kamath started the discussion by moving an amendment that proposed to start the Preamble with ‘In the name of God’. Following Kamath, Shibban Lal Saksena and Pandit Govind Malviya also moved similar amendments and said that it was under no circumstances ‘anti-secular’ and of ‘narrow, sectarian spirit’ as termed by Pandit H.N. Kunzru. Rather, citing the use of the word ‘God’ in the Preamble of the Irish Constitution, Malviya said that by invoking phrases like “By the grace of the Supreme Being, lord of the universe, called by different names by different peoples of the world”, they were not sanctifying God of any particular religion and hence must not be considered contrary to the spirit of secularism.

SY Quraishi speaks of the viability of the India’s secular tradition and its commitment to diversity in ‘A Walk Through The Several Decades Of Indian Secularism’.

“Constitutional secularism is of immense import to our notions of citizenship, nationality and civic freedom. Apart from the obvious effects that a crisis in secularism is registering in the electoral realm, we must also pay attention to how that crisis is creeping into other sectors of our nation’s life, ranging from our national media to education to the everyday life of a citizen.”

The questions of secularism, its inclusion in the Preamble through a constitutional amendment, and the rise of right-wing politics in India have deeply shaped the functioning of the Republic. These shifts have had tangible consequences, with minorities and marginalised communities often finding themselves struggling to access the Justice, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity promised by the Constitution.

Published At: 26 January 2026 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Hinduism Is Fascism