All that ails this civilisation – the inequality, the poverty, the filth – is because of caste. So too the violence, subterranean sometimes but always palpable, ready to surface. Every day, even sixty full years after Independence, the sun sets in India on a landscape disfigured by violence, a violence perpetrated by caste Hindus on people they consider 'untouchable'. Physical violence, psychological violence, the violence of enforced separation, of enforced poverty, the violence of hunger and despair: for 200 million Dalits and 50 million Adivasis, India is an intensely violent land.
In his monumental A Study of History, A J Toynbee points out that civilisations have always disintegrated because of internal strife. When it came, the external blow was only the coup de grace, the final act in a long series of catastrophes caused by crises within. Indic civilisation, founded on Hindu notions of 'graded inequality', has always been vulnerable. Yet besieged as it is today by external threats both real and imagined, and impending ecological collapse, India will require all of its citizens to stand shoulder to shoulder and work together for the common good.