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.
One might think that the Republic of India should be able to muster such cooperation. But for the caste Hindus, what does 'republic' really mean for them? What do notions of equality, liberty and especially fraternity mean for them? These are the same people who shouted the loudest about apartheid in South Africa, the same people who work themselves into a frenzy when their compatriots are beaten up in Australia and elsewhere, yet they are largely uncaring, or even applaud, when Dalit students in India's premier medical university are segregated and beaten.
At the same time, the dystopian Republic of India has an outstanding Constitution, authored by a genius forged in the crucible of caste discrimination. And it was this genius, again, that foretold the rest, for B R Ambedkar himself observed that political equality meant nothing if there was no social equality.