Akhilesh Kumar
Two days after Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge addressed a public rally at Haldwani’s Ramlila Maidan in Uttarakhand on August 8, a shuddhikaran havan was conducted at the same venue. Members of the Shri Ram Sena Dharmarth Seva Nyas Sangathan performed the ritual to purify the site. The organisation cited the slogans raised at the rally and Kharge’s criticism of the BJP and RSS as its justification for the ceremony. But a political disagreement does not make a public space impure, and it certainly does not justify cleansing a venue after it has been used by a person from the Dalit community. The act reproduced the caste logic of purity and pollution that lies at the heart of untouchability. Kharge subsequently raised the matter in the Rajya Sabha, calling it an experience of untouchability and humiliation and seeking action under the law.
The incident should be called what it is: an expression of caste-based untouchability. The fact that the organisers offered a political justification does not erase the social meaning of the act. A public space was subjected to a ritual of purification after a political event addressed by a person from the Dalit community. In a society where Dalit communities have historically been treated as polluting and subjected to exclusion on that basis, such a ritual reproduces an idea that should have no place in a democratic society. Political disagreement can be answered with argument, protest, or criticism. It cannot justify treating a space as impure because of who has occupied it.
The Politics of Purification
Purification is never simply about cleanliness. It establishes a boundary between what is considered pure and what is considered impure. In the caste order, this distinction has historically been imposed upon human beings themselves. Certain communities were treated as closer to ritual purity, while others were placed at the bottom of the hierarchy and treated as polluting. Their touch, presence and proximity were regulated accordingly. The Haldwani incident brings this logic into a contemporary public space. A person from the Dalit community addressed a political gathering, and the venue was subsequently subjected to a purification ritual. The symbolism is unmistakable: something associated with the event was treated as requiring cleansing. When such a ritual follows the presence of a person from a community historically subjected to notions of pollution, it reproduces the very social imagination that sustains untouchability. This is why the incident deserves criticism not merely as an act of political provocation, but as an act that reproduces caste hierarchy. It is not necessary for the organisers to explicitly announce that Kharge’s caste was the reason for the purification for the caste meaning of the act to matter. Caste often survives through symbols, rituals and practices whose social meaning is inherited from a much longer history. The caste system does not merely divide society into communities. It ranks those communities. The distinction between purity and pollution has historically provided one of the mechanisms through which this ranking is maintained. It determines who can enter certain spaces, who can share food and water, whose touch is acceptable, whose presence is welcome, and whose presence must be kept at a distance.
The most disturbing feature of this system is that impurity is attached to birth. A person is not treated as impure because of an individual action but because of the caste into which they were born. Caste therefore turns social difference into inherited hierarchy and makes inequality appear natural.
Untouchability is the most brutal expression of this logic. It transforms the body into a marker of social status. The question is no longer simply who a person is as an individual, but what caste the person’s body is understood to represent. When a public space is purified after a person from the Dalit community has occupied it, the act invokes this same logic. It suggests that the presence of a particular social body has altered the status of the space. That is the caste imagination that must be confronted.
Sacred and Profane
The distinction between the sacred and the profane provides another way to understand why purification is so significant. Societies create boundaries around what they consider sacred, pure, and worthy of protection. The problem begins when these boundaries are transferred from objects and rituals to human beings. Caste has historically transformed this distinction into a social hierarchy. Some communities have been positioned closer to what is considered sacred, while others have been associated with pollution and pushed away from spaces of ritual and social purity. The distinction between sacred and profane consequently becomes a distinction between people. The Haldwani ritual reproduces the danger of this logic. A political venue, which should belong equally to all citizens, becomes a space that is symbolically purified after a person from the Dalit community has spoken there. The public sphere is thus made to carry an old caste boundary: some presences are accepted as legitimate, while another presence is treated as something from which the space must be cleansed. A democratic society cannot accept such a hierarchy. No citizen’s caste can make a public space sacred or profane. No person’s presence can make a venue impure. The moment society accepts such an idea, it has already moved away from equality.
Caste has always operated through a paradoxical relationship between inclusion and exclusion. Those at the bottom of the caste order are not completely outside society. They are made part of society, but kept apart within it. Their labour is required, their social roles are defined, and their presence is necessary to the functioning of society, yet their equality is denied.
This is the deeper meaning of untouchability. It does not simply expel a person from society. It incorporates them on unequal terms. A person can be part of the village but kept apart from its common spaces. They can contribute labour but be denied dignity. They can be a citizen under the Constitution but remain socially marked by caste. The Haldwani incident exposes this contradiction in a contemporary setting. A person from the Dalit community can occupy a public stage and exercise political rights, yet the purification of that venue afterwards symbolically places his presence on the other side of a caste boundary. He is included in the political event but symbolically kept apart from the imagined order of purity.
That is how caste survives: not always by keeping people completely outside, but by determining the unequal terms on which they are allowed to belong.
The Myth of Individual Advancement
The presence of a small number of people from the Dalit community in prominent positions is sometimes presented as evidence that caste is disappearing. This is a misleading conclusion. The exceptional advancement of a few individuals cannot be equated with the emancipation of a community. There are people from the Dalit community who have achieved significant political, professional, academic, and institutional positions. These achievements matter, but they do not erase the structural inequalities that continue to affect millions of people from Dalit communities. Access to education, employment, land, political power, social dignity and public resources remains deeply unequal. Individual mobility therefore cannot be mistaken for collective transformation. The fact that a few individuals cross institutional boundaries does not mean that caste itself has been dismantled. Kharge’s position makes this contradiction particularly visible. His political authority is considerable, but the incident demonstrates that institutional status does not automatically erase caste identity. The fact that a person from the Dalit community can occupy a prominent political position and still be subjected to an act rooted in the logic of purity and pollution exposes the limits of representation as a measure of social equality. Political representation matters. It gives historically excluded communities a voice in institutions and can challenge the monopoly of dominant social groups over political power. But representation alone cannot annihilate caste. The presence of a few individuals from the Dalit community in powerful institutions should therefore not be presented as proof that caste has disappeared. It is possible for institutional inclusion and social exclusion to coexist. A person can be politically powerful and still be socially marked by caste. This is the central contradiction exposed by the Haldwani incident. Political democracy recognises the individual as an equal citizen, while caste society continues to interpret the individual through inherited social categories. One system says that citizenship is equal; the other continues to ask which caste a person belongs to.
The problem is therefore not simply that more people from Dalit communities need to be represented. The deeper problem is that representation must be accompanied by a transformation of the social relations through which caste hierarchy is reproduced. This is where B.R. Ambedkar’s critique of caste remains indispensable. Ambedkar understood that political democracy could not survive without social democracy. Constitutional rights and political representation are necessary, but they cannot by themselves transform a society organised through graded inequality. Article 17 abolished untouchability. But the legal abolition of untouchability does not automatically eliminate the social consciousness that produces it. A law can prohibit a practice; it cannot instantly erase the ideas of purity, pollution, hierarchy and inherited status that have been reproduced over generations. Ambedkar’s challenge was therefore much deeper than political representation. It was the annihilation of caste itself. That requires not merely changing who occupies institutions, but changing the social relations through which human beings recognise one another. The Haldwani incident demonstrates why that project remains unfinished. The Constitution recognises every citizen as equal, yet caste continues to produce distinctions between those who are considered pure and those who are considered polluted, between those who are allowed proximity and those who are expected to remain apart.
Political Disagreement Cannot Become Caste Purification
The organisers may provide political reasons for conducting the ritual. But those reasons cannot make the act acceptable. A political speech can be criticised. A slogan can be opposed. A political leader can be challenged. None of these requires a purification ritual. The decision to purify a public venue transforms political disagreement into an act of cleansing. It takes the dispute out of the realm of political argument and places it within a symbolic framework of purity and impurity. That is precisely why the incident is casteist in its social meaning. The act reproduces a hierarchy in which impurity must be removed and purity restored. When this takes place after the presence of a person from a community historically subjected to untouchability, the caste implications are unavoidable. Democracy depends upon disagreement. Caste depends upon hierarchy. The former can tolerate difference; the latter converts difference into graded inequality. The Haldwani incident shows what happens when the language of caste hierarchy enters a space that should belong equally to all citizens.
The Haldwani incident should therefore not be treated as a minor political controversy or as an isolated ritual. It is a stark reminder that caste survives not only through explicit exclusion but also through the symbolic boundaries that continue to organise social life. The purification of the venue after Kharge’s rally reproduced the logic of purity and pollution. It placed a public space within a hierarchy of sacred and profane and, symbolically, treated the presence of a person from the Dalit community as something that required cleansing. That is fundamentally incompatible with the principle of equality. The issue is not whether a few individuals from the Dalit community have reached positions of prominence. The issue is whether caste has ceased to determine the social meaning of their presence. The Haldwani incident tells us that it has not.
The Constitution abolished untouchability, but the struggle against caste requires more than legal prohibition. It requires dismantling the social imagination that divides people into the pure and the polluted, the sacred and the profane, those who can belong without qualification and those who are made part of society only while being kept apart.
The real test of equality is therefore not whether a person from the Dalit community can reach the political stage. It is whether, once they leave it, anyone still believes that the stage has been contaminated by their presence.
Until that belief disappears, the struggle against caste remains unfinished.
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Akhilesh Kumar is a PhD Research Scholar at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, an Ambedkarite activist, and an independent writer.
Image courtesy: Wiki
