Caste as Structural Violence: Dalit-Led Media Exposes Brahminical-Capitalist Nexus Perpetuating Graded Inequality
Original framing: “Play and Ploy of Caste: Where Does It End?” — bing news
The interview format centers articulate Dalit intellectuals but silences: Manual scavengers — 58,000 identified in 2018 survey, 97% Dalit, 80% women, dying at 32 years average age (SKA 2020); Dalit trans persons — excluded from both hijra gharanas and Dalit movements, facing 'double untouchability'; Devadasi/Jogini system survivors — 80,000+ Dalit girls dedicated to temples in Karnataka/Andhra, legally banned but socially enforced; Musahar 'rat-eaters' of Bihar — 99% landless, literacy 9%, living outside even Dalit solidarity networks. The 2020 Hathras gang-rape victim's family was denied last rites by UP police — the state itself performing caste violence. These voices require not 'inclusion' but epistemic authority over policy.
Caste is not a cultural relic but a living political economy — a 3,000-year-old technology of labor extraction that mutated through Mughal mansabdari, British colonial census science, and now neoliberal gig algorithms.
The Mooknayak's interview surfaces Dalit testimony but the systemic insight requires connecting Ravidas's 15th-century 'Begumpura' to the 2022 IFAT study proving caste-coded delivery apps, linking the 1927 Mahad water satyagraha to the 2020 Hathras denial of last rites, and recognizing that Ambedkar's 1956 Buddhist conversion was not religious escape but the only successful mass spiritual secession from caste Hinduism. The trickster reads the 'play and ploy' as the system's fatal vulnerability: caste requires the scavenger's belief in pollution to function; when the scavenger refuses, the joke collapses. Solutions exist in constitutional provisions (Article 39, 300A), historical precedents (Kerala land reform, Buraku Liberation Law), and living movements (SKA, Dalit women's federations) — what's missing is the savarna political will to stop performing 'merit' and start returning stolen life.