Jagjivan Ram To Kharge The Distance Not Covered

The chilling incident in Haldwani reminds us that caste prejudice will not die until the system itself is throttled. It will show up again and again, like a shapeshifting virus, not just in the meetings of Dalit leaders but in the everyday lives of millions — in schools, playgrounds, offices and temples. Caste in India is the most perverse project of humiliation ever conceived, and in 2026, it is alive and well.

The Haldwani purification rite, after Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge had left the stage, has a personal resonance. In 1978, when my grandfather Babu Jagjivan Ram was deputy prime minister, he went to Banaras to inaugurate the statue of Sampurnanand, an upper-caste Kayastha leader who had been CM of Uttar Pradesh in the 1950s. The venue was at the entrance of Sampurnanand Sanskrit Vishwavidyalaya.

As Jagjivan Ram arrived, the atmosphere was tense with the sneers of right-wing student groups and caste Hindus. The paradox of an overachieving Dalit man, wielding great power and turning the caste dharma on its head, was the stinging point. As soon as the statue was garlanded, casteist insults were hurled at my grandfather for having defiled the statue of a venerated Hindu elite. After the event, the statue was smeared with cow dung and washed with gangajal amid the chanting of Vedic verse.

The incident made national news. In the following session of Parliament, there was an uproar across party lines — from the ruling Janata Party and the Congress opposition — followed by speeches of condemnation, apologies, and demands for inquiry and punishment. Jagjivan Ram is believed to have stayed silent as the debates raged for two days, but one of his comments echoes the sentiment of Congress President Kharge on Haldwani: If this could happen to him in his position, then what is the day-to-day plight of ordinary Dalits? As was the case then, Parliament needs to suspend all else and debate casteism again, particularly because it’s 48 years later. Casteism collapses the concept of time and makes it dysfunctional. Regrettably, the reverse is not true.

For the pro-caste warriors, of whom there are far too many, there was a danger that prejudice was flatlining or sub-optimal. That the Haldwani incident came after the Jantar Mantar protests may not be a coincidence. “Gen Z” may be a temporal category, but these socially diverse protestors had deep ideological moorings and awareness. Social justice and inclusivity seemed fundamental to the agitation even though the immediate target was the paper leaks. To the upholders of classical dharma, irreverent, wokeish interlopers, especially masses of youngsters, were dangerous and needed to be dealt with. The recently whitewashed NCERT textbooks that blanked out the existence of caste-based prejudice altogether had clearly not made any impact. Which is why there has been a concerted effort by caste votaries and saffron groups to politely reach out to the protestors, hoping to co-opt them. Others in Haldwani have had to enact de-contamination rituals as a symbolic assertion of caste power and a warning to potential disrupters. Both reactions have a common impulse.

In liberal circles, there has always been talk about ending discrimination and bigotry, most of it insincere, some patronising, some even well-meaning. But this misses the point. It is the caste system that is the head of the snake; all discrimination flows from it. It is this that must go. Perhaps this defining generation will decide its future.

The writer is national spokesperson, Congress