Crime Without Punishment

The system protects those who commit caste violence while blaming victims for asserting dignity

- By Anand Teltumbde

WITHIN the span of days, two incidents have laid bare the entrenched caste realities of contemporary India and the impunity that the Hindutva regime has institutionalised.

On October 6, 2025 a 71-year-old lawyer hurled a shoe at Chief Justice of India B.R. Gavai, a Dalit, inside the Supreme Court, defiantly shouting “Sanatan ka apmaan nahi sahega Hindustan” (India will not tolerate insult to Sanatan Dharma). He was released without charges, his shoe returned, facing no consequences for attacking the country’s highest judicial authority. The very next day, October 7, Additional Director General of Police Y. Puran Kumar, also a Dalit, died by suicide at his Chandigarh residence, leaving an eight-page note describing years of caste humiliation and harassment by senior officers. Despite huge public outrage, nothing has been done to the perpetrators.

These two events, occurring within 24 hours, are not aberrations but revelations of a deeper malaise—the normalisation of caste violence and Brahminical supremacy under a majoritarian Hindutva order that has erased accountability for crimes committed in the name of Sanatan Dharma or Hindu honour. One incident reflects physical assault on a Dalit constitutional authority without reprisal; the other, psychological persecution that drove a senior officer to death. Together, they expose an ecosystem where Dalits—irrespective of office, achievement, or rank—remain vulnerable to humiliation and violence sanctioned by ideological impunity.

These are not isolated tragedies but logical outcomes of the Hindutva project that the ruling regime has consolidated over the past decade—an order that weaponises religion to defend caste and punishes dignity itself.

The Shoe That Revealed Everything