“Tell everyone we scalped you,” Sardar Singh Jatav recalled a group of upper caste men as having told him while they pinned him down, broke his arm and shaved his forehead. He was brutalised﹘when he had gone to talk to his son’s upper caste employers﹘only because he is a member of the Dalit community, treated as pariahs for centuries.
This incident from September 2018 was just one among 4,15,821 cases of violence against Dalits that took place between 2011 and 2020, according to data from the National Crime Records Bureau. But these figures merely present a slice of the actuality; the systematic and daily subversion of the basic rights of Dalits that socially excludes and accommodates violence against them is ingrained in the very atom of Indian society, even in the 21st century.
