Can Untouchability Be Ritualistic?

Shaleen Mahajan

The reported “shuddhikaran” of a venue in Haldwani following Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge’s rally raises a constitutional question beyond the political contest between the BJP and the Congress. If the allegations are established and the purification was undertaken because Mr. Kharge is a Dalit and his presence was regarded as polluting, the episode raises a difficult question that can untouchability manifest itself symbolically or ritually even when a Dalit person is neither denied entry nor physically excluded from a public space? The issue is not to pronounce the incident an act of untouchability before its facts are established but to examine what the constitutional prohibition means when caste-based ideas of impurity may be expressed through conduct rather than an explicit denial of access.

Article 17  does not merely discourage untouchability or leave its abolition to social reform. It abolishes untouchability and prohibits its practice “in any form”. The breadth of this language is significant. It reflects the Constitution’s categorical rejection of a social order in which birth could determine a person’s status, dignity and access to ordinary civil life.

The constitutional prohibition was followed by the Untouchability (Offences) Act, 1955, subsequently strengthened and renamed the Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955. The legislation was designed to address disabilities imposed on the ground of untouchability including religious and social restrictions, denial of access to public facilities, refusal of services and other forms of exclusion. Its purpose was not simply to penalise physical segregation but to protect equal enjoyment of civil rights against practices rooted in untouchability.

Section 12 of the Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955 is relevant where alleged conduct is symbolic rather than conventionally exclusionary. It creates a presumption in specified circumstances where an act constituting an offence under the Act is committed in relation to a member of a Scheduled Caste. Where its statutory conditions are satisfied, the court may presume, unless the contrary is proved, that the act was committed on the ground of untouchability. The provision recognises the evidentiary difficulty in establishing the caste-based basis of conduct and places that question within a statutory framework rather than leaving it entirely to inference.

Caste-based exclusion was never confined to literal avoidance of physical contact. Ideas of purity and pollution formed part of the social logic through which caste hierarchy was maintained. They influenced where people could go, whom they could interact with, which facilities they could use and how they were treated in social and religious life. Dalits were excluded from temples, wells, schools, public spaces, accommodation and community activities, among other forms of discrimination.

Research on caste and untouchability has documented continuing discrimination in accommodation, education, employment and access to social and religious spaces. In some settings, older forms of exclusion have given way to less visible forms of segregation and humiliation. Caste prejudice can, therefore, change its vocabulary.

A person may no longer be openly told that “they cannot enter because they are a Dalit.” Yet caste hierarchy may be expressed through conduct conveying that the person’s presence is undesirable, contaminating or socially inferior. The Haldwani controversy acquires significance here.A Dalit person is present in a public space. That presence is allegedly treated as a source of caste-based impurity. A purification ritual is subsequently performed. If that sequence is established and the person’s caste is shown to be the reason for the ritual then the act communicates something beyond a religious ceremony in isolation. It conveys that the presence of a person belonging to a particular caste had rendered the space impure and that the space required purification after his departure.Such conduct cannot be examined without reference to the historical idea of purity and pollution that sustained untouchability. Its deeper harm was not merely that people were prevented from touching one another. It lay in constructing some human beings as inherently impure and consequently as less worthy of equal participation in social life.

At the same time, not every purification ritual involving a public place can be treated as untouchability. Nor does the invocation of religious belief, by itself, determine the legal character of an act. Constitutional analysis must distinguish between a religious practice undertaken for an independent reason and conduct that uses religious or cultural language to reproduce the belief that a person is inherently impure because of caste.

The objective cannot be to transform every controversial religious act into a criminal offence. Equally, the absence of traditional physical exclusion cannot become a shield for conduct that reproduces the notion of caste-based impurity that the Constitution sought to eradicate. Facts and motive must therefore precede legal characterisation.

Article 17 formed part of a larger constitutional project. The framers did not merely seek to eliminate a limited set of objectionable customs. They sought to dismantle a social hierarchy that assigned human worth according to birth. Equality, dignity and fraternity consequently shape the constitutional setting in which contemporary manifestations of caste discrimination must be understood.

Law often responds most readily to visible disabilities like exclusion from a public place, denial of access to a well or temple, segregation, refusal of services or other identifiable restrictions on civil rights. Contemporary discrimination may be less explicit. It may operate through social humiliation, symbolic exclusion or practices that communicate inferiority without formally denying entry. Such forms may not fit comfortably within the historical image of untouchability yet they may reproduce its underlying logic.

The Haldwani episode therefore warrants examination beyond its immediate political context. If the evidence establishes that the purification was motivated by the caste of the person whose presence preceded it then the incident would raise a serious question about the reach of Article 17 that can the constitutional abolition of untouchability address a manifestation in which exclusion is expressed not by keeping a Dalit person outside a space but by treating his presence as having polluted it? If, conversely, the evidence establishes that the ritual had a purpose unrelated to caste, the constitutional and statutory conclusion would necessarily be different.

The controversy also has an uncomfortable historical echo. At Mahad, when B.R. Ambedkar asserted the right of Dalits to draw water from a public tank, upper caste Hindus responded by performing a purification ritual. Nearly a century later, the question returns in a different setting- what does it mean when a public space is “purified” after a Dalit leader has addressed a gathering?

The Haldwani episode is not without precedent. A study of post-independence manifestations of untouchability records that when Dalit leader Jagjivan Ram unveiled a statue in Varanasi in 1978, the statue was subsequently ceremonially cleansed because it was considered defiled. The form of the act may change but the underlying message remains familiar. Caste is translated into an idea of purity and pollution.

The question is no longer only whether a Dalit person is denied entry. It is whether caste continues to be treated as a source of impurity when entry itself is not denied. Nearly eight decades after the Constitution abolished untouchability but the issue remains one of constitutional interpretation and social transformation. Untouchability has changed its vocabulary before. It may also be changing its form. The constitutional task is to ensure that a prohibition intended to dismantle caste-based notions of impurity does not become confined to the historical forms in which those notions were once most visible. Law must remain attentive to substance, motive and social meaning not merely the physical form of exclusion.