Abstract

When the Father of the Indian Constitution, Dr. Bhim Rao Ambedkar stated that even though Equality may seem a fiction, it should be accepted as a governing principle, when Dr. Shashi Tharoor stated that he doesn’t go by his caste, creed or religion, that his works speak for him, these wise words are not meant to end as titles or quotes in a research paper. India is home to over 1.4 billion Indians out of which more than 200 million are Dalits. In July 2020, a Dalit man was stripped and brutally beaten up, along with his family members in Karnataka for allegedly ‘touching the motorcycle of a dominant caste man’. According to data published by the Union of India, crimes against Dalits increased by 7% since 2019. Even after the insertion of Articles 14 and 17 in the Constitution, yet today, groups of citizens in the country are relegated in the ladder of hierarchy. This prejudiced outlook towards people from subjugated categories labelled as ‘lower castes’ i.e., caste discrimination, poses an imminent threat to the world’s largest democracy in the years to come; the need for a caste-free mindset to emerge among citizens in order to save India’s constitutional democracy before it’s too late must be recognized.

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