Mumbai- The Bahujan community across India and the diaspora is celebrating with pride the announcement that Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, the South African jurist of Tamil Indian origin and former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, has been awarded the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee recognised her “for her efforts to promote peace and international law,” praising her instrumental role in ensuring that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are prosecuted, her judicial rigour, personal integrity and moral courage.

Nagsen Sonare, National President of the Ambedkar Centre for Justice and Peace (ACJP), said the community feels proud that she is “one amongst us.” “All downtrodden should feel pride on Navi's achievement. She is originally Indian. Her forefathers were from Tamil Nadu and went to South Africa in search of livelihood as indentured labour taken by the British Government in India.”

Pillay’s grandparents travelled from India to Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal) in the late 19th century as indentured labourers to work on sugar plantations under the British colonial system that transported more than 150,000 Indians between 1860 and 1911. Born on 23 September 1941 in Clairwood, Durban, into a Tamil-origin family, she grew up under apartheid’s racial segregation, experienced poverty, and became the first woman of colour to open a law practice in Natal in 1967. She defended anti-apartheid activists, including associates of Nelson Mandela, and later became the first non-white woman appointed to South Africa’s High Court by Mandela himself after the end of minority white rule.

Her international career included serving as a judge and President of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (where she helped establish that rape and sexual violence can constitute genocide and crimes against humanity), a judge on the International Criminal Court, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (2008–2014), and later work including chairing the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and serving as an ad hoc judge at the International Court of Justice. She is the fifth South African to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, following figures such as Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu.

Close encounters with ACJP and concern over caste atrocities

ACJP leaders recall meeting Pillay closely during key UN processes. Sonare noted: “We saw her from close distance in Durban, South Africa in the World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) held in Sept-Oct 2001 and met her in 2007 CERD committee India discussion and 2008 Human Rights Council UPR India discussion. She was then High Commissioner on Human Rights and expressed deep concern on caste atrocities in India and said let us break the Wall of the Caste similar to ending Apartheid in South Africa. I feel proud that I met her twice in 2007 and 2008 in Geneva in the office of United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights during the India Human Rights report discussion under the leadership of Yogesh Varhade , the founder global president of ACJP. Being originally from the downtrodden community of Tamil Nadu, we feel proud that she fiercely fought against apartheid as a senior lawyer along withNelson Mandela in South Africa and ended minority white supremacist rule after the release of Nelson Mandela from life imprisonment on Robben Island.”

During her tenure as High Commissioner, Pillay was the first holder of the office to systematically and publicly treat caste-based discrimination (including untouchability) as a major global human-rights issue. She repeatedly highlighted that it affects roughly 250–260 million people worldwide, the large majority in South Asia, describing a system rooted in notions of ritual purity and pollution that produces lifelong humiliation, exclusion, poverty, segregation and violence. She drew explicit parallels with apartheid, published the influential piece “Tearing down the wall of caste,” spoke of the “double assault” of caste and gender discrimination faced by Dalit women, condemned practices such as manual scavenging, and called for stronger international action and enforcement of existing laws. Dalit activists later publicly thanked her for speaking when others remained silent.

ACJP’s long advocacy and the 2022 memorandum on caste atrocities

The Ambedkar Centre for Justice and Peace (ACJP), founded in 1991 in North America with an India chapter established in 2003, has long fought caste-based atrocities and human rights violations against an estimated 350 million Dalits (formerly called Untouchables) and tribals in India. ACJP has raised these issues at the UN since 1991, at the Working Group on Indigenous Populations in Geneva, the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, the 1995 World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen, the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, the 2002 Asian Civil Society Forum in Bangkok, the 2005 World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia, and successive treaty-body reviews (CERD, CRC, CEDAW, CCPR, CESCR, CAT) and Universal Periodic Reviews.

In a detailed memorandum dated 14 November 2022 addressed to then High Commissioner Volker Türk (and reflecting the organisation’s sustained engagement with the Office of the High Commissioner, including during Pillay’s tenure), ACJP founder and Global President Yogesh Varhade set out the scale of the problem:

Indian society is structured by a caste system in which roughly 82% of the population belongs to the Hindu hierarchical order of more than 6,000 castes marked by “graded inequality based on ascending order of reverence and descending order of contempt.” About 25% of the population, Dalits and tribals, sits at the bottom, facing stigma, severe discrimination and disabilities from birth to death. Drawing on traditional codes such as the Manusmriti, the memorandum states that these communities have historically been denied civil rights and assigned the role of serving the upper varnas.

Despite Dr B.R. Ambedkar, born into an untouchable caste, educated at Columbia University and the London School of Economics, called to the Bar, and chief architect of the Indian Constitution, securing the constitutional abolition of untouchability and making it a criminal offence, along with reservations in legislatures, educational institutions and public services, implementation has remained incomplete. The memorandum notes that “due to the sickness of high caste–low caste mentality, millions of these people suffer human rights violations every second and every minute.”

Citing 2021 National Crime Records Bureau data, it states that 17 cases of rape and murder and 135 other serious cases (abduction, kidnapping, molestation, naked parading, stalking, outraging modesty, burning, looting, dacoity, acid throwing, assault, humiliation, land dispossession, denial of voting rights, etc.) are registered every day against Dalits and tribals.

ACJP’s compilation of government data for 1997–2021 records 1,036,780 serious cases of human-rights violations, including 21,018 murders and 55,799 rapes and gang-rapes of women and girls. The memorandum notes that most crimes go unrecorded, with NGO estimates suggesting that for every recorded case many more remain unreported. These are described as “Crimes Against Humanity” that are “genocidal in nature” and premeditated, occurring amid inadequate implementation of the Protection of Civil Rights Act 1955 and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989.

The memorandum criticises media coverage dominated by upper-caste interests for often ignoring or downplaying these crimes, and highlights the lack of political will, poor investigation, intimidation of victims and witnesses, and high rates of acquittal. It recalls that India gave assurances in its previous UPRs (2008, 2012, 2017) to combat such violations, yet atrocities increased after 2014. Warning that continued neglect risks loss of faith in democratic governance and could lead to civil conflict with disastrous regional and global consequences, ACJP requested the High Commissioner to raise the issue with India for time-bound action and to appoint a special UN committee to study the human-rights situation of Dalits — analogous to the approach once taken on apartheid in South Africa.

The memorandum was submitted with a detailed 25-year report of human-rights violations against 350 million Dalits and tribals.