The Untouchability of Institutions: Caste, Discrimination, and Humiliation

— ✍️Akhilesh Kumar

The recent events surrounding Chief Justice B R Gavai and IPS officer Y. Puran Kumar have laid bare the deep fractures within the institutional fabric of the democratic order. The tragic death of Y. Puran Kumar, a 2001-batch IPS officer and Additional Director General of Police, who in his suicide note alleged caste-based discrimination, mental harassment, and public humiliation by his seniors, reveals how the culture of hierarchy persists beneath the veneer of bureaucratic modernity.

These two incidents, one from the judiciary, the other from the bureaucracy, expose a grim continuity: a person from a Dalit background may enter the highest ranks of governance, yet the institutional ethos continues to mark them as perpetual outsiders. The law may proclaim equality, but the moral imagination of institutions still refuses to embrace it fully. The act of hurling a slipper at Chief Justice who comes from Dalit community and the humiliation that drove an officer to despair emerge from the same continuum of denial—the refusal to extend full human dignity to those historically placed at the margins of recognition.

Democracy’s Incomplete Transformation

Dr. Ambedkar, in his famous address to the Constituent Assembly, warned that political democracy—the equality of votes and rights—would collapse without social democracy, which rests upon liberty, equality, and fraternity. Unless the moral and social foundations of the society are democratized, political equality remains an empty form, vulnerable to hypocrisy and collapse.

The contradiction Dr. Ambedkar identified continues to define the present. Political equality has not evolved into social recognition. Institutions that claim impartiality still operate through the deep-seated hierarchies. The act of throwing a slipper at  Chief Justice from a Dalit background, therefore, is not merely an act of violence; it is a symbolic repetition of an oppresive social order that refuses to acknowledge dignity as indivisible. The democratic order, while constitutionally complete, remains socially fragmented. Equality exists in law, but not in lived experience.

The Everydayness of Humiliation

Humiliation functions as the most enduring expression of caste hierarchy. It rarely takes spectacular forms; rather, it survives in everyday encounters—through tone, gaze, silence, or denial. Within bureaucracies, universities, and judicial spaces, humiliation is not an accident but a mechanism of regulation. In universities, this humiliation unfolds through the constant questioning of competence, the denial of intellectual authority, or the exclusion from networks of recognition. students and scholars from Dalit community often encounter a persistent skepticism toward their achievements, as if their presence needs perpetual validation. Research from their perspectives is frequently dismissed as “subjective” or “emotional,” while Savarna  scholarship enjoys the status of neutrality. In classrooms and seminars, the act of speaking from one’s social location becomes a risk, as institutions demand silence from those who bear the weight of history. In universities, this manifests in subtle forms of exclusion: the questioning of competence, the sidelining of research, or the erasure of intellectual contribution.

In bureaucracies, it appears as the casual dismissal of authority or the denial of institutional respect. These forms of humiliation, as Gopal Guru has elaborated, are not private experiences but public acts that reproduce inequality. They are collective performances through which institutions remind individuals from oppressed backgrounds that their belonging is conditional. Humiliation, then, is not merely an emotional wound—it is a social mechanism and a political tool. It converts social prejudice into institutional behavior, transforming bias into procedure. Within this framework, the case of Y. Puran Kumar reveals how bureaucratic order turns social discrimination into an administrative logic. The denial of dignity becomes normalized, while those who resist it are framed as the problem.

When individuals from Dalit backgrounds seek justice within institutions, they often face a cruel inversion—they are transformed from victims into perpetrators, from complainants into the accused. This moral reversal demonstrates that the promise of democracy collapses when institutions fail to protect dignity. The structures that were meant to guarantee justice end up reproducing humiliation in newer, quieter forms.

Trauma and the Continuity of Hierarchy :

The endurance of caste within institutions operates not only through external barriers but also through what may be called internalized trauma—the deep psychological and emotional burden imposed upon those who have been historically humiliated. From early life, individuals from Dalit backgrounds are made to carry a sense of hyper-visibility, of being constantly marked and scrutinized. This burden does not vanish when one enters positions of power; instead, it often intensifies.

The institutional environment demands that such individuals continually prove their competence and legitimacy, as though their presence itself requires justification. The repetition of everyday slights, gestures of disregard, or subtle acts of distancing produces a collective exhaustion—a trauma that is both historical and contemporary. The violence is not always physical; it is psychic, cultural. What Gopal Guru calls the politics of humiliation points toward a social order where the oppressed are expected to maintain dignity in spaces that systematically deny it. This continuity of humiliation from childhood to adulthood, from village to University, from workplace to bureaucracy, reveals how the caste order mutates but never disappears.

Structural Injustice and the Culture of Apartness :

Caste has refined itself to adapt to the procedural and moral vocabulary of modern institutions. It no longer operates primarily through explicit exclusion; rather, it functions through differentiation—through the quiet partitioning of those who belong and those who are merely allowed to enter. Inclusion often coexists with exclusion: one may be present within the institution but absent from its moral life.

Here, the distinction between part and apart, drawn from Jacques Ranciere’s idea of political inclusion, becomes crucial. The oppressed may appear as part of the institutional order but remain apart from its moral and affective core. A person from a Dalit background may hold authority, yet that authority is persistently undermined through small gestures of disregard. The culture of apartness continues; entry does not translate into belonging.

This structural injustice is sustained not only by active discrimination but by complicity—the comfort of those who benefit from the hierarchical order. The silence of privilege becomes the language through which inequality survives. Institutions remain insulated from the social realities of those they claim to serve, reproducing a hierarchy of recognition even under the banner of democracy.

Humanizing the Social Order

The persistence of humiliation within the institutions of society is not merely a political failure—it is a moral collapse. Constitutional democracy may have succeeded in creating procedures of equality, but it has not cultivated a culture of fraternity. Dr. Ambedkar envisioned democracy not just as a governing framework but as a moral association among equals, rooted in mutual respect and shared humanity. That vision remains unrealized. Throwing shoes on Chief Justice and the tragic death of Y. Puran Kumar are not disconnected events; they are symptoms of the same moral crisis. They reveal how the hierarchies of caste have transformed their form but not their essence.

Whether in courts, bureaucracies, or universities, the institutions continue to carry within them the residues of social exclusion, often cloaked in the language of procedure or discipline. Democracy cannot thrive in a society where dignity remains unequally distributed. The challenge before us is not merely to reform institutions but to humanize them—to transform the moral consciousness that sustains their everyday functioning. Until fraternity becomes a lived social reality and justice ceases to be conditional, equality will remain only a constitutional text, not a collective experience.

Those from Dalit backgrounds have entered the institutions of democracy with the hope of transforming them. Yet, the institutions, in turn, have often sought to distance them—to make them “apart”. Justice remains deferred, and humiliation continues to echo across corridors of power. The struggle, therefore, is not only for representation but for recognition—for the realization of Dr. Ambedkar’s dream of a democracy that is not merely political, but profoundly social and moral.

- The author is a PhD scholar at Jamia Millia Islamia University, specializing in the Centre for Dalit and Minorities Studies. His Doctoral research focuses on "Conceptualising Marginality: Dr. B. R. Ambedkar and the Women's Question.