Dismissing Dalit Assertion as Victimhood Is an Insult to the Constitution

There is a particular kind of violence that never raises its hand. It arrives, instead, in the language of wellness and self-improvement. It does not deny history, it pathologises the act of remembering it. 

Nowhere is this violence more precisely deployed than in the recurring accusation that Dalits – one-sixth of India’s population, constitutionally recognised as the subjects of the country’s most urgent social justice provisions – ‘play the victim card.’ 

When that accusation comes from a person occupying a position of institutional authority, it does not merely insult the community, it also rejects the constitutional philosophy of the Republic of India.

The ‘victim card’

Let us be precise about what the ‘victim card’ accusation actually claims. It claims that Dalit assertion is not a legitimate constitutional exercise but a psychological performance – that the demand for the implementation of Articles 15, 16, and 17 of the Constitution is not citizens asking for their rights but dependency; that the invocation of the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on caste discrimination is not law but theatre. It is, in short, a demand that Dalits stop using the Constitution of India in the manner that the Constitution of India was specifically and explicitly designed to be used.

Dr. B.R. Ambedkar – the man who designed that Constitution, warned in his closing address that ‘political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of it social democracy’. He did not write Articles 17 and 46 as aspirational poetry, but as tools to help dismantle the unequal social order.

He knew that a formal constitution in fundamentally unequal society could not produce justice. The reservation system, the anti-atrocity law, the National Commission for Scheduled Castes – these were not gifts from the state to a disadvantaged community. They were constitutional rights, extracted by democratic assertion from a state that would, without them, have perpetuated the very order the Constitution claimed to abolish.

Calling Dalit assertion ‘victimhood’ is not a philosophical position. It is the oldest reflex of every dominant order: discredit the claim before examining its truth.

What the data shows

In 2022, the National Crime Records Bureau recorded 57,582 cases of atrocities against people from Scheduled Caste (SC) communities. That is roughly 157 cases every single day. These were not mere reports of discrimination or allegations of social slights, but registered cases of violence, humiliation, and abuse — everything from murder and rape to the forced drinking of urine, the destruction of homes, and the prevention of access to public water sources. 

According to the fifth National Family Health Survey, women from SC communities face significantly higher rates of violence than caste Hindu women. According to the 2011 Census, 79.8% of India’s manual scavengers – those who clean human excrement by hand because no one with a choice would do so – belong to SC communities. 

A landmark 2007 study by economists Sukhdeo Thorat and Paul Attewell found that identical job applications sent to employers with only the applicant’s name changed resulted in 67% fewer callbacks for Dalit names compared to upper-caste ones. 

Oxfam India’s 2022 Discrimination Report found that SC households earn, on average, 21% less than upper-caste and dominant caste households even in formal, regulated employment, where the law theoretically guarantees equal treatment.

These are not the numbers of a community suffering from a psychological addiction to grievance. They are the numbers of a community living inside a system so comprehensively hostile to their existence that the real question is not why they assert their rights, but why they are required, in the face of this evidence, to justify the assertion to anyone at all.

The American lesson

The comparison to the Black community in the US is frequently used in this debate – usually to suggest that India, like the US, should move beyond race or caste-conscious remediation toward a colour-blind meritocracy. This selective reading of American history is a reversal of what that history actually demonstrates.

Martin Luther King Jr., writing from a Birmingham jail cell in 1963, described the greatest obstacle to Black freedom as not the violent racist but the ‘white moderate’ – the liberal who was ‘more devoted to order than to justice,’ who told Black Americans their demands were badly timed, their demonstrations extreme, their sense of urgency unreasonable. 

King wrote that this moderate preferred a ‘negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.’ The counsel to stop playing the victim card is, in every era and in every country where it has been deployed, the voice of King’s white moderate. 

The Kerner Commission, appointed by President Lyndon Johnson after the 1967 urban uprisings, concluded with the full authority of the American federal government that the United States was moving toward ‘two societies, one Black, one white – separate and unequal’ and that passive non-discrimination was woefully inadequate to address centuries of structural racism. 

The US responded with affirmative action. 

When the US Supreme Court struck down race-conscious university admissions in 2023, Black and Latino enrolment at elite institutions dropped within a single admissions cycle. Evidently, its removal immediately reconstituted the exclusion it had been designed to address. 

India, with thirty centuries of caste oppression and a SC literacy rate of 3.6% at independence, is in a far more severe position than the US was in 1965. Suggesting that India abandon the Ambedkarite constitutional project on the basis of America’s recent retrogression is simply laughable.

In every era, the counsel to ‘move on’ has served the same function: to protect the advantages of the dominant order from the constitutional claims of those it excluded.

What victimhood looks like

There is an important distinction that this debate consistently and deliberately obscures. Victimhood is the condition of those who have no recourse – no institutional standing, no legal mechanism and no democratic voice. It describes passivity before power. 

But the Dalit who approaches the National Commission for Scheduled Castes is not passive. The Dalit student who fights for the implementation of reservation provisions is not passive. The Dalit community that organises, litigates, and demands accountability from the state is the furthest thing from passive. It is, in the most precise constitutional sense, the exercise of democratic citizenship – the same democratic citizenship that the Constitution of India guarantees to every person within its territory, regardless of the accident of their birth.

Periyar E.V. Ramasamy, who was also the opponent of the caste order that the Indian subcontinent has produced, understood that the caste system’s deepest mechanism of perpetuation was not violence but epistemology: the capture of the oppressed community’s own interpretation of their condition. 

The Self-Respect Movement’s most subversive act was not its burning of caste scriptures but its insistence that Dalits and Other Backward Caste communities were the authoritative interpreters of their own experience. That they did not require the validation of the dominant order to know that what had been done to them was wrong. 

The accusation of victimhood is the contemporary ideological heir of that which Periyar fought: the insistence, from positions of social privilege, that the oppressed must interpret their own oppression through the conceptual framework of those who benefit from it. 

When a Dalit asserts their constitutional rights, the dominant order offers them a choice: accept our characterisation of your assertion as weakness, or risk being dismissed entirely. 

The constitutional verdict

The Constitution of India does not leave this debate open. Article 17 does not merely prohibit untouchability, it makes its practice a criminal offence. Article 46 does not suggest that the state might consider the educational interests of SC communities. It directs that the state shall promote them ‘with special care.’ The Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act does not provide a general anti-discrimination framework. It creates specific criminal liability for specific acts of caste-based dehumanisation, precisely because the parliament understood that general anti-discrimination law was insufficient to address the specificity of caste violence.

These provisions were not inserted into the Constitution by oversight. They were placed there by Dr. Ambedkar, who had personally experienced untouchability, who had studied at Columbia University and the London School of Economics, who had spent 30 years documenting the caste system’s mechanisms of exclusion, and who understood that a Constitution without these provisions would be a document that formally abolished the past while functionally perpetuating it. 

To characterise the assertion of these provisions as victimhood is, therefore, not a critique of Dalit politics. It is a rejection of Dr. Ambedkar’s constitutional philosophy. It is a declaration that he was wrong about the society he was constituting.

The institutional authority of those who make this declaration does not make it correct. It makes it more dangerous because institutions shape discourse. When the discourse of victimhood enters institutional language, it creates the conditions under which constitutional provisions are defunded, equity regulations are dismissed as irrational, and the state’s obligation to its most structurally excluded citizens is quietly replaced by a counsel of individual self-improvement.

The Dalit who invokes Article 17 is not playing a card. They are playing the Constitution – the document that the Republic was founded upon and which it is obligated, by the sovereign will of the people, to honour.

Conclusion

Seventy-five years after Independence, the question before the Republic of India is not whether Dalit assertion is politically convenient or socially comfortable. The question is whether the Constitution means what it says. Whether Article 17’s abolition of untouchability is a present-tense legal reality or a historical aspiration. Whether Article 46’s directive to promote the educational interests of SC communities with special care is a binding state obligation or a suggestion contingent upon the goodwill of those who administer it.

When 57,582 atrocity cases are filed in a single year and the response from institutional authority is to question whether the community filing them is too addicted to victimhood to progress, the institution has a problem. The problem is not Dalit assertion. The problem is the institution's willingness to protect the constitutional rights of its most structurally excluded citizens

Dr. B. R. Ambedkar submitted the Constitution to the Constituent Assembly with a profound awareness of the historical, political and social complexities that framed its adoption. He was acutely conscious that the constitutional text was being introduced into a society divided by caste, class, gender and religion. 

The egalitarian commitments articulated in the document – particularly its guarantees of equality before the law, fundamental rights, and democratic representation – stood in sharp contrast to long-standing patterns of social exclusion and graded inequality. 

Dr. Ambedkar clearly recognized the substantial distance between the normative aspirations embodied in the Constitution and the deeply stratified social order that would be entrusted with its interpretation and implementation. His submission of the Constitution thus reflected not only a legal and institutional milestone, but also a historically informed engagement with the structural contradictions between constitutional morality and prevailing social realities.

Prakash Priyadarshi is a Post-doctoral Fellow, ISEC, Bengaluru.

Akhilesh Kumar is an Ambedkarite activist and a PhD scholar at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.

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