I began thinking about this question after reading about a recent social boycott in Balangir, Odisha. Around the same time, I returned to Dr B. R. Ambedkar’s Waiting for a Visa. In that powerful autobiographical account, Ambedkar describes the everyday violence of untouchability and the organised exclusion that followed whenever caste boundaries were challenged. His experiences, and those of countless Dalits, reveal what life under caste truly means. The recent incident and Ambedkar’s experiences forced me to confront one disturbing question: If Dalits are already treated as ‘Untouchable’, why does caste still need social boycott?
The question may seem simple, but it exposes a fundamental feature of caste. Untouchability and social boycott are not the same. They perform different functions. Untouchability assigns hierarchy. Social boycott enforces it. Dalits have lived under untouchability for centuries. They have been denied entry into temples, forced to live outside villages, refused water from common wells, pushed into degrading labour, and treated as socially impure. Yet whenever Dalits demand equality, they often face another form of violence: social boycott.
Untouchability and social boycott are not the same. Untouchability assigns Dalits a fixed place at the bottom of the caste hierarchy. It tells them where they can live, what work they should do, whom they can marry, and how others should treat them. It makes inequality appear natural and permanent. Social boycott serves a different purpose. It is not simply an act of exclusion. It is a mechanism through which caste governs everyday life. By disciplining resistance and producing fear, it reproduces caste hierarchy without relying on constant physical violence. It enforces caste discipline not because someone is born Dalit, but because they refuse to accept the place that caste assigns to them. It begins when Dalits challenge caste authority.
A boycott is the deliberate refusal to engage with or support a person or group as a form of protest. A social boycott is the organised exclusion of a person, family, or community from social and economic life to enforce caste hierarchy. It often follows acts of Dalit assertion. Dalits send their children to school, refuse caste-based labour, buy land, contest elections, enter temples, choose their own partners, or demand equal treatment. In response, they are denied work, refused access to shops and common water sources, and excluded from village life. Sometimes an entire Dalit settlement pays the price because one person challenged caste. The punishment extends beyond the individual. It disciplines the entire community by turning one act of resistance into a warning for everyone else.
The message is clear: stay in your place. If you refuse, you and your community will pay the price. Therefore, the purpose is not only to punish one individual but to create fear across the community, discouraging future resistance. It reveals that equality has consequences. Resistance has costs. It teaches the entire community that challenging caste invites punishment. Untouchability assigns hierarchy. Social boycott enforces it. Together, they reproduce caste power.
Ambedkar understood this long before Independence. In 1927, he named his newspaper Bahishkrit Bharat, meaning Excluded India. The title itself was a political statement. It captured the everyday reality of millions who were pushed outside the social, economic, and political life of the nation. Ambedkar understood that caste survives because society punishes those who break its rules. Violence is not an accident. It is a method of social control. Social boycott was one of its most effective tools. It isolated families, destroyed livelihoods, and warned others against challenging caste authority.
Manyavar Kanshi Ram Saheb extended this insight through the politics of the Bahujan movement. He argued that every struggle for self-respect would face organised resistance from those who benefited from caste. He wrote, “The self-respect movement can never be built without self-help. In fact, we can hope for hindrances instead of help.” (Kanshi Ram, Writing & Speeches, Vol. 1, 1980, p. 81). His words remain relevant. Those who benefit from caste rarely surrender their power voluntarily. Whenever oppressed communities organise, educate themselves, or demand dignity, they face resistance. Social boycott is one of the ways that resistance is crushed before it grows.
Dalit women experience this violence in particularly harsh ways. They struggle to collect water. They lose their daily wage work. Local shops refuse to sell them food. They face humiliation in public spaces. Their children are isolated at school. At the same time, women carry the responsibility of feeding their families and sustaining everyday life. Social boycott, therefore, is also social, emotional, and gendered violence. It deepens existing inequalities and makes survival itself more difficult.
The Constitution abolished untouchability and promised equality. Yet social boycott continues because caste survives through everyday practices, local power, economic dependence, and collective silence. Ending caste requires more than condemning untouchability. It requires dismantling every mechanism that punishes people for claiming equal dignity. Caste has not disappeared. It has only changed its methods. The real question, then, is not whether caste still exists. The real question is why a democratic society continues to punish Dalits for demanding the equality that the Constitution already guarantees.
The way forward requires more than condemning social boycott after it occurs. It requires preventing it from becoming a tool of caste power. Governments must treat every incident of social boycott as a serious violation of constitutional rights by enforcing existing laws without compromise. Police, district administrations, and local authorities must act swiftly to protect victims and prosecute those who organise collective exclusion. At the same time, Dalit communities need greater economic independence through access to land, secure livelihoods, education, and public resources so that dominant castes cannot use economic dependence as a weapon of control. Ambedkarite organisations, women’s groups, student organisations, labour unions, lawyers, journalists, and civil society must stand with those who are targeted, ensuring that every incident becomes a public concern rather than a private burden. Silence strengthens caste; solidarity weakens it.
Ambedkar understood this well. His call to “Educate, Agitate, Organise” remains the strongest response to caste oppression. Education exposes the workings of caste, while agitation challenges injustice, and collective organisation transforms fear into resistance. When communities stand together, caste loses one of its most effective instruments of control. Ending social boycott, therefore, is not only about protecting Dalits; it is about ensuring that equality can be lived without fear. As long as equality invites punishment, caste has not disappeared.
Thank you for this thought-provoking article. The central argument is powerful, and I really appreciated the distinction between untouchability and social boycott. It was an engaging and insightful read.
You have written it absolutely correctly. I thank you very much for writing such things. That’s why we should do something. These ST caste people are still abudhiaa.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for reading and engaging with ideas.
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