India’s Caste Apartheid Is a Global Human Rights Crisis

India’s Caste Apartheid Is a Global Human Rights Crisis

By Nazish Mehmood

In the twenty-first century, the idea of systemic racial or ethnic segregation is rightly condemned in international discourse. Yet, there remains one of the world’s oldest, largest, and most brutal systems of social stratification, casteism, that continues to flourish in the world’s largest democracy: India. Caste-based discrimination is not a cultural artifact nor an internal matter. It is a global human rights crisis, affecting more than 300 million people. The global community’s silence is not neutrality; it is complicity.

While India projects itself as a modern, digital, and democratic power on the global stage, it continues to uphold a deeply entrenched social apartheid against Dalits, Adivasis, and other caste-oppressed groups. Every progressive claim; be it in education, technology, economic growth, or democracy, rests uneasily atop the exclusion of millions. Just as the international community united against apartheid South Africa, it is time to recognize that casteism in India represents an equally systemic and violent form of oppression, deserving global condemnation and accountability.

The numbers speak for themselves. According to India’s National Crime Records Bureau, over 50 caste-based crimes are committed daily. These include beatings, murders, sexual assaults, and public humiliations—often committed with impunity. Dalit women are raped at an average of 10 per day, their assaults often ignored by police or reframed as “disputes” rather than hate crimes. India’s caste system is not a historical remnant; it is a contemporary structure of everyday terror.

In education, the consequences of caste are devastating. Despite affirmative action policies, dropout rates among Dalit students remain disproportionately high. Only 13.9% of Dalit students’ complete higher secondary education, compared to over 37% of upper-caste students. In elite institutions such as the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and medical colleges, the pressure of discrimination and isolation leads many students from Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes to despair. Between 2014 and 2023, at least 122 Dalit and Adivasi students died by suicide in India’s top academic institutions. These are not isolated incidents they are the result of an environment that stigmatizes their very presence.

Even in the reputable industries of the so-called modern India, the technological and the corporate worlds, casteism flourishes and goes unpunished. Only 0.5 per cent of the Dalits or Adivasis occupy leadership positions in top 1,000 businesses in India. The domination of the upper-castes is the norm, in IT led industries, in which India boasts of global leadership. Reports in Oxfam India and other rights agencies show that it is not merit but rather caste privilege that advances a person profession-wise. Caste oppressed communities in contrast are heavily concentrated in the low paying, stigmatized, or informal sectors.

The most deplorable representation of the caste apartheid in India is perhaps this manual scavenging which is the practice and inhuman cleaning of human waste with bare hands. Although the practice was illegalized in 1993 and reaffirmed in 2013, it is still going on. Official records in 2024 were admitting to more than 58,000 registered manual scavengers but the unofficial sources calculate the figure to be more than 770,000. Nearly all are part of Dalit groups. Each year, dozens of people lose their lives in septic tanks and sewers with little or no compensation and media coverage. It is not just a tragedy that a nuclear power and a spacefaring nation lets its most oppressed citizens die in excrement, it is barbaric.

The institutions of power in India follow the same social order. Every Dalit judge in the Supreme Court of India is absent in the judiciary. Less than 5 percent of the representation of SC/ST is evident in High Courts around the country though the constitution provides otherwise. The same holds true in the media where more than 89 percent of English-speaking media as vetting positions in editorial offices are staffed by upper-caste Hindus and Dalits are virtually invisible in newsrooms. Indian democracy is full of contradiction which is that political equality exists formally but social hierarchy rules the roost.

India’s caste system is often framed by its defenders as an “internal matter,” shielded from international scrutiny by the sovereignty argument.  Human rights are not home comforts, however, tolerated only on the home ground. The discrimination on the basis of castes contravenes various articles of Universal Declaration of Human Rights, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and ILO Convention No. 111 on Discrimination in Employment and Occupation. In addition, the United Nations Special Rapporteurs on racism and discrimination have sounded alarms regarding caste violence and exclusion in a number of occasions.

Multinational companies and global organizations trading in India can no longer afford to turn a blind eye on the caste issue. Tech giants which promote diversity in Silicon Valley need to investigate the way their offices in India keep the dominance of upper caste. Scholarly institutions should require caste-disaggregated information and implement safety nets of Dalit and Adivasi academics. The word clash has to stop to be used in the international media to describe caste violence since it is structural persecution.

As the apartheid South Africa was once ‘justified’ to be ‘culturally ingrained’ and defended by interests of economy, so is casteism today. History has taught us, though, that none of the societies, which practice birth-based segregation, can possibly be democratic. The future of India is in breaking not denying the caste structure. To that end, the international community cannot afford to keep their eyes closed.

Casteism is not India’s shame alone. It is a global test of moral clarity. To remain silent is to sanction oppression. To speak is to affirm the dignity of hundreds of millions. The world cannot afford to pass this crisis off as a cultural peculiarity. It must confront caste for what it is: a violent hierarchy masquerading as heritage.