In the small hours of October 2nd, in Unchahar, Uttar Pradesh, a mob beat Hariom Valmiki, a 40-year-old Dalit man, to death, mistaking him for a thief. Days later, in Chandigarh, Y. Puran Kumar, a Dalit IPS officer, shot himself, leaving a searing eight-page note accusing 13 senior officials of caste-driven harassment. In Delhi’s Supreme Court, a shoe hurled at Chief Justice B.R. Gavai—the second Dalit to hold India’s highest judicial post—unleashed a torrent of casteist slurs online. These are not echoes of India’s feudal past. They are its present. Caste, as B.R. Ambedkar warned in his 1936 treatise Annihilation of Caste , remains a social tyrant, cloaking itself in mob suspicion, bureaucratic rivalry, or religious outrage to enforce a hierarchy that decides who suffers, who is silenced, and who walks free. New Masks, Old Truths India’s economic ascent and affirmative action have propelled some Dalits into elite echelons, yet the social order bends without breaking. Hariom Valmiki’s ...