With the tragic news that Mr Armstrong, Bahujan Samaj Party head in Tamil Nadu, was hacked to death by six goons this week, it was time for me to revisit a precious book, to better understand the complex forces of caste at work, beyond dirty politics. Dr Suraj Yengde’s Caste Matters (Viking/Penguin Random House India, 2019, Rs 599). He reminds us that “by choosing to remain silent, the dominant castes effectively practise a thinly veiled ‘caste terrorism’ by pleading ‘ignorance’ over caste issues.” 

One of India’s leading intellectuals, Dr Yengde is a charismatic icon, an inspiration and a force of nature. Born in a slum in Nanded, Maharashtra, he worked his way up and is Shorenstein Center inaugural postdoctoral fellow with the Initiative for Institutional Anti-Racism and Accountability (IARA) at the Harvard Kennedy School. He has worked with leading organisations in London, New York and Geneva. He also features in Ava DuVernay’s film Origin, based on Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of our Discontents. He is occasionally flamboyant, with his luxuriant shock of Afro hair, and when he posts photos of himself travelling business class on social media and gets trolled for it, you can clearly see how many Indians simply cannot bear to see a Dalit succeed.