“Why should I have to pay for something my ancestors did?” That is a refrain frequently heard from members of the upper castes during discussions about casteist violence and prejudice or reservations in India.
This belief has found renewed expression in the “Reservation Hatao Movement”, a social media campaign that gained visibility in late July. It calls for the abolition of caste-based reservation so that “merit” and equal competition can prevail.
Many Indians believe that caste is a relic of a bygone time and that the government’s social justice policies have addressed these problems.
This ignores the inherited control over land, wealth, education, social networks and institutions through which caste privilege reproduces itself, presenting outcomes produced by historical inequality as though they emerged from neutral competition among equals.
The Indian state, similarly, speaks the language of social justice without unsettling the structures of social power that shape Indian society.
It is against the backdrop of this refusal of historical accountability that Nepal’s decision to offer a formal state apology to Dalits for centuries of caste-based oppression acquired significance in India. In April, referring to Nepal’s decision, MP Chandrashekhar Azad asked in Parliament when India would apologise to Dalits for centuries of injustice.
Azad’s intervention, along with those of others who have raised this issue, reflects one dimension of the demand for a national reckoning with caste injustice: a formal apology that acknowledges caste oppression as a historical system sustained by social, religious and state institutions.
Such an apology could establish the public truth that caste oppression was wrong. Yet it also risks becoming a “soft substitute” for justice if such an acknowledgement is not accompanied by an obligation to repair the material and institutional consequences of that oppression.
Instead, reparation is a more accurate term. It recognises historical injustice and the obligation to repair it through measures that restore dignity and address accumulated disadvantages.
Suppose India were to follow Nepal’s lead, how would an apology for caste injustice work?
To avoid being merely symbolic, it would, at a minimum, have to take the form of a resolution adopted by Parliament and a formal statement by the Union government acknowledging the role of state and social institutions in sustaining untouchability and caste oppression.
It would also require acknowledgement by dominant castes and by the religious and social institutions that legitimised and benefited from the caste order.
An apology formulated in consultation with Dalit communities, it would have to identify the injustices being acknowledged and the responsibilities arising from them. Yet even an apology that meets these conditions will be inadequate unless it results in concrete reparative measures.
Legal scholar Martha Minow argues in Between Vengeance and Forgiveness that societies which pursue reconciliation without acknowledgement risk reproducing injustice, masking harm under the language of neutrality and reform.
In his essay The Case for Reparations, Ta-Nehisi Coates argues that reparations for slavery go beyond monetary compensation. They require a national reckoning with how slavery and subsequent practices, including segregation and discriminatory housing policies, produced inequalities that continue to structure the lives of Black Americans.