wl-2226-Quantitative Insights on Dalit Assertion and Caste Violence in India

The paper by Damera and Reddy (EPW, 1 June 2024) analyses the links between Dalit assertion and caste crimes in Telangana. It is an important addition to the rich body of work on such links in various regions of India. A number of studies, mainly using qualitative methods, has documented that rising aspiration of Dalits for economic and political mobility often leads to an increase in violence against them. This note argues that while qualitative analysis helps us understand the processes that lead to such coordinated and systematic group violence, the context-specific substantive findings may be strengthened and integrated using insights from recent quantitative studies using large-scale national level datasets from India. Such inquiries, though few in number, have unequivocally shown that declining gaps in economic status between Dalits and upper castes have led to perpetration of caste violence in India. This note argues that combining insights from region or state-level research with findings from rigorous quantitative analysis of large-scale secondary data may usefully inform recent debates around the failure of the legal machinery to address the rise in caste violence.