Who's Afraid of a Blue Pigeon Colour, Coos and Covert Casteism A Pragmatic Account of a Compositional Caste Slur, with a Research Agenda

This paper argues that "blue pigeons" (Hindi neele kabootar), used online to derideAmbedkarite and Dalit activists, is a compositional slur. It is built from two words that areharmless on their own, yet together they do the work of a caste slur while leaving thespeaker room to deny it. The colour term blue picks out the target group by metonymy: itborrows the Ambedkarite movement's self-chosen colour. It functions as an identifyingdog whistle, one that in-group readers decode instantly and outsiders read as a colour.The animal term pigeon supplies the insult. Drawing on relevance-theoretic lexicalpragmatics, I propose that hearers construct an ad hoc concept PIGEON* whosederogatory content is carried by a spread of weak implicatures: dirt and contagion,flocking, meaningless noise, dependence on handouts, and nuisance in shared space.Each maps onto a long-standing anti-Dalit or anti-reservation stereotype, including purityand pollution, while the speaker never asserts any of them. The account explains why thephrase suits platform environments: it contains nothing a keyword filter could catch, it ishard to act on legally, and it can be denied in conversation.The phrase is attested from October 2025, and I observed it circulating again in onlineresponses to student protests following the death of a Dalit student at IIT Bombay inSeptember 2026. I situate the analysis in the literature on slurs, dog whistles and animalmetaphor, and consider how the metaphor can be realised in images and emoji, and how itmight be reclaimed. I close with falsifiable hypotheses and a corpus design for testingthem. The paper's contribution is a pragmatic model of covert caste derogation thatapplies beyond this single phrase.