Democracies are dimming everywhere—fractured by polarisation, hyper-nationalism, community tensions, and widening inequality. We reach for the usual explanations: collapsing economies, colonial ghosts, racial injustice, immigration anxieties, religious fault lines. But these familiar frameworks miss a powerful, disruptive force reshaping politics from the bottom up. Across continents, a community once condemned to the margins is quietly rewriting the rules of modern citizenship. Dalits are not storming the gates—they are mastering the language of democracy, weaponising the Constitution, and compelling the state to recognise those it was built to exclude. This is the missing piece in the global story of democratic decline and rebirth.
Dalits: Democracy’s Unlikely Architects
Far from rejecting the state, Dalits have used it as an instrument of liberation. Their politics is rooted in participation, not insurgency; representation, not rupture. By stepping into institutions—courts, parties, universities, unions—they have transformed the very structures that once silenced them.
Caste: A Global Story
A diaspora reshaping nations, from India to the Caribbean to the Gulf
Suraj Milind Yengde’s Caste: A Global Story uncovers the sweeping footprint of 230 million Dalits across 15 countries. Through forgotten archives and contemporary voices, the book reveals a movement as historic and far-reaching as the transatlantic slave trade—one that has built solidarity with Black Americans, redefined rights-based activism, and forced nations to confront the inequalities they inherit and reproduce.
Inside the Global Dalit Struggle
Dalits didn’t simply resist discrimination—they hacked the system. They entered political arenas, demanded citizenship on their terms, and challenged nations from within. Whether as indentured labourers in 19th-century plantations or as migrant workers in London, Toronto, Dubai, and Johannesburg, they carried with them a political philosophy forged in oppression but sharpened by ambition.
What Yengde Unearths
- Caste as a global architecture—not an Indian anomaly but a portable hierarchy
- The role of colonialism and religion in exporting caste logics abroad
- Diaspora denial: Why South Asian communities abroad resist anti-caste politics
- The fragile limits of Dalit–Black solidarity
- Ambedkarite networks building cross-border resistance
- How Dalits turned the Constitution into a tool of power
A New Universalism
At its core, the book issues a provocative call: to build a cosmopolitan Dalit universalism—a politics that links the world’s most oppressed communities in a shared claim for dignity and justice. Yengde reframes the Dalit movement as not just Indian, not just social, but a global moral frontier shaping the future of equality.
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