In a casteiest society, love is never just love. It is regulated, guarded, and violently enforced. For Dalits, love—especially across caste lines—often becomes a crime punishable by death. The repeated killings of Dalits who have fallen in love are not isolated incidents driven by emotion or family anger. They are structured acts of caste violence, deeply rooted in the belief that Dalit bodies are impure, polluting, and undeserving of intimacy in a society where caste plays a dominant role.
The recent killing of a Dalit youth in Nanded, Maharashtra for being in a relationship with a dominant-caste woman once again exposes how caste continues to operate through the control of bodies, emotions, and desire.
Killings across states—Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and others—follow the same script. A Dalit crosses a forbidden boundary, and a casteist society responds with violence.
These killings are not merely "honor killings" or "family matters". They are caste killings, grounded in a long-standing social belief that Dalit bodies are inherently impure and must be disciplined when they challenge caste boundaries through love.
Why such killings are brutal and public
A casteist society is built on boundaries: who can touch whom, who can eat with whom, and who can marry whom. These boundaries are not just social; they are moral and symbolic. Dalits have historically been placed outside the zone of purity. Their bodies are imagined as polluting, excessive, and out of place.
When a Dalit person enters a romantic relationship with someone from a dominant caste, a casteist society sees this as a violation of its moral order. Violence then becomes a means of re-establishing order.
This explains why such killings are often brutal and public. They are not only meant to punish the individual but also to send a warning to the entire community: certain boundaries are not meant to be crossed.
The killing in Nanded reflects this logic. It was not spontaneous rage. It was a calculated act to erase what caste society perceived as contamination.
A silent approval that is disturbing
Dominant-caste families treat their lineage, homes as sacred spaces. Dalits are placed on the opposite end, as profane, defiling, and dangerous. When a Dalit man loves a dominant-caste person, a casteist society does not see two consenting adults. It sees sacrilege.
This is why caste killings often receive silent approval from families, neighbors, and sometimes even local institutions. The act of violence is normalised as "necessary", "unfortunate", or "provoked".
The Dalit body, already marked as profane, is considered expendable. The idea that Dalit bodies are impure is not natural; it is socially produced through repetition. Every act of exclusion, surveillance, humiliation, and punishment reinforces this fiction.
From childhood, Dalits learn that they are watched more closely, judged more harshly, and disciplined more violently. Love becomes dangerous not because of emotion, but because a casteist society has trained itself to view Dalit desire as out of place. When violence follows, society asks not whether the killing was wrong, but why the Dalit crossed the line.
The lack of grief
One of the most disturbing aspects of caste killings is how quickly they disappear from public memory. Media coverage is brief. Public outrage is limited. Legal processes move slowly. The deaths of Dalits rarely become national moral crises.
This is because a casteist society does not treat Dalit lives as valuable. Their deaths are not seen as losses that demand collective mourning. They are reduced to statistics, local news, or unfortunate incidents. When a Dalit is killed for loving, the focus often shifts to "family honor", "social pressure", or "cultural conflict". The victim's humanity disappears.
This lack of grief is itself a form of violence. It confirms that Dalit lives are considered less worthy of protection, remembrance, and justice.
Caste survives through strict control over marriage and sexuality. The regulation of women's choices is central to maintaining caste boundaries. A casteist society treats women as carriers of caste purity, and any deviation is seen as a threat to lineage and status. Dalits, in this framework, are imagined as the ultimate danger, not because of who they are, but because of what their presence represents.
A relationship between a Dalit and a dominant caste threatens the hereditary transmission of caste privilege. This is why the violence is often directed more harshly at the Dalit partner. Killing the Dalit becomes a way to restore caste order while controlling women through fear and surveillance.
Dalit bodies are not only seen as impure; they are also seen as criminal. Dalit desire is portrayed as aggressive, illegitimate, and predatory. This stereotype allows caste society to justify violence as self-defense or moral protection. Police responses often reflect this bias. Complaints are delayed. Cases are diluted. Atrocity laws are underused. The system implicitly agrees with the idea that the Dalit body provoked its death.
This criminalisation is not accidental. It is a structural feature of caste society, designed to keep Dalits within prescribed limits.
Cases that reveal the pattern
Across India, the killings of Dalits for loving across caste follow a disturbingly familiar pattern, revealing how caste power operates through surveillance, discipline, and exemplary punishment.
In Nanded, the Dalit youth was murdered for being in a relationship with a dominant-caste woman, not because the relationship harmed anyone, but because it escaped the watchful control of caste society. His death functioned as a warning, a public lesson in what happens when Dalits refuse to remain within prescribed limits.
Similar violence has unfolded in Tamil Nadu, where Dalit men have been hacked to death in public spaces after inter-caste marriages, their bodies displayed as proof that caste boundaries are enforced not just socially but physically.
In Telangana, the killing of a Dalit groom through a planned contract murder showed how caste power does not act impulsively; it calculates, plans, and eliminates threats to its order with chilling precision.
In Karnataka, Dalit youth have been murdered for relationships that dominant castes interpreted as defiance rather than affection.
In Punjab, the killing of popular Dalit singer Amar Singh Chamkila, intensified by resentment over his marriage outside caste, revealed how Dalit assertion, cultural, emotional, or intimate, invites violent correction.
Violence here is not excess; it is governance.
When a Dalit steps outside the role assigned to them by the casteist society, punishment follows swiftly, not only to eliminate the individual but also to produce fear in others.
This is how caste maintains order: by turning Dalits into examples. The killing of Dalits for love is not a reaction; it is a method of social control that ensures obedience through terror.
Breaking the myth of purity
The myth of purity that sustains caste is written in blood. It survives by marking some bodies as sacred and others as disposable, by deciding whose touch is acceptable and whose presence must be erased.
This idea of purity is not innocent or spiritual; it is violent at its core. It justifies exclusion, legitimises humiliation, and ultimately sanctions murder. Under its logic, the killing of Dalits for loving across caste is not seen as a crime but as a corrective act, a way of restoring a social order imagined to be under threat.
Purity functions as a moral shield behind which brutality hides. It transforms hatred into duty and cruelty into responsibility. When a casteist society speaks of purity, it is not defending values but defending hierarchy. The language of purity allows perpetrators to see themselves as protectors rather than killers, while institutions often mirror this logic by softening violence into cultural explanations.
In this process, Dalit bodies are stripped of humanity and reduced to symbols of pollution that must be removed for society to feel clean again.
Breaking this myth is essential, because purity is neither natural nor eternal; it is maintained through fear, repetition, and bloodshed. The moment Dalits assert dignity, desire, and equality, the myth begins to crack. Every act of Dalit love exposes the lie at the heart of caste: that hierarchy is sacred.
There is nothing sacred about a system that requires death to preserve itself. What truly pollutes society is not Dalit presence, but the continued acceptance of a social order that murders in the name of purity.
Dalits are not impure.
Dalit love is not a crime.
What is truly polluting is a social order that kills people for choosing whom to love. Caste may police bodies, silence deaths, and delay justice. But it cannot erase the human longing to belong, to love, and to live with dignity.
That longing continues to unsettle the casteist society—quietly, persistently, and dangerously.
(Akhilesh Kumar is an Ambedkarite activist and a PhD scholar at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, at the Centre for Dalit and Minorities Studies.)