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Today on the NYR Online, Ratik Asokan writes about the history and lives of India’s Safai Karamcharis, or sanitation workers. Drawn almost exclusively from Dalit (so-called “untouchable”) subcastes, Safai Karamcharis face hazardous and disgusting working environments with few protections. “Rather than respect sanitation as a profession,” Asokan writes, “most Indians look down on it as a duty that Dalits were born to perform. Embracing the material benefits of modernity without letting go of the hierarchical ideology of caste, upper-caste Indians have grown murderously indifferent to the plight of Safai Karamcharis.” In recent years, Asokan reports, an alliance of abolitionists and labor organizations led by sanitation workers themselves has intensified its fight for better conditions in the face of Narendra Modi’s conservative Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Below, alongside Asokan’s report, we have selected five essays from the Review’s archives about the rise of the BJP and the persistence of India’s caste system.

Ratik Asokan
The Long Struggle of India’s Sanitation Workers

For centuries, the caste system has forced Dalit laborers to handle human waste in deadly conditions. Now they are rising up.

Ratik Asokan
Looking for ‘Reason’ in Modi’s India

“Shot across the country between 2013 and 2018, Vivek is a work of great ambition, really a report on Modi’s first term in power. It covers most of the big and small abominations now committed almost daily in India in the name of Hinduism: from cow vigilantism and the lynchings of Dalits, to the rewriting of history and attacks on higher education.”

Arundhati Roy
Election Season in a Dangerous Democracy

In Modi’s India, the vulnerable are being cordoned off and silenced. The vociferous are being incarcerated. God help us to get our country back.

Pankaj Mishra
God’s Oppressed Children

“India, the world’s largest democracy, also happens to be the world’s most hierarchical society; its most powerful and wealthy citizens, who are overwhelmingly upper-caste, are very far from checking their privilege or understanding the cruel disadvantages of birth among the low castes.”

Anita Desai
India: The Seed of Destruction

“The movement swelled through the Eighties into a stampede. The aggressive and the unscrupulous pushed ahead, others fell under their feet and were trampled. Millions found themselves held back for lack of an education, technology, economic power, or out of the restrictions placed on them by the ancient traditions of a caste-bound and hierarchical society.”

V.S. Naipaul
A Defect of Vision

“When the props of family, clan, and caste go, chaos and blankness come. Gandhi in 1888, not yet nineteen, taking ship at Bombay for Southampton, would have been at sea in every way.”

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