When Caste Pride Slays Young Love: A Global Human Rights Crisis- 

By Yasha Singh

On 27^th July 2025 , a Dalit software engineer, Kevin Selvaganesh, was brutally murdered in Tamil Nadu, India,  for falling in love. The alleged perpetrators? His partner’s family including her own brother, a police inspector. Kevin’s crime, in the eyes of his killers, was not theft or violence but love across caste lines. Framed as an “honour killing,” his death lays bare the violent entrenchment of caste pride that continues to override constitutional rights in India.

The caste system is often narrated as a uniquely South Asian phenomenon. Yet its hereditary status, purity- pollution, and social exclusion has followed the diaspora across continents. From Indian immigrant communities in the U.S. and U.K. to caste–based hiring discrimination in Silicon Valley and visa marriages in Canada, caste has travelled  and adapted.

In 2020, the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing filed a lawsuit against Cisco for caste discrimination against a Dalit engineer echoing Kevin’s story in a new economic arena. Around that same year, Harvard, Brown, and Brandeis universities began recognizing caste as a protected category.  

Dr. B.R. Ambedkar once described caste as “graded inequality.” It mirrors racism in its systemic denial of dignity, autonomy, and freedom. The policing of Dalit love, especially when it crosses caste or class boundaries, is not unlike anti-miscegenation violence once seen in the Jim Crow-era American South. The notion that social groups must not “mix” is enforced through intimate, often familial, violence. Kevin’s death is akin to lynchings where Black men were murdered for perceived transgressions against white women.

This shared history has led to growing Afro–Dalit solidarities. Activists like Suraj Yengde of Harvard University have documented how Dalits and African Americans can form coalitions against casteism and racism -both of which rely on dehumanization and patriarchal control of women’s sexuality and men’s social mobility.

The framing of “honour” killings as cultural practices is misleading and dangerous. It pathologizes communities while ignoring the systemic nature of such violence. These killings are targeted attacks on human agency, especially of those at the margins: Dalits, women, LGBTQ+ individuals. Caste pride, in this sense, becomes a moral alibi for social control.

While caste is often portrayed as a uniquely South Asian issue, the logic of “honour” killings resonates globally. Similar violence occurs in contexts where families suppress inter-religious, inter-ethnic or same-sex unions. The underlying violation is the same: extinguishing individual autonomy in the name of collective reputation. International human rights law recognizes this pattern. Therefore even honour-based violence should be  considered a hate crime, and it should be recognised that the enforced interference in consensual relationships is a denial of sexual and personal freedom.

For Kevin, the institutions that should have protected him failed. The alleged participation of a police officer in the murder is a grim reminder that caste pride is often shielded by impunity. Justice became hostage to bloodline. But Kevin’s story is not isolated; around the world, romantic and marital violence driven by notions of honour, caste, community, or religion continues unchecked. Therefore , Kevin’s case, and others like it, demand greater recognition of the right to love and choose without fear. The UN Human Rights Committee and Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) affirm that protections must extend to intimate and marital life. Forced separation, removal of choice, or victimisation on caste grounds breaches these guarantees.  

Global human rights actors therefore must include caste-based hate crimes in broader “honour crime” discourse ensuring policies account for caste as a protected category. Non-governmental organizations, academic institutions, and rights-based bodies should use international human rights platforms to spotlight caste killings as a systematic violation of human dignity and equality.

Kevin’s death is a chilling reminder that caste pride is not benign tradition . It is a lethal assertion of hierarchy. Such killings deny basic human rights: freedom, equality, autonomy, and the right to love safely. Recognizing caste based honour crimes as hate crimes under both Indian and international law is a crucial step. Cultural resistance and legal reform must intersect to protect individual choice and dismantle entrenched prejudice.Silences must end on this portable hierarchy. Love must not cost lives.  

When DEI Funding Shrinks, Dalit Women Pay the Price

By Yasha Singh

This spring, a policy shift in the United States to roll back federal funding for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives has sent ripples through global academic and human rights communities. While the implications for race and gender equality in the U.S. have rightly drawn attention, what remains less discussed is its  global impact.

As a global citizen, I write not just with concern, but with a growing sense of urgency. What may seem like a domestic policy shift in the United States reverberates across oceans, touching the lives of 1.4 billion people in my country, where caste injustice remains a brutal everyday reality. I speak of   India’s Dalits – who have been historically silenced and systemically excluded and whose struggles mirror that of Black Americans. They are, in many ways, the unseen siblings of global civil rights movements.

Institutions like Harvard University had taken a lead in bringing the issue of caste equity on global stage .For many of us in India, it felt like the winds of change were beginning to stir. But the rollback of DEI support now threatens to dim our hope  , stalling a momentum that had only just begun to reach our shores.

What we need to understand here is that caste is not just a relic of Indian society. It is a global apartheid that persists in invisible forms in employment, education, housing, and even technology. Like race, caste operates through social segregation and inherited disadvantage. And like racism, its heaviest burden falls on women specifically Dalit women, who live at the intersection of caste-based discrimination and patriarchal control. Therefore by taking up the issue of Dalit Atrocity , Harvard University had been doing a service to humanity . So when DEI programs are cut or deprioritized, it is often the most intersectional, least visible communities like Dalits who suffer first. Conversations about caste which are already considered “too niche” or “too local” in many Western circles are likely to be the first casualties. The funding that supports research on caste and gender, that brings Dalit women scholars and activists into global dialogues, that trains institutions to recognize caste dynamics in admissions, hiring and policymaking – that  is what’s at stake. Institutions like Harvard have been instrumental in naming and addressing Caste Atrocity . In recent years, they have hosted caste-awareness conferences, expanded curriculum offerings, and fostered inclusive spaces for South Asian students from marginalized backgrounds. Harvard’s stance has also inspired other universities and city governments across the U.S. to begin recognizing caste as a protected category under non-discrimination policies. But these efforts require sustained resources and political will.

In India, Dalit women remain drastically underrepresented in public leadership, routinely subjected to violence, and locked out of economic opportunity. But these inequities do not stop at India’s borders. Caste-based exclusion has followed South Asian communities into the diaspora, including in the United States. Recent lawsuits in American tech companies have revealed caste-based workplace discrimination.  Surveys among Indian-American communities show that caste identity remains a source of both privilege and marginalization. Therefore when American institutions scale back their commitment to equity, the signal sent to us in the rest of the world is that justice is negotiable – that some histories matter more than others. For the millions of Dalit women fighting for dignity and recognition, this is not some distant policy question . This  is a reminder that their lives are still viewed as marginal even on global platforms that profess inclusion.Therefore  the loss of this policy shift is not merely academic. It is personal, generational, and political.

In a time when global movements such as #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, Dalit Lives Matter etc. have reminded us how interconnected injustice is, we cannot afford to turn inward. The social issues of caste, gender, and race have to be understood as interconnected systems of oppression. The moral arc of history may bend toward justice, but it will not do so without institutional support.

As Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the father of India’s Constitution and a Dalit icon, warned: “Justice is not a natural order. It is a social construct that must be defended.”  Today, the defence of that construct lies in our shared commitment to equity across borders .United States  has historically given the  moral leadership on questions of equality. It must continue to do so , not only for its own citizens, but also for all those who look up to its institutions for inspiration and solidarity. We cannot allow the walls of inclusion to shrink at a moment when they must expand.