Caste and gender are two of the most deeply entrenched axes of power in South Asian society – and where they intersect, violence becomes systematic. For millions of women in India, especially those from Dalit communities, discrimination is not experienced along one axis but along several simultaneously: they are women in a patriarchal society, Dalits in a caste-stratified hierarchy, and often poor in a deeply unequal economy. This convergence does not simply add up the disadvantages – it multiplies them, creating a specific and severe form of oppression that demands careful examination.
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The role of caste in gender-based violence
At its core, the caste system is a rigidly hierarchical social structure determined by birth. Caste divisions in India dominate housing, marriage, employment, and general social interaction – reinforced through the threat of social ostracism, economic boycotts, and physical violence. Within this system, women’s bodies become central sites for maintaining caste purity. The control of whom a woman marries, whom she interacts with, and how she carries herself in public is not merely a personal or family matter – it is treated as a community obligation.
Caste norms prescribe strict rules of endogamy (marriage within one’s caste group) and exogamy (restrictions around marrying within the same village or clan). Violating these rules is seen as a threat to the entire social order. Women who dare to cross these lines – by falling in love with someone from a different caste or the same gotra (patrilineal clan) – face social ostracism, forced marriages, and in extreme cases, death. Their choices are not their own; they belong to the community.
This regulation of women’s choices through caste norms is not incidental – it is structural. Violence against Dalit women is systematically used to deny them opportunities, choices, and freedoms at multiple levels, undermining not only their dignity and self-respect but also their right to development. The message embedded in every act of violence is clear: stay in your place, or face the consequences.
Case study: Honour killings in Haryana
Few examples illustrate the lethal consequences of caste transgression as sharply as the case of Ved Pal Maun from rural Haryana. Ved Pal, a 27-year-old Jat farmer, fell in love with Sonia Banwal from a neighbouring village – a seemingly ordinary romance that the local caste council, known as a khap panchayat, deemed a grave offence. Since the two villages fell under the jurisdiction of the same khap, their union was considered equivalent to incest, forbidden by tradition.
The couple eloped and registered their marriage in a civil ceremony. They were warned that if they did not return, the khap panchayat would banish their families – and so they came back. Ved Pal even sought court intervention, obtaining police protection to accompany him to Sonia’s village. It made no difference. A mob of approximately a hundred people attacked him while police stood by. He was lynched with farm tools. No one was initially charged. The court order, the legal marriage, the police escort – none of it could override the dictates of the khap.
The Ved Pal case is not isolated. Khap panchayats sanction acts of gendered violence and override any notion of equality or gender empowerment that the Indian Constitution endeavoured to provide. Research on honour killings in Haryana shows that inter-caste affairs are the dominant trigger in nearly half of all such cases, while same-gotra relationships and same-village relationships account for most of the remaining incidents. Across these cases, a consistent pattern emerges: the moment a woman or couple attempts to exercise autonomy over marriage, caste councils mobilise to crush that autonomy – sometimes fatally.
While men like Ved Pal can also be targets, women bear the greatest risk. The main targets of honour killings are women and girls, penalised for choices ranging from rejecting arranged marriages, to engaging in relationships of their own choosing, to seeking divorce. Their bodies and choices are treated as property belonging to the family and community – any deviation is framed as dishonour deserving punishment.
Violence against Dalit women: a system, not an aberration
If caste norms brutally police women who cross social boundaries, they are even more devastatingly deployed against Dalit women – women who are positioned, by birth, outside the protections that caste privilege confers. Dalit women have been systematically placed at the lowest rung of India’s caste, class, and gender hierarchies. Out of over 200 million Dalits in India, approximately half are women, and they disproportionately bear the brunt of both caste oppression and gender-based violence.
The numbers are staggering. Reported rape cases against Dalit women and girls nearly doubled between 2014 and 2022, rising from 2,233 to 4,241 incidents – a jump of almost 90 percent. And these are only the reported cases. Activists and researchers consistently point out that the majority of incidents go unreported due to fear of retaliation, social stigma, police hostility, and the near-certainty that justice will not be served.
The 2016 Jisha murder case in Kerala became a grim landmark in understanding how this violence operates. Jisha, a 30-year-old Dalit law student, was found dead in her home with 38 wounds on her body, with signs of rape and severe mutilation. Her mother, a daily wage labourer, discovered the body. The police initially delayed providing the family with a copy of the First Information Report – a legal right – and Amnesty International called for an independent investigation into alleged police inaction. Prior complaints about caste-based harassment against the family had also gone unaddressed.
What makes the Jisha case – and others like it – particularly instructive is the institutional silence surrounding it. Dalit rights activist Cynthia Stephen noted that when Dalit women are victims, outrage is generally less across the country, and there is a pervasive sense that “this girl is not ‘one of us.’” This indifference is not accidental – it reflects a social order that treats Dalit women’s suffering as less worthy of attention, less deserving of justice.
The 2020 Hathras case in Uttar Pradesh reinforced this reality on a national scale. A 19-year-old Dalit woman was gang-raped by four men, left with a severed tongue and spinal injuries, and died two weeks later in a Delhi hospital. After her death, police cremated her body at night without her family’s consent, destroying potential evidence. The handling of the case drew widespread condemnation but also illustrated the depth of institutional failure: police, administration, and judiciary – all are implicated in the culture of impunity that surrounds violence against Dalit women.
The systemic neglect of Dalit women’s cases
Across India, a consistent pattern emerges in how cases involving Dalit women are handled. Police frequently cause undue delay in registering FIRs and deliberately omit relevant sections of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act – effectively stripping caste-motivated violence of its caste dimension. Around 65 percent of perpetrators charged under the PoA Act are ultimately acquitted, often because upper-caste accused can draw on their social, economic, and political connections to influence investigations and court proceedings.
Human Rights Watch has documented the use of sexual abuse and other forms of violence against Dalit women as tools by landlords and police to inflict political lessons and crush dissent and labour movements within Dalit communities. Violence, in this context, is not random – it is purposeful. It is deployed to maintain economic subordination, punish political assertion, and reinforce the message that Dalits who step out of their assigned roles will face severe consequences.
Even simple acts of assertion – drawing water from a common tap, walking across a dominant-caste field, or demanding wages – can trigger violent retaliation. These triggers fall broadly into two categories: violence used to maintain caste and caste-based gender norms, and retaliation against Dalit women who assert their rights by defying untouchability norms. The violence is not personal – it is the caste system enforcing its own logic.
Impact of patriarchal norms on caste violence
It would be a mistake to analyse caste violence without accounting for the role of patriarchy in sustaining and intensifying it. Caste and patriarchy do not operate independently – they form an interlocking system where each reinforces the other. Casteist patriarchy assigns women the role of vessels for caste honour: it is through their bodies that caste purity is maintained, and through their control that social hierarchies are reproduced across generations.
In rural areas particularly, patriarchal norms dictate that women must remain “obedient” and “pure,” subordinating their desires, choices, and movements to the authority of fathers, husbands, and community councils. The khap panchayat system is perhaps the most visible institutional expression of this. Composed predominantly of upper-caste elderly men, these councils operate as parallel governance structures that override constitutional protections and punish any deviation from their rulings with social boycott, economic exclusion, or physical violence.
For Dalit women specifically, the burden is compounded further. Dalit women are more discriminated against than other women not only by people of higher castes but also within their own communities, because Dalit men also follow patriarchal norms as dominant figures. This means Dalit women face violence from multiple directions: from dominant castes above them in the hierarchy, and sometimes from within their own families and communities. They have no safe quarter in a system that places them at the bottom of every axis of power.
The impunity with which caste-based violence is carried out reinforces the normality of a culture of violence. When perpetrators face no consequences – when police refuse to act, when courts dismiss evidence, when panchayats openly support accused killers – it sends a powerful social message: this violence is acceptable, even legitimate. Changing this requires not only legal reform but a fundamental transformation in social attitudes, in how communities understand women’s autonomy, caste dignity, and the right to safety.
The law and its limits
India does have legal mechanisms designed to address caste-based violence. The Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, first enacted in 1989 and significantly amended in 2018, is the primary legislative instrument. The Prohibition of Child Marriage Act and provisions under the Indian Penal Code also apply. Yet laws on paper have consistently failed to match realities on the ground – particularly in rural areas where caste hierarchies permeate every institution, including the very police and courts meant to deliver justice.
What these gaps reveal is that caste-based gender violence cannot be addressed through legal reform alone. It requires a dismantling of the social, economic, and ideological structures that treat Dalit women’s bodies as sites of domination. It requires accountability for police officers who destroy evidence or delay registration of cases. It requires courts that take caste motivation seriously as an aggravating factor, not a detail to be erased from the record. And it requires social movements – Dalit women’s movements specifically – to have the space, resources, and safety to organise and advocate for their rights.
Dalit feminist scholars and activists have long argued that the experiences of Dalit women must be centred, not absorbed into broader women’s movements that often speak from a position of caste privilege. The intersection of caste and gender is not simply additive – it is its own distinct form of oppression that demands its own analysis, its own politics, and its own justice.
What do you think? If both caste discrimination and gender-based violence are legally prohibited in India, why do Dalit women continue to face this compounded violence with so little institutional recourse – and what structural changes would be necessary to actually change that? Does mainstream feminist discourse in India and globally do enough to centre the specific experiences of Dalit women, or does it risk flattening their unique position within intersecting hierarchies of caste, class, and gender?
References
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste-related_violence_in_India
- https://idsn.org/wp-content/uploads/user_folder/pdf/New_files/Key_Issues/Dalit_Women/Manjula_Pradeep_-_Violence_against_Dalit_Women_2014.pdf
- https://www.chicagotribune.com/2009/09/28/villagers-mete-out-medieval-justice/
- https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/26330024231219703
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333557222_Honour_Killings_In_Haryana_State_India_A_Content_Analysis
- https://theamikusqriae.com/honour-killing-no-honour-in-killing/
- https://cofemsocialchange.org/sexual-gbv-dalit-women-girls-india/
- https://idsn.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/AIDMAM-Factsheet-2024-Violence-again-women-Factsheet.pdf
- https://www.amnestyusa.org/press-releases/rape-and-murder-of-dalit-woman-highlights-persistence-of-caste-gender-based-violence/
- https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/22/india/kerala-india-teen-rape-allegations-dst-intl-hnk
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Hathras_gang_rape_and_murder
- https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/Issues/Women/SR/RapeReport/CSOs/162-india-2.pdf
- https://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/india/India994-11.htm
- https://vc.bridgew.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2680&context=jiws
- https://www.socialstudiesjournal.com/archives/2025/vol7issue1/PartI/7-1-95-204.pdf
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