Caste discrimination, international human rights, and Hinduism

Abstract Since 1996, international human rights law (IHRL) has attempted to address caste-based discrimination through the rubric of racial discrimination by reading caste into ‘descent’ under Article 1(1) of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD). However, this framing of discrimination remains inadequate. The Committee on Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) and the UN Sub-Commission for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights sought to identify caste-based discrimination by identifying practices of untouchability without analysing caste as a system of entitlement to knowledge, wealth, and land. Therefore, IHRL envisioned caste-based discrimination as primarily inflicting recognition harms on its victims. This meant that even material manifestations of caste-based discrimination were framed as consequences of untouchability. Furthermore, the creative legal move to read caste into ‘descent’ meant deracinating caste from its particular context in South Asia — where it remains imbricated with Brahmanical Hinduism 1 — into a general form of ‘descent’ like any other ascriptive category. This process of abstraction erases the interdigitation of caste and Hinduism. These two moves mean IHRL remains ill-equipped to identify, let alone redress, caste-based discrimination.