Do you, like me, believe that our Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are busy doing critical work? You aren’t wrong. It’s just that this “critical work” is different. The third edition of the Critical Philosophy of Caste and Race conference, held between January 16 and 18, is the latest critical stuff from IIT Delhi (IITD). One suspects the institute was taking a short ideological break.
The annual conference was organised in the Senate Hall of IITD by Professor Divya Dwivedi, who teaches Literature and Philosophy at the institute, and Sowjanya Tamlapakula, an Associate Professor at Woxsen University, Hyderabad.
The focus of the conference was “the histories and futures of the arduous and brilliant efforts of oppressed groups”. “Oppressed groups,” I wondered. Why would a conference whose foundation rests on caste and race expand its ambit to include oppressed groups? Then, I saw a session dedicated to tracing the “commonality between Dalits and Palestinians,” and I had my answer—a revelation that will likely surprise both of them as well. Just saying: Palestinians are neither a race nor a caste; they are an ethnolinguistic group.
Similarly, a session on “egalitarian Islam and invisible caste” also caught me up. Islam, we were told, is egalitarian. According to three of the six major Hadiths—Sunan Ibn Majah, Abu Dawud, and Tirmidhi—Muhammad predicted that Muslims would divide into 73 firqas (sects), of which only one would attain Jannat (heaven), while the rest would end up in Jahannum (hell). One sect gets heaven; 72 get hell. From this, egalitarianism seems to be homeless. No?
It was in January 2023 that Penn State University Press published a special issue titled Caste and Religion in India, dedicated to “critical studies of caste”. The Guest Editor of this was Dwivedi. To have a “critical discussion” on the same, next year, Dwivedi organised a conference titled “Critical Philosophy of Caste and Race” with Dickens Leonard M and Yashpal Jogdand, who also had their articles in that special issue. First, the work was published, and then one of the premier institutions of the nation was used to promote it. Classic Left move. Thank you, Shourie Saab.
What Dwivedi and her associates are essentially propagating, firstly through the special issue and then through these conferences, is that caste stands on the same pedestal as race—that both are identical systems of oppression.
Ram Swarup, the renowned Sankhya philosopher, mentioned “Old India had castes, but not casteism”, that is, oppression. Going by Swarup, the foundation of this conference appears to rest on a questionable equivalence, one driven more by ideology than by truth, though presented as settled beyond debate.
‘Ziegenbalg (1682 – 1719) writing on the eve of the British advent saw that at least one-third of the people practised other than their traditional calling and that “official and political functions, such as those of teachers, councillors, governors, priests, poets and even kings were not considered the prerogative of any particular group, but are open to all”’, wrote Swarup.
We have seen slogans written and raised across various universities: “Brahman-Baniya Bharat Chodho”, “Brahmanvaad ki Chaati Par, Birsa, Phule, Ambedkar”, and even “There will be blood”. Such slogans do not take birth in vaccum. Such conferences do the seeding.
Dwivedi has claimed that Hinduism was created in the “early 20th century,” that Hindus are a “false majority,” and that caste in India can only be ended through a “French-style revolution.”
I believe it is here that Dwivedi’s scholarship stops being “philosophy” and starts being a full-on hallucination. The essential argument from Dwivedi and those who agree with her is that if the British hadn’t tried to characterise Hinduism in the early twentieth century, it wouldn’t have existed. How stupid is that? It’s like saying the sun didn’t exist until someone gave it the name “sun.” Hinduism is a dharma, not a religion.
The fact is, Hindus aren’t “made” by a census — they are born into it. The dharma of every human being is Sanātana (eternal); it is only after coming into this world that rituals like circumcision make someone a Muslim, or baptism makes them a Christian. We are born into the natural order, not a British category.
The absolute worst part is her belief that the solution to annihilating caste is a “French-style revolution.” This is pure radical-chic brain rot. It’s an intellectual failure when a philosopher thinks the only way to fix social problems is a Reign of Terror. It’s easy to fantasise about thousands of people losing their lives when you’re sitting in a safe enviornment. But this isn’t deep insight — it’s just dangerous. Very dangerous.
If Dwivedi contributes regularly to portals such as The Wire and The Caravan, publications of the Left, and to Economic and Political Weekly (EPW). Then, as editor of the journal Philosophy World Democracy, she has got the executive editor of The Caravan, Hartosh Singh Bal, as one of its editorial consultants, while Romila Thapar, a marxist historian and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Sameeksha Trust—the publishing body of EPW—as someone serving on the journal’s scientific committee.
You might not be aware, but in May 2025, a writing workshop was conducted by the Humanities and Social Sciences Department (HSS) of IITD for the MA programme in Culture, Society and Thought (MA-CST), for which Dwivedi was the course coordinator. Among the invited speakers were? 2 individuals associated with The Caravan. The so-called intellectual ecosystem is, at the very least, consistent. Something we should also learn.
The themes of previous editions of the conference are also worth noting. The 2024 conference held sessions on “The Shared Moral Universe of Dalits and Blacks” and “The Evasive Racism of Caste—and the Homological Power of the ‘Aryan’ Doctrine”. I thought Blacks were remaining to be compared with Dalits, but I was wrong.
The 2025 conference, meanwhile, had sessions on “Phenomenology and Intersectionality” and “Ordinary Muslims, Extraordinary Negotiations: Rethinking the Caste and Islam”. America’s Intersectionality has arrived at IITD. There will, no doubt, be more conferences. After all, coloniality lovers love the copy-paste of the West.
S Shiva is an independent journalist based in Delhi.