The Ground That Needed "Purifying": An Old Ritual Returns to Haldwani

A Ritual That Keeps Returning In October 1927, at Mahad in the

Konkan region of present-day Maharashtra, upper-caste residents performed a purification ceremony on the Chavadar tank after Dr B.R. Ambedkar led thousands of Dalits to publicly drink from its water. The tank itself had done nothing; the water was unchanged.

What the ritual sought to undo was contact - the idea that a Dalit body could touch a shared resource and leave it, in some cosmological sense, unfit for others. Ninety-nine years later, in Haldwani, a public ground was subjected to a "shuddhikaran havan" two days after Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge addressed a rally there.

The object of anxiety has changed from a water tank to a rally ground. The underlying grammar has not.

The Pattern Beneath the Politics This is the

part a purely political reading misses. Purification rituals after a Dalit presence are not spontaneous acts of religious sentiment; they follow a repeatable logic going back to at least the Vaikom and Mahad satyagrahas of the 1920s, when temple entry and tank access by Dalits routinely provoked ritual "cleansing" by caste Hindus who considered the space contaminated.

Article 17, adopted in 1950 and the Untouchability (Offences) Act of 1955 - renamed the Protection of Civil Rights Act in 1976 - were built precisely to outlaw this cosmology of contamination. What Haldwani shows is that a law can abolish untouchability as a legal category without dislodging it as a social reflex.

Where the Parallel Breaks Down

The comparison is not perfect and the difference matters. In 1927, the colonial state was largely a bystander; local authorities rarely condemned purification rituals and the burden of response fell entirely on Ambedkar's movement.

In 2026, within a day of the Haldwani ritual becoming public, the Rajya Sabha Chairman - himself holding the constitutional office of Vice President - condemned it on the floor of the House and a Union Minister expressed regret.

That institutional reflex to disavow untouchability publicly, instantly, is new. What has not changed is the absence, in both eras, of anyone identified, charged or punished under the law meant to prevent exactly this.

The Real Question for the Exam The

UPSC-relevant insight is not "untouchability still exists"

• that is a headline, not an analysis. It is that Article 17 and the Protection of Civil Rights Act target the behaviour of untouchability but cannot, by themselves, dissolve the belief that produces the behaviour - the purity-pollution complex that treats certain bodies as contaminating. Ninety-nine years of legal abolition have changed who condemns the ritual. They have not yet changed who performs it.