I was born into a family that does not discuss caste at the dinner table because, as my father once put it, we are the kind of family that does not need to. That sentence contains everything I want to talk about. The families that do not need to discuss caste are, without exception, the families for whom caste has always worked. The families for whom it has not worked discuss it constantly, because it structures every interaction with every institution they encounter from birth.

The data on this is not ambiguous, though it is routinely treated as if it were. National Sample Survey data consistently shows that Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe households earn approximately 40 percent of the average income of upper-caste households, own a fraction of the land and assets, and are dramatically underrepresented in every elite profession except government employment — where reservations policy has created partial and contested access. The gaps have narrowed at the margins over seventy years of independence. They have not closed. At current rates of convergence, they will not close within any timeframe that justifies complacency.

What has changed is the vocabulary. Discrimination that was once naked is now laundered through the apparently neutral language of merit, cultural fit, social networks, and soft skills. The upper-caste entrepreneur who hires exclusively within his community calls it trust. The gatekeeper who cannot imagine a Dalit colleague at a senior level calls it a pipeline problem. The parent who steers a child away from an inter-caste relationship calls it family values. The discrimination is continuous. The language that makes it invisible is what has been perfected.

I am writing this because I think the Indian middle class — my class — has developed a story about caste that functions as a sedative. The story is: we have the constitution, we have reservations, we have urbanisation and economic growth and a meritocratic private sector, and these forces are slowly but surely dissolving the old hierarchies. I believed this story for a long time. The evidence against it has become too heavy to carry.

Discomfort is not a solution. But it is a precondition for one. We cannot fix what we refuse to see.