Why India doesn’t want its students talking about caste

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Editor's note: Y.S. Raghav has been a teacher for 40 years. He’s spent the last 17 of them as principal of JPGD Inter College at Hathras, Uttar Pradesh. Nearly 1,000 students, from classes 1 to 12, attend his institute. A few end up in the police or civil services, many go back to work on the potato and lentil farms sprawled across the countryside. At 61, Raghav has a full head of hair and a beard that makes him look a lot like Narendra Modi. And, like the prime minister, he too is full of platitudes, especially when talking about caste. “Roti aur beti ka sambandh hi is khai ko paar kar sakta hai,” he says. That is, sharing meals and inter-caste marriage are the only solutions to casteism. He wouldn’t do it himself, though. “I am afraid of my society. I will be discarded and boycotted and no one will come to my home and functions and ceremonies if I do it.” It’d been exactly a year since the gang-rape and murder of a 19-year-old Dalit girl on the day we …