Divya Dwivedi is a professor of philosophy at IIT Delhi. Her philosophical publications with Shaj Mohan are considered to be among the most important of our time.

Considered the most iconic philosopher from the "third world", Dwivedi has never stopped writing and speaking about oppressions, racisms and the atrocities committed by the west, led by America, in poorer countries of the world including Venezuela, Palestine, Iran, Lebanon, and Sudan.

Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan are the authors of Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-politics (2019) and Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution: On Caste and Politics (the Malayalam translation published by Pusthaka Prasadhaka Sangham). Dwivedi is the editor of several anthologies which raised cutting edge research issues in philosophy, politics and narrative studies, and she is a prolific author of academic publications and public interventions in magazines and news platforms.

Recently, she was the subject of viral social media attacks when she organised the third edition of the conference series Critical Philosophy of Caste and Race in January 2026. This conference format itself was found threatening not only by the 'Hindutva' organisations, but also academic left and the liberals, because in this series which started since 2024, the majority voices discussing caste were from the lower caste and tribal communities of India.

Currently she is under investigation as the organiser of the iconic Critical Philosophy of Caste and Race conferences, which is only the latest addition in a series of what an American academic described as the academic ostracism and social exclusion of Divya Dwivedi.

I studied the report by Dr Ajay Sekher, published in Mathrubhumi, on your anti-caste conference at IIT and the attacks it faced. These are among the many intimidation tactics and threats issued against you by the casteist extremists in India, which include acid attack, threats, and death threats over the past many years.iv We are all deeply concerned about you in Kerala.

At the root of it is your unwavering and courageous stance of a decade, based on all available facts, about the oppression of the lower caste majority in India and against the destruction of India. Your recent book with Shaj Mohan, in translation in Malayalam, is awakening our intellectual class in an unprecedented way right now.

First, for the readers of Kerala can you tell me something about how your academic and intellectual journey moved towards anti-caste revolutionary politics? How did you break through the high privilege of your background? When did it begin?

I grew up in Allahabad (now called Prayagraj) in a bungalow opposite the high court, visited often by political leaders from extremes including Congress and the Left. There was a library curated by my grandfather who was a Kantian jurisprudentialist and a socialist. That is, an extremely privileged milieu. Typically, one does not experience all the horrors of the caste system as a protected girl in such a milieu; domestic atmospheres are carefully managed to approximate the bourgeois scene. But my parents were communists working in the villages. They took me along with them for many years. My mother would remind me about the sacrifices made by the lower caste poor to feed their children a meal a day, which I witnessed with her. My father explained to me the principles of Marxism and Communism, and of his life in prison when I was still in primary school and taught me to observe the actualities of labour and exploitation on the city streets.

When I came to Delhi to study at the university, I also worked in what can be broadly called the "anti-dam movement" around the Narmada Bachao Andolan. There it became apparent that caste discrimination and oppression exceeded the principles of Marxist theory; that Marxism was used as a method to evade Dr. B. R. Ambedkar's dream, the annihilation of caste, the Indian revolutionary project; and that philosophy had never adequately encountered this distinctly horrific form of inequality.

Delhi was the centre of the casteist anti-reservation agitations from the days of Mandal commission report in the 1980s. But in early 2000s there was a BJP government at the centre. What triggered you to take this academic direction to rigorously and revolutionarily pursue philosophy in the western style and oppose the caste system theoretically and politically?

In 2001, every last bit of innocence about India's university systems and the Savarna liberal and left pretences were shattered for me. Shaj Mohan was at St Stephen's college with me at that time, teaching himself scholasticism and various Aristotelianisms while I was studying Kant and Heidegger, and together we were studying Jean-Luc Nancy, analytic philosophy and anti-caste literature. In the that year, Durban 2001 "World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance" (WCAR) in South Africa saw the anti-caste assertion of the lower caste majority participants led by many Dalit intellectuals and activists who wanted to participate and bring caste under the purview of WCAR.

The government denied them permission to travel, but they were incredibly clear-sighted and courageous and went to Durban anyway. In the end, through diplomatic manoeuvres of the BJP led union government, caste oppression could not be included in the final declaration.

Simultaneously, Savarna academics of India including Shiv Vishwanathan, Andre Beteille, Dipankar Gupta, and others published articles in national media to criticise, ridicule and to condescend to the Dalit campaigners in Durban. They sought to evaluate the "nationalism" of the Dalit, Bahujan, Adivasi activists. That was when I understood that most of the upper caste intellectuals of India wear the mask of 'progressivism', while they treat the oppression and the murders of lower caste majority as the distinct background noise of India.

Shaj and I were stunned by this deep animus against anti-caste leadership in thought and mobilization by Dalits to eradicate their own suffering. We wrote letters to our friends explaining this casteism while the articles we wrote were not given space in the media. From there onwards, we could not conceive research in philosophy without addressing inequalities and oppressions which had often been justified through the authority of philosophy.

I think those realisations changed for us the way philosophy itself was approached in the academia - distanced from politics and suffering, as if it were another 'Aranyaka' praxis or a 'contemplation' exercise of pleasure. We began to conceive the relation between philosophy, freedom, politics, and revolution through the book on M. K. Gandhi.

What does it show? All societies have their taboos and their logic which is unconscious. In India, the very conscious taboo - which produces unconscious as well as conscious effects - is the discussion of and organisation against caste oppression, because it can end the most comfortable "way of life" for the upper castes who enjoyed it for 3000 years.

The first massive attack on you by the upper caste supremacists came in 2019 when you spoke out about the character of caste oppression in NDTV and exposed who the real majority of India are. Can you elaborate this position for this occasion?

In India the real demographic majority are the lower caste people, who are more than 90% of the population. The majority lower castes have been excluded from positions of power, knowledge, prestige, wealth, honour, and acclaim for 3000 years.

When we speak about majority and minority in politics it has a very precise meaning, this is important. Let me give you an example. The government at the centre in India is a minority government as the BJP does not have the number of seats needed to govern on its own, and therefore it rules with the support of other parties. The BJP still does not have even 50% of the national vote share but only 36.6%v. That is, 63.4% of votes in India are opposed to the BJP.vi

The meaning of majority and minority in a parliamentary democracy is the number of votes polled in favour of political parties in that particular election, which can change dramatically if elections are held again in a few weeks.

The people decide the majority and the minority based on their long-term and short-term concerns. In India, if a party gains extraordinary majority to amend the constitution, elections can themselves be annulled, which is one of the paths to dictatorship through democratic means, which is illegitimate.

I must interrupt. Why is it 'illegitimate'?

Because, from then onwards the people lose their power to decide on a government based on their concerns and interests. The people as such are then destroyed as they no longer have a relation to self-determination; and in its place there will be mere subjects of power.

To continue, political power gains temporary and conditional legitimacy from the votes of the majority people who voted according to their concerns. A subversion of democratic principles already took place in India before 1947.

The British colonial census reports showed that the upper castes of India were a minority, and that the lower caste people, across religions, were the real majority of India. This was found alarming by the upper caste minority who adopted a "Hindu" identity to project a false majority and hide the real one. Because the caste order is conceived and enforced from out of scriptural authority which assigns value to the human body based on birth, parentage, and skin colour, and thus orders sexual segregation and apartheid.

Caste in practice is enforced assignment of labour based on descent, such that a carpenter's son remains carpenter, which is the functional isolation of the human body; endogamy, primarily through the control of women's sexual freedom, such that the carpenter never marries a Brahmin woman; caste is also enforced through ritualised rules of exclusion and untouchability. Therefore, a caste can work as a functionally isolated interest group that will choose what is best for it in a democracy. If you ask the lower caste majority what they want, the answer will of course be the annihilation of caste. Who would choose their own untouchability, humiliation, and oppression?!

On conservative estimations, the upper castes are less than 10% of India's population, across religions. You yourself have estimated it with a demographer and found that it was less than 8%. Gajendran Ayyathurai writes that it is about 5%. Obviously, since 1931 the upper castes of all religions have opposed caste-based census so as not be exposed as a minority.

Of course, that is why "Hinduism" was invented, so that the minority upper castes ritualistically and politically represented the majority lower castes whom they oppress. We had published our researches, with Shaj Mohan, in the Caravan cover story, "Hindu Hoax: How the Upper Castes Invented a Hindu Majority". What role does religion play in caste oppression?

A: It is this representation through "Hindu" that allows the upper caste minority to suppress the discussion of caste oppression internationally, presenting it as a discrimination within the "same" ethnic group, and as the feature of a religion.

This is a hoax, of course, of the Savarna tricksters to represent the lower caste majority while oppressing and humiliating them. There are many sociological studies from the 1940s that showed that the religions and the gods of the lower caste people and Adivasis were entirely different from the Savarna world of religion. As you know, even today Dalits are brutalised and killed for entering upper caste temples. What kind of religion is it, that kills its statistical members for entering its temples?

But, the same untouchability extends to the Dalits, OBCs, and Adivasis in India's elite institutions. The renowned science journal Nature published an article in January 2023 according to which 98% of all professors of IITs and IIScs are upper caste.vii In IIT Kharagpur there are 32 departments with no Dalit faculty, 23 departments with no OBC faculty, and no Adivasis at all.

Several leading IITs are accused of systemic violation of reservation norms.viii I am witness to this brutal exclusion of the lower caste majority from education. 77% of all judges in India's high courts are upper castes.ix Of the 33 judges of the Supreme Court 12 are Brahmins alone. An Oxfam report found that 90% of all leadership positions in Indian media and news are taken by upper castes and not even a single Dalit or Adivasi is editing Indian mainstream media.x All this is much more aggravated in the private sector.

Here, what is self-apparent in all these statistics is often hidden through rhetoric and evasion. The upper caste minority of less than 10% transcends political parties, the laws, institutions and constitutional norms by their ruthless and shameless capture of all sources of wealth and power, so that they continue to control the lives of the oppressed majority lower castes. The corroded and weakened democratic politics of India is a pretence before the world for upper caste supremacism's real dominance over India.

I have many questions from here. In this context is not religion like a political party, because the BJP seeks its votes in the name of Hinduism?

First, we have to indicate the theoretical problem of politics against religion. The impediment for politics, not just in India but everywhere, had been religion and ethnic groupings. A religion is recognised as such only if it refers to uniform practices across a wide geographic area and includes millions of people. Religion dictates the routines of Individual lives and collective lives; for example, the number of times one prays; containment of women's freedom according to menstrual cycles; clothing, dietary prohibitions, and social relations; and finally the very goal of a human life.

In this sense religion overwhelms this world and the other worlds, which is why it has been the great instrument of power from the ancient times to today. A ruler can choose the religion that enforces its order on the whole society, while expanding the territory of that realm or country into empires. Understanding the relation between religion and imperialism-including in the Anglo-American empire-is essential for learning about the future of politics.

So, you are arguing that religion and caste are institutions counter to politics. But did not modern politics emerge through the sciences?

Indeed, philosophy and the sciences emerged to counter the religious form of power, in order to create newer freedoms for the people. This new freedom, political freedom, allows us to conceive new ends and goals of life together.

As we know, it is from the new mechanical philosophy of Galileo that the modern theory of state emerged in the works of Hobbes. Hobbes encountered Galileo through the Mersenne circle of Paris, and he may have visited Galileo during his house arrest.