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The World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance held at Durban in South Africa in 2001 gave an opportunity for Dalits in India to represent the issue of caste discrimination and practice of untouchability on an international platform. With their demand that the UN should recognize caste and caste-based discrimination on par with racial discrimination, the event increased (in spite of the counter propaganda of the then Hindu rightist government in India) the international visibility of caste oppression as violation of human rights and denial of human dignity. In recent history, the flutters at the Durban conference and the resurgence of Dalits in the Indian political landscape leading to their assertion in civil society have impelled scholars, policy makers, and global organizations to take notice of their presence and also to search for their antecedents. It is against this historical backdrop of Dalit assertion and the recent culmination of events at the socio-political level in India that the present study, Dalits in India: Search for a Common Destiny by Sukhadeo Thorat, needs to be placed.
Even though there is no dearth of writings on Dalits in India ranging from the colonial census, anthropological and government reports, and missionary writings to the more recent quasi-academic scholarship by social scientists, the uniqueness of the present work lies in its ability to combine disparate information...