The facts are not polluted. The prejudice is. No Ganga can wash it away.

There is a simple question that needs to be asked about the alleged shuddhikaran ceremony at Haldwani: What exactly was being purified?

If it were a venue littered with plastic bottles, paper plates, food packets, and other rubbish after a political gathering, the answer would be simple. It needed cleaning. That is what sanitation workers do every day. They sweep floors, collect garbage, and clear roads after public meetings, religious festivals, and heavy rain. Nobody calls it purification.

The word shuddhikaran changes the meaning. It takes us from hygiene to ritual purity. And in India, ritual purity has a long and deeply uncomfortable association with caste. That is why the Haldwani episode cannot be dismissed as a minor controversy over terminology.

The facts must first be established. If the venue was cleaned, there is nothing objectionable. But if a ritual was performed because Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, a Dalit leader, had addressed a gathering there, then the incident deserves the strongest possible condemnation.

A place cannot be polluted by the presence of a Dalit. That proposition should not even require an argument in the India of 2026. Yet we are compelled to make it because India has never entirely escaped the idea that some people are more pure than others. The country’s history is replete with reminders.

In 1978, Babu Jagjivan Ram, then Deputy Prime Minister and one of India’s most respected national leaders, inaugurated a statue in Varanasi. After he garlanded it, the statue was subjected to a ritual purification by upper-caste groups. The message was chilling: the touch of a Dalit could supposedly defile even a statue.

Jagjivan Ram held one of the highest offices in the land. Many believe that if he had been chosen as Prime Minister, instead of Morarji Desai, the Janata Party government would have completed its full term. But, for those who performed the ritual, the office apparently could not erase the caste into which he had been born.

Two decades later, in Allahabad, the same mentality reportedly entered the precincts of the judiciary. After Dalit judge Bharthari Prasad left his chamber, his successor had the chamber and furniture washed with Ganga water. A room occupied by a judge of the Republic was treated as though it had been contaminated by its previous occupant.

And then there was Guruvayur in Kerala. In 2007, the family of Union minister Vayalar Ravi went to the temple for the choroonu ceremony of his infant grandson. The temple authorities subsequently ordered a punyaham, or purification ritual, reportedly because Ravi’s wife, the late Mercy Ravi, was Christian by birth. The Guruvayur Devaswom Board eventually apologised to the family.

Nearly two decades later, in August 2025, Guruvayur again found itself at the centre of a controversy over purification. Social media influencer Jasmin Jaffar filmed a video while walking through the temple complex and washing her feet in the sacred temple pond, Rudra Theertham. The temple subsequently performed purification rituals. No such rituals were held when dogs and cats entered the place. Whatever the religious rules governing access to a temple pond, the episode showed how quickly the vocabulary of ritual purity can enter public life.

These are not identical incidents. Nor should every ritual of purification be equated with caste discrimination. Families have long performed rituals after childbirth, death, and other major transitions. Religious traditions have their own vocabulary and practices.

The problem begins when that vocabulary is used to declare another human being a source of pollution. That is what makes Haldwani so disturbing.

The Constitution did not merely abolish untouchability as a legal practice. It established a radically different moral principle: that every citizen possesses equal dignity. In Kerala, there were people of caste who were not only untouchable but also invisible!

India’s social reform movements had understood this long before the Constitution came into force. Kerala’s Temple Entry Proclamation of 1936 was a historic blow against caste-based exclusion from temples. Yet even those who challenged caste orthodoxy paid a price. Poet Ulloor S. Parameswara Iyer, who drafted the declaration, faced ostracism from sections of his own caste for asserting that he should not be defined by caste but simply as a human being.

That remains the unfinished business of India. What is particularly disturbing in Haldwani is the reported official response. Instead of the focus being first on the alleged purification, an FIR has reportedly been registered against Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi for protesting against it.

If this account is correct, it represents a remarkable inversion of accountability. The first question should be: Who performed the ritual? Why was it performed? Who authorised it? What was meant by it?

Only after those questions are answered should the police decide whether an offence has been committed. Protesting against alleged caste discrimination cannot become more objectionable than the discrimination itself.

There is an increasingly familiar tendency to examine the protester before examining the provocation. When a church is vandalised, it is the church authorities who are taken to task. When discrimination is challenged, the person challenging it can find himself facing the police. When injustice becomes inconvenient, sometimes the easiest response is to criminalise the person pointing it out.

That is not how a constitutional democracy should function. The Haldwani controversy also exposes something else: how easily the word “cleanliness” can become a convenient cover for something much uglier.

India desperately needs cleanliness. Our public spaces often become dumping grounds after political rallies, religious festivals, and social gatherings. Sanitation workers deserve far greater respect and protection for the work they do. They clean what others dirty. But they do not purify.

They remove garbage. They do not remove the supposed pollution of a person. That distinction is not semantic. It is moral.

If Kharge’s presence was followed by a ritual because of his caste, the insult was not confined to Kharge. It was directed at every Indian who believes that birth cannot determine human worth.

It was directed at the Constitution. And it was directed at the idea of India itself. The irony is almost unbearable. A Dalit leader can be elected to the highest political positions, lead one of the country’s oldest political parties, and address a public gathering, and yet someone can still imagine that the ground he stood on requires ritual purification.

What kind of progress is that? The answer cannot be another ritual. It cannot be holy water poured over a floor. It cannot be an FIR against those who object. And it certainly cannot be silence.

The appropriate response is investigation, accountability, and, above all, rejection of the prejudice that made such a ritual conceivable in the first place.

If Haldwani was cleaned, let the authorities say so clearly and establish the facts. If it was purified because a Dalit leader had spoken there, let those responsible explain themselves. There is no need to purify the facts. The facts are not polluted. The prejudice is. And no amount of Ganga water can wash that away.