7.6 Caste Discrimination and the Untouchability Issue

The historical construction (fast recap from earlier units): the Muluki Ain 1854 codified a five-fold caste hierarchy with graded rights and penalties (Nepali History Unit 5); the 1963 re- enactment removed untouchability's legal sanction; the 1990 and 2015 Constitutions entrenched equality; and the Caste-based Discrimination and Untouchability (Offence and Punishment) Act 2068 (2011) made caste discrimination in any public or private sphere a criminal offence — in water sources, temples, schools, shops, services and assemblies. The sociological reality (the persistence data): Dalits — roughly one Nepali in eight — still face discrimination in access to water taps, temples and inns; inter-caste couples face family and community violence (the 2020 Rukum (West) killings of five young Dalit men, including Nawaraj BK, after he came to marry a non-Dalit woman, is the emblematic case — cite it); landlessness and occupational stereotyping remain structural (landless Dalit households far above the national average; the haliya (bonded agricultural labourers) of the far-west freed by state declaration in 2008–09 after the Kamaiya liberation of the 2000s, with rehabilitation still incomplete; haruwa-charuwa practices lingering in the tarai). The legal machinery and its gap: criminal statute (2068) + constitutional right against untouchability + the National Dalit Commission (a constitutional body since 2015) + Supreme Court public-interest activism. Yet: FIRs are few, prosecutions fewer, convictions fewest — the enforcement…