Abstract

In 2001, the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR), a coalition of activists and academics for the rights of the Dalits, the Indian Institute of Dalit Studies and several Indian non-governmental organizations, introduced with the statement «caste is race plus», the issue of caste discrimination into the agenda of the Third World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Tolerance (WCAR), in Durban, South Africa. This initiative has triggered an intense debate between representatives of non-governmental organizations, the Indian government, academics and scholars on the theoretical issues of caste and race and their semantic convergence. The themes of the debate focused on two main questions: Is caste race? Can we compare caste and racial discrimination? The article gives a glimpse of this debate, outlining the tight dialectics and the plurality of positions.