Truth About Caste

For more than a century, caste has functioned as the master explanation for India's social problems — cited by academics, mobilised by politicians, and treated as a fixed lens through which Bharat's past and present must be read. N.K. Vaid's book does not accept that framing. It argues that the concept has been actively distorted by those with interests in keeping the distortion in place: scholars who built careers on particular narratives, and politicians who found in caste a reliable instrument of electoral division.

Truth About Caste is a polemic in the serious sense — a sustained argument, not a dismissal. Vaid examines how the term has been used and misused, who benefits from the current discourse, and what gets suppressed when caste becomes the sole explanatory framework for everything from poverty to communal violence. The book insists that concealed truths serve specific agendas, and that exposing those agendas is a precondition for honest conversation.

Readers who sense that the debate around caste has become more doctrinaire than analytical will find in this book a direct challenge to the consensus.