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Justice Markandey Katju has stopped using polite language.

In a blistering assessment of Indian society, the former Supreme Court judge called casteism pure “gobar” — cow dung. Not as a casual insult, but as a diagnosis. According to him, it is the mental garbage still filling the minds of even the most educated Indians, blocking clear thought and keeping the country trapped in backwardness.

His first target was the intellectual class itself.

Katju argued that fancy degrees mean almost nothing when it comes to caste. A person can hold a PhD from Harvard, Yale or the London School of Economics and still carry deep caste prejudice. He posed a simple, devastating test: ask these highly educated scholars whether they would marry their daughter to a Dalit young man. Most, he claimed, would refuse. The university may be world-class. The mind, he suggested, remains feudal.

He then drove the point home with a concrete example from the judiciary. A judge of the Madras High Court married outside his caste. The reaction from his own relatives was swift and total: they cut off all relations with him. Even inside the higher judiciary, in a supposedly modern professional environment, caste loyalty proved stronger than education, status or urban exposure.

For Katju, this is the real disease. Casteism is not just a social practice. It is a form of mental blockage — a dirty residue that prevents people from thinking rationally about the country’s actual problems. As long as this “gobar” continues to occupy the Indian mind, he argued, India will never seriously solve poverty, unemployment or mass illiteracy. The energy that should go into economic and social transformation is wasted on maintaining caste hierarchies and prejudices.

The language is deliberately crude. That is the strategy. By calling casteism “gobar,” Katju is refusing the soft academic vocabulary that usually surrounds the subject. He is saying the problem is not complicated theory. It is basic, ugly, and still widespread — even among those who pride themselves on being progressive and highly educated.

The challenge he has thrown is brutal and direct:

If the most educated Indians still refuse to rise above caste in their personal lives, what hope is there for the rest of society?

Katju has not merely criticised politicians or institutions this time. He has accused the Indian mind itself of remaining filled with garbage. And once that charge is made so bluntly, polite disagreement becomes much harder.