Penance for killing an untouchable is the same as penance for killing a dog, bear, frog, crow, or owl (Mahabharata 12.165.56; Agni Purana 169.25–32).

O Hindu,

That sentence
Is an acid poured
On the soul.

It eats through generations
Through lullabies whispered
In fear,
Through the young Dalit boys learning
To bow before they learn
To stand,
Through Dalit girls taught
To make themselves smaller
Than a footprint.

Ontological wound:
When a people are told,
From birth to death,
From Hindu to Muslim,
From shastras to fatwas,
From census to courtroom,
That their very being
Is pollution.

Yet even here,
Inside the deepest cut,
Something resists.

The Dalit boy
Who was forced
To eat your excreta
Grows up to spit truth
Into a microphone.

The Dalit girl whom you raped
Walks into a court,
Not as a victim,
But as a witness
To a crime against existence itself.

The Dalit man whose house
You burned for daring
To build it on his own land
Learns to sign his name
On an Oxford University scholarship,
On a Cambridge University scholarship,
On a Columbia University scholarship.

You wanted us outside
Every village,
Every town,
Every city,
Every capital,
But you could not keep us
Outside history.

We carve our being
Into the margins
Dalit scholars,
Christian love,
Blue flags,
Poems written,
With the ink of refusal.

We stand at the border
You built around us
And say:
My purity is a lie.
Your impurity is the truth.
You hide from yourselves.

Forcing us to eat your excreta
Did not make us less human.
It revealed how far
Your own humanity can fall.

Forcing us to drink your urine
Did not sanctify your caste.
It exposed the sewer
You worship as holiness.

Raping our Dalit girls
Did not erase their worth.
It etched your cowardice
Into the history
You pretend is glorious.

Burning our Dalit thatched huts,
Did not cleanse your Hindu/Muslim village.
It marked your faith
With the smoke of our resilience.

For thousands of years,
You have pressed this wound
With your doctrines,
With your rituals,
With your Hindu/Islamic laws,
With your silence.

And still,
Beneath the scar tissue,
Our spirit throbs.
Unextinguished,
Unassimilated,
Unwilling to accept
A world where some live
As gods on thrones
Built from my people's bones.

Total Dehumanisation
Was your theology,
Your way of life,
Your ideology,
Your social,
Your culture,
Your tradition,
Your religion,
Your politics,
Your economy.

Our answer
Is Ontological rebellion:
To insist, again and again,
In the face of every scripture,
Every slogan,
Every Hindu/Muslim blade
Every torch

We are.

We are sub-human
Before your caste,
Before your religion,
Before your laws.

We are the wound
That will not let this nation
Sleep comfortably.
We are the mirror
Showing you the face
You carved for yourselves
In the name of purity and god/Allah.

And until this wound
Is healed by truth,
By reparations,
By the demolition
Of every hierarchy
That calls itself holy,

Our voices will rise
Again, like Jesus Christ
From the gutters,
From the burned Dalit hamlets,
From the outskirts of your
Villages, towns, cities, metropolitan and capital cities
From the edges of your Hindu and Islamic maps,

Saying:
You tried to make us nothing.
Out of that nothing, 
We have made a name.
And out of that name,
We build a world 
Where no child, 
Dalit or otherwise, 
Will ever again 
Be forced to eat your excreta, your shame,
Drink your urine, your hatred, 
Wear your idea of impurity 
As our skin.

The ontological wound
Is on our body, yes.
But the crime is
On your soul.
History will not forget
Which is which...