In Pakistan, caste is often treated as someone else’s problem. It is spoken of as a Hindu matter, an Indian disease, or an old village habit that modern Pakistan has supposedly outgrown. This is a comforting story, but it is not an honest one. Caste has not disappeared from Pakistan. It has simply learned to live under softer names.
We call it biradari, zaat, khandan, family background, sharafat, lineage or “good family”. These words sound ordinary because they are part of everyday speech. But they also do social work. They decide who can marry whom, who can sit where, who is respected in the village, whose occupation is mocked, whose touch is avoided, whose name becomes an insult, and whose suffering is dismissed as normal.
Selective Denial of Caste
The strange thing is that even our denial is selective. In private life, caste is remembered with remarkable precision. Families remember it when arranging marriages. Villages remember it when distributing honour. Employers remember it when deciding who is fit for “clean” or “dirty” work. Political actors remember it when mobilising biradari networks. But in public discussion, caste suddenly becomes invisible.
This invisibility is not harmless. When a hierarchy is not named, it becomes difficult to challenge. What cannot be named cannot be properly counted. What cannot be counted cannot be debated. What cannot be debated rarely becomes policy.
The State and Caste
The state itself has never fully escaped the category. Pakistan’s official census tables still include “Scheduled Castes” as a classification. Yet public policy and mainstream discussion often treat caste as marginal, almost embarrassing, as if acknowledging it would damage the national self-image. This is the heart of the problem: Pakistan wants the moral comfort of equality without confronting the social arrangements that violate it.
The contradiction is especially sharp because Pakistan’s public morality is deeply shaped by the language of religious equality. We are taught that Islam rejects inherited superiority and that all human beings stand equal before God. But society often operates differently. A person may be equal in a sermon and unequal in a marriage proposal. Equal in a national slogan and unequal at the dining mat. Equal in law and unequal in the village, workplace, school or street.
Caste Beyond Minorities
This is why caste in Pakistan should not be seen only as a matter of minority suffering, though religious minorities have suffered deeply from it. A 2025 Amnesty International report on sanitation workers found that workers from marginalised caste and religious backgrounds face stigma, discriminatory recruitment and unsafe working conditions. It documented how terms such as “chuhra” and “bhangi” are still used as insults, and how some workers reported segregation in food and utensils. This is not merely bad behaviour. It is hierarchy made ordinary.
Human rights groups have been warning about this for years. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan’s State of Human Rights in 2023 noted that Dalit groups in Sindh protested against concerns including forced conversions and the undercounting of poorer Scheduled Caste Hindus during the digital census. Such concerns show that caste is not an abstract debate. It shapes citizenship, recognition, safety and dignity.
Hidden Hierarchies Among Muslims
The problem also extends beyond official categories. Many caste hierarchies among Muslims are hidden behind biradari and occupational labels. They may not be recorded in the same way, but they are lived through marriage restrictions, jokes, slurs, neighbourhood boundaries and assumptions about “low” and “respectable” work. This makes caste harder to discuss, not less real.
Popular culture adds another layer. Pakistani films and television often use caste-coded language as humour, rustic identity or insult without treating caste as a system of inequality. The audience laughs, and the laughter performs social work. It teaches people which names carry shame, which communities can be ridiculed, and which humiliations are not serious enough to disturb entertainment.
The Need for Honest Conversation
This is how domination survives in polite societies. It does not always need open violence. Sometimes it survives through jokes, marriage preferences, job categories, school bullying, family pride and silence. The most durable hierarchies are not the ones shouted in public. They are the ones everyone understands but few are willing to discuss honestly.
To speak about caste in Pakistan is not to import an Indian issue. It is to confront a Pakistani reality. It is to ask why certain communities remain trapped in stigmatised work. Why “family background” matters more than personal dignity. Why religious equality fails to transform social practice. Why some citizens must carry both poverty and inherited shame. Why a society that speaks so often of honour distributes respect so unequally.
This conversation will make many people uncomfortable. But discomfort is not a reason for silence. In fact, discomfort may be the first sign that a society is touching the truth it has avoided. Pakistan does not become equal by refusing to say the word caste. It becomes unequal in quieter and more sophisticated ways. Naming caste is not the end of the struggle, but it is the beginning of honesty. And without honesty, every claim of equality remains incomplete.
Muhammad Usama is a MPhil Political Science scholar at Forman Christian College and a BS Sociology graduate from Quaid-i-Azam University.
