Why is it easier to feel sorry for a Dalit man than to sit with one who is simply, unapologetically angry? Ten years after Una, that question still cuts. Sorrow is easy to sit with—it asks nothing of us. Anger is not.
On 11 July 2016, in Mota Samadhiyala village near Una, Gujarat, a Dalit family bought a dead cow to skin it—the traditional caste labour assigned to them for generations. Self-declared cow vigilantes accused them of killing it. An investigation later found a lioness had. It made no difference. Four men were tied to a car, beaten with sticks, iron pipes and a knife, dragged into town, stripped, and flogged in public while someone filmed it. The footage went viral within days and stayed there for weeks.
Ten years on, the verdict finally arrived. In March 2026, the Veraval Sessions Court in Gir Somnath convicted five men under the SC/ST Atrocities Act and acquitted thirty-five others for lack of evidence, closing a case that had waited a decade to close. Their names—Ramesh Jadav, Rakesh Joshi, Pramod Goswami, Nagji Daya and Balwant Goswami—barely made headlines this time. Each convict received five years. Concurrent sentencing and time already served meant most walked free within months of the ruling. One of the flogged men said, simply, that the state never delivered what it promised once the cameras left.
What most retellings leave out is that the unrest that followed saw seventy-four cases filed against Dalit protesters, forty-three arrests including four policemen, and one head constable killed in the violence. That August, roughly ten thousand people set out from Ahmedabad on the Chalo Una march, swelling, by some accounts, into the hundreds of thousands by the time they reached Una. The community pledged that month: never again would they clear carcasses off upper-caste land.
Call that a refusal. But ask who actually paid for it. The men who made that pledge lost an income they had no way to replace. The villages that had leaned on that labour for generations, while despising the people who did it, lost nothing at all. Before reaching for the word "empowerment," it's worth asking why the cost of refusal always lands on the people with the least to spare.
That gap between outrage and outcome is the real story here. In 2018, Parliament passed the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Amendment to restore arrest safeguards the courts had previously weakened. That same year, the Tehseen Poonawalla ruling ordered mandatory FIRs, compensation, nodal officers and fast-track courts for mob violence. The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita only added mob violence to the penal code seven years after Una. None of that moved at the speed of a viral video. It moved at the speed of institutions nobody was filming, which is to say, barely at all.
None of this started with a camera phone. In 1873, Jyotirao Phule's Gulamgiri argued that caste was neither natural nor divine, but conquest dressed as religion. He wasn't asking to soften the hierarchy but rejecting its legitimacy. Una isn't separate from that history; it shows how little has changed and nobody has acted on it. If the case against caste has stood, fully formed, since 1873, what does it say about us that a court still had to spell it out in 2026?
So here's the real question, the one worth sitting with instead of scrolling past: does visibility actually move power, or does it just change the genre of spectacle? Virality doesn't just fail to deliver justice; it substitutes for it. A video goes viral, the cycle plays out on schedule: outrage, a hashtag, a politician's statement, and then the news cycle moves on, because its business model depends on the next outrage arriving before this one is resolved. Watching becomes something we can feel finished with. Millions watched that video. What didn't move at video speed: who gets assigned unclean labour by caste, how fast police respond when the caller is Dalit rather than upper-caste, how long it took mob violence to even enter the law.
Even a video watched by millions couldn't survive the decade it took to end in five convictions and near-immediate release. If we're comfortable watching Dalit suffering, why does that comfort vanish the moment suffering turns into anger and starts asking who's accountable? Some voices were never meant to make us comfortable. Ten years after Una, the question isn't whether the world was watching. It's whether it was ever listening, and whether a verdict like this counts as an answer, or just a quieter kind of silence.
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*Post-graduate student at Christ Deemed to be University, Bengaluru
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