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Caste is a delicate issue. It's ubiquitous, and we are full of it. We should start to change things from individual level. But when you go to people and deny caste, they may not react favourably. I think if a decisive percentage of people, especially elites, start marrying out of their caste, we may see a casteless India in a generation's time.

Most modern Indians don't stick to their caste jobs any more. There is more inter-caste marriage, more fluidity, more freedom than ever before. But the outcastes are usually still outcastes, because they are still the ones who tan India's animals, burn its dead, and remove its excrement.

Caste is not a physical object like a wall of bricks or a line of barbed wire which prevents the Hindus from co-mingling and which has, therefore, to be pulled down. Caste is a notion; it is a state of the mind.

Caste may be bad. Caste may lead to conduct so gross as to be called man's inhumanity to man. All the same, it must be recognized that the Hindus observe Caste not because they are inhuman or wrong-headed. They observe Caste because they are deeply religious.

But in view of the constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here.

So far as the government is concerned, there is only one holy book, which is the constitution of India. My government will not tolerate or accept any discrimination based on caste, creed and religion.

I think the presence of caste in India, how the villages are geographically structured on caste lines, is very different from China. The presence of an egalitarian culture is striking in a Chinese village.

If we dispense with some of our self-made boundaries, India can really take its place in the world as an economic power. It hasn't happened because we, sadly, don't look at ourselves as Indians but as Punjabis or Parsis, unlike the Americans. Don't make such boundaries.

I don't think people give Indian society enough credit. We may not like to talk much about things but we do, basically, want to live and let live.