In 1902, the French colonial government in Hanoi had a rat problem. To control the growing population of rodents, the government introduced a bounty of one cent for every rat tail produced. The logic was simple: more tails meant more rats killed, and thus fewer rats meant a cleaner Hanoi.
However, soon, officials began finding rats without tails. The Vietnamese rat catchers had understood the incentive better than the government. Instead of killing the rats, they would cut off their tails, collect the bounty and release the rats to reproduce. It became a classic example of a perverse incentive, where an intervention rewards the measurable manifestation of the problem rather than the problem itself.
The problem was not merely that the rat catchers had gamed the system. It was that the government had mistaken a proxy for its objective. A rat tail was only a measure of the larger problem, which was the population of rats. Once the tail itself became the target for which people were rewarded, the measure ceased to represent the thing it was meant to measure reliably. This is the intuition behind what later came to be known as Charles Goodhart's Law: "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". The tail became easier to count than the rat, and eventually, counting the tail became the policy substitute for eliminating the rat.
There is an uncomfortable parallel here with the problem of caste discrimination. Perhaps caste neutrality can work in much the same way. Treating everyone as simply an individual beyond caste can become an incentive for social acceptance, but making caste less visible does not dismantle its structure. It becomes another tail, a sign of progress, while the problem remains.
The analogy is not that caste-neutrality necessarily produces the same kind of deliberate gaming as the Hanoi bounty. The deeper concern is that formal equality can become a proxy for substantive equality. Once the absence of caste from language, institutions or legal categories becomes the measure of equality, we may begin to mistake the disappearance of its visibility for the disappearance of its structure. What cannot be easily measured, i.e., historical exclusion, inherited social capital, unequal access to knowledge, resources and opportunities, can consequently become harder to recognise.
The case of the Principal Secretary, Government of Maharashtra, vs Kshipra Kamlesh Uke and Shiv Shankar Das takes us back to Hanoi's rodent problem, now refracted through Caste and Law. In this case, Kshipra Uke and Shiv Shankar Das, Dalit scholars, had been researching the sociopolitical awareness among the youth of Nagpur since 2014. Ironically, they lived on the RPTS road barely half a kilometre from Deekshabhoomi, the holy shrine of the Dalit-Buddhist community, a symbol of equality. In 2018, while they were away, their home was allegedly raided by their landlord. Their laptops and research data were stolen. They approached the Bajaj Nagar police station, where their complaint was initially not registered. Left with no other resort, they eventually approached the National Commission for Scheduled Castes and ultimately knocked on the doors of the Bombay High Court (Nagpur Bench).
The Court then confronted a broader question: What counts as 'Property' under Section 15A(11)(d) of the SC/ST Atrocities Act? Section 15A(11)(d), read with the Rules, provides for relief in cases involving death, injury or damage to property. However, the Act itself does not define 'property' for this purpose. The question, therefore, was whether property had to mean something tangible and physically possessed, or whether the protection could extend to intangible material whose loss could cause real economic and intellectual harm.
The Court interpreted it expansively to include incorporeal property, further channeling the comprehensive relief and rehabilitative purpose of the Act. In doing so, it refused to allow the physical form of property to become the measure of the harm suffered. Research data and intellectual material may not occupy the same physical space as a laptop, but their loss can represent years of labour, knowledge and opportunity.
The counter challenge of the State through a Special Leave Petition was dismissed on lack of merit. What makes this case a Landmark judgement is not only the expansion of the Atrocities Act into the domain of intellectual property but rather the graver lens it offers to the caste-based discrimination in Contemporary India. The case suggests that caste-based harm need not always announce itself through the physical or ritual exclusions with which we have historically associated caste. It can also operate through the control or destruction of knowledge, data, intellectual labour and opportunity.
The Uke judgment is not itself the rat without a tail. It is, in fact, a corrective to the Hanoi problem. Where the Hanoi government mistook the tail for the rat, the Court refused to allow an old legal category of 'property' to become a substitute for the actual harm. The judgment recognises that the form of the harm can change even when the underlying structure of inequality does not.
There is, however, another way of looking at the boundary of law. Justice Holmes, through the figure of the 'Bad Man', asks us to look at law not merely through its moral aspirations but through the practical consequences it creates. The Bad Man is interested in knowing what the law will actually permit, prohibit or punish. If the law protects only what it can recognise as physical property, then the boundary of that recognition becomes consequential. The person willing to exploit that boundary does not necessarily have to defeat the law; he only needs to understand where it stops.
This makes the Uke judgment significant beyond the question of intellectual property. It reminds us that law cannot afford to measure caste discrimination only through the forms in which it has appeared before. If caste-based harm increasingly operates through access to knowledge, information and opportunity, then a legal system that recognises only its tangible manifestations risks counting the tail while missing the rat.
Caste discrimination may no longer appear in the forms we recognise. The challenge is therefore not merely to make caste invisible, but to identify the structures that continue to make it consequential.
Perhaps the lesson from Hanoi is simple: if we keep looking only for the tail, we might miss the rat.
Author is a Lawyer and a student of the Integrated MA in Social Governance & Public Policy + LLM in Social Policy & Law at TISS Hyderabad. Views are personal.