Caste law sustains itself by regulating violations, not just prohibiting them.

Evidence

The Slovenian Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek says of the Manusmriti and the caste system that such a system can be sustained “only by a complex panoply of tricks, displacements and compromises whose basic formula is that of universality with exceptions: in principle yes, but…The Laws of Manu demonstrates a breath-taking ingenuity in accomplishing this task.” Žižek believes that the true regulating power of the law does not reside in its “direct prohibitions, in the division of our acts into permitted and prohibited, but in regulating the very violations of prohibitions: the law silently accepts that the basic prohibitions are violated (or even discreetly solicits us to violate them), and then, it tells us how to reconcile the violation with the law by way of violating the prohibition in a regulated way.” … Wendy Doniger, in the introduction to her translation of the Manusmriti (Doniger and Smith, 1991, liv), talks of how it was “law in extremity”, where every stringent rule has an exception that almost contradicts the rule; an emergency—apad—escape clause. “The concept of apad recognises human fallibility: don’t do this, says Manu, but if you do, this is what to do to fix it.” — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 1169

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the concept of apad, the emergency escape clause built into Manusmriti.
• XREF: Connects to Ambedkar’s reply to Gandhi about Brahmins breaking caste daily while preaching against it — the universality-with-exceptions formula in action.